Our Water at Risk: Scott Pruitt’s assault on the Clean Water Act
Lately, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has faced increasing scrutiny over a number of ethics issues. But whatever Pruitt’s ethical lapses, they pale in comparison to the staggering number of ways that he is weakening protections for clean water.
Clean water is vital to our health, our ecology, and our way of life. From the Great Lakes to the Chesapeake Bay, millions of Americans enjoy swimming, fishing, or boating in our waterways. Local streams help provide drinking water, and wetlands provide habitat for wildlife. For all these reasons, our nation adopted the Clean Water Act in 1972, with overwhelming bi-partisan support.
Yet if Pruitt is allowed to pursue his agenda, the Clean Water Act will be riddled with loopholes that allow more pollution, exempt some types of pollution, weaken enforcement against polluters, and leave some waters unprotected altogether.
Already, Administrator Pruitt has allowed power plants to keep dumping a huge amount of toxic pollution — including heavy metals such as arsenic, mercury, and lead — into our waterways. Under the Clean Water Act, the EPA had set “Effluent Limitation Guidelines” that would cut toxic pollution from power plants by 1.4 billion pounds each year. But Pruitt has delayed these limits for two years, allowing this toxic pollution to continue until November 2020.
Separately, the EPA is now proposing to weaken regulations of coal ash ponds. This move comes even though coal ash is highly toxic, and there have been more than 200 instances of coal ash ponds spilling or leaking into local waterways.
In addition, the EPA is now considering whether to exempt from the Clean Water Act pollution that initially flows to groundwater. Millions of Americans get their drinking water from groundwater. Yet manure lagoons at factory farms, fracking waste pits, and landfills can all leak pollution into groundwater before it emerges in our rivers, streams or wetlands. Pruitt’s proposed exemption would make it difficult, if not impossible, to hold polluters accountable in these types of cases.
More broadly, the EPA chief is at least tacitly supporting administration proposals that would weaken clean water permits. Clean water permits are supposed to be reviewed every five years, so that pollution limits can be ratcheted down as technology allows or water quality demands. Yet the Trump administration’s infrastructure plan would allow pollution limits in Clean Water Act permits to remain unchanged for up to 15 years at a time and would eliminate the EPA’s ability to stop certain projects that harm wetlands.
And then, of course, there is Pruitt’s plan to dismantle the clean water rule, which restored federal protections for more than half our nation’s streams and thousands of wetlands across the country. These streams help provide drinking water for one in every three Americans. These wetlands help filter pollutants, provide wildlife habitat, and protect communities from flooding.
Yet from his time as Oklahoma’s attorney general, Pruitt has attacked the clean water rule with a vengeance. Despite more than a thousand scientific studies and a million public comments in support of the rule, Pruitt has sought to repeal it, delay it, and even to personally determine which waterways are covered by the Act. His proposal to replace the clean water rule — putting our drinking water at further risk — is expected soon.
Taken in sum, Pruitt’s dirty water rollbacks turn a core mission of the EPA on its head. Instead of protecting our water, Pruitt is systematically weakening the rules that limit pollution.
But there‘s some hope. The public cares deeply about clean water. In fact, a recent poll shows that more Americans are worried about pollution of rivers, lakes and drinking water than any of 80 issues except government corruption and healthcare. The public would be appalled to learn that the chief of the EPA — the agency tasked with protecting our water — is taking a wrecking ball to the Clean Water Act.
So, will Members of Congress take a stand to defend clean water? The answer is unclear.
When Congress passed the omnibus spending bill last month, it rejected an unprecedented “rider” that would have allowed Mr. Pruitt to repeal the clean water rule without regard to any of the federal laws that make agency rulemaking accountable to the public.
Yet this week, legislators are muddying the waters. On Wednesday, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will hold a hearing that could legitimize Pruitt’s groundwater loophole. And the Senate might soon vote on its own dirty water proposal — a bill that would exempt ships’ ballast water (which can carry invasive species) from the Clean Water Act.
All Americans deserve clean water. Now is the time for Congress to send a clear, bi-partisan message to Administrator Pruitt: do not mess with the Clean Water Act.
