Tag: Clean Water Act

Federal judge strikes down administration’s Clean Water Act attack

This Southern Environmental Law Center article discusses the Federal Court striking down the EPA attempt to gut the Clean Water Act.

A federal judge in South Carolina today struck down the administration’s effort to strip away crucial clean water protections from rivers, lakes, streams, and other waters that feed drinking-water sources for nearly 20 million people in the South and 117 million people across the country. Today’s decision follows a legal challenge filed by SELC in the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina located in Charleston. The ruling ends the Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ suspension of clean water protections under the Clean Water Act, one of the nation’s bedrock environmental laws, and puts the Clean Water Rule back in effect for more than half of the country. The ruling does not apply to 24 states where other legal challenges are pending.

In Rebuke to Pruitt, EPA Science Board Votes to Review Climate Policy Changes

This article discusses the EPA efforts to roll back the Clean Power Plan and weaken auto standards and other regulations. This action was done by the EPA Science Advisory Board, which has more than a dozen a Pruitt-appointed EPA scientists.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Board, in a rebuke to the Trump administration’s retreat on environmental protection, voted overwhelmingly Thursday in favor of a full board review of the agency’s most important actions to dismantle climate policy.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, who appointed about 15 members of the 44-member board, now must decide whether to accept its recommendation that the outside scientific experts be allowed to formally vet his decisions.

With only two members dissenting, the Science Advisory Board agreed that it had received insufficient information on the science behind several of Pruitt’s decisions—including his planned repeal of the Clean Power Plan and methane regulations on oil and gas operations, the weakening of auto efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions standards, and the elimination of a rule to curb truck pollution. The board also backed a full review of a revised “social cost of carbon” cost-benefit analysis EPA is using that essentially wipes out the benefits of actions to curb carbon emissions.

Study: How Trump’s EPA Is Moving to Undo Fracking Wastewater Protections

This article discusses how the Trump Administration and EPA are attempting to dismantle clean water protections. It references a 2008 EPA study showing how sewage treatment plants cannot detoxify fracking waste water.

Back in 2008, residents of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and surrounding areas received a notice in the mail advising them to drink bottled water instead of tap water — a move that Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) internal memos at the time described as “one of the largest failures in U.S. history to supply clean drinking water to the public.”

The culprit: wastewater from oil and gas drilling and coal mines. This included fracking wastewater that state officials had allowed to be dumped at local sewer plants — facilities incapable of removing the complex mix of chemicals, corrosive salts, and radioactive materials from that kind of industrial waste before they piped the “treated” water back into Pennsylvania’s rivers.

The levels of corrosive salt in some of the oil and gas wastewater was so high that at some sewage plants, it was suspected of killing off the “good bacteria” that removes fecal coliform and other dangerous bacteria from raw sewage.

State and federal regulators responded with a mix of voluntary requests and, eventually, rules designed to stop drillers from bringing their wastewater to ill-equipped water treatment plants.

Eight years after the Pittsburgh incident, in 2016, the EPA finished writing the rules that would stop that kind of failure from reoccurring, specifically forbidding sewage treatment plans from accepting untreated wastewater from fracked wells.

A few months earlier, the EPA had announced its long-awaited national study of the risks that fracking-related pollution posed to American drinking water supplies. That study specifically examined the impacts of using sewage plants and commercial wastewater plants to handle fracking waste. It made special note of the dangers of toxic chemicals called trihalomethanes that were created during the treatment process, as well as the likelihood that “radium, metals, and organic compounds can also be discharged.”