U.S. to impose weaker clean water protections
WASHINGTON — Defying environmentalists and public health advocates, the Trump administration on Thursday announced the replacement of Obamaera water protections with a significantly weaker set of regulations that lifts limits on how much pollution can be dumped into small streams and wetlands.
The changes to the Clean Water Act’s protections are expected to hit California and other Western states especially hard.
Federal data suggest 81% of streams in the Southwest would lose long-held protections, including tributaries to major waterways that millions of people rely on for drinking water.
Andrew Wheeler, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, defended the new rule when he announced it at a conference in Las Vegas of the National Association of Home Builders — one of the industry groups that pushed for loosening clean water rules.
Under the new rule, polluters will no longer need a permit to release contaminated water into so-called ephemeral streams — sometimes called washes or arroyos — where water flows only occasionally because of rainstorms and snowmelt. Wetlands that aren’t immediately adjacent to protected waters will also lose federal safeguards.
Both of these features are common in Western states, and scientists say they are likely to become more so as warming temperatures make a dry climate drier.
Clean water regulations are “essentially about how you provide drinking water. How you store flood waters. How you protect ecosystems that thrive in certain areas that we all need and want,” said Gina McCarthy, president of the nonpartisan Natural Resources Defense Council and a former EPA administrator under President Barack Obama, in an interview shortly before the rule’s unveiling. “This is a big deal issue, and I don’t think it was thoroughly looked at as it should have.”
In a rebuke to the Trump administration, the EPA’s own advisory board criticized the agency’s plans.
“These changes are proposed without a fully supportable scientific basis, while potentially introducing substantial new risks to human and environmental health,” the board wrote in its commentary.
In California, 2 out of 3 of the state’s freshwater streams could lose federal protection.
Yet the state is better positioned than others to weather the changes. Waters that lose protection under the Trump rule will still be covered under California law. And state regulators have strengthened protections for wetlands and streams in anticipation of the federal rollback.
Most states don’t have nearly enough money or environmental expertise to fill the void created by vastly scaled-down federal regulations.
In New Mexico, environmental regulators estimate that the new rule could leave 96% of the state’s waterways and wetlands unprotected from pollution, including waters that flow into the iconic Rio Grande. The state does not have its own regulations to replace those lost in the rollback, making it particularly vulnerable.
The new rule is likely to attract legal challenges. By limiting federal jurisdiction over small streams and wetlands, it not only unravels the Obama administration’s enhanced protections — it strips away safeguards put in place in the 1990s under President George H.W. Bush.
Plans to narrow the Clean Water Act’s reach have been in the works since the earliest days of the Trump administration when the president issued an order directing the rollback of the 2015 rule, known as Waters of the United States, enacted by his predecessor.
That rule expanded the reach of federal regulations and further restricted farmers’ ability to use pesticides and fertilizers on land that could drain into wetlands and streams.
Real estate developers, farmers, ranchers and others fought for years against the Obama-era regulations.
Homebuilders complained that the rules needlessly limited where they could build. Farmers complained that the rules amounted to illegal infringements on their property rights that required them to get costly permits in order to dig a ditch. Mining and oil and gas companies joined the attack.