Just two days after again praising himself for what he has ridiculously called his very good environmental record—this time in Davos, Switzerland, at the elite World Economic Forum—Donald Trump has finalized a rule that will remove half of America’s wetlands from Clean Water Act protections. At risk, among other things, is the drinking water of more than 100 million people and the well-being of animals and plants, including some endangered ones.
Said Blan Holman, an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, "This will be the biggest loss of clean water protection the country has ever seen." No surprise coming from the squatter in the White House, who lied on a whole range of subjects at the Davos forum and told reporters Tuesday, "I'm a big believer in the environment. The environment is very important to me."
The retreat on wetlands protections has been in the works since Trump arrived in the Oval Office three years ago. Less than two months after taking the oath, he issued an executive order commanding the Environmental Protection Agency and Army Corps of Engineers to rework the 2015 Obama administration rule extending Clean Water Act protections to 2 million miles of streams and 20 million acres of wetlands. Last September, the rule was repealed. These moves were one more element in Trump’s and the Republicans’ extremist agenda to roll back environmental and energy rules, actions tracked by the Harvard Law School and Columbia Law School. Ninety such rules have been rolled back or are in the process, according to The New York Times’s analysis of the tracking. Many of those rollbacks are being fought in the courts.
Last summer, this time in the East Room of the White House, Trump repeated one of his relentless fabrications: “From day one, my administration has made it a top priority to ensure that America has among the very cleanest air and cleanest water on the planet. We want the cleanest air, we want crystal clean water, and that's what we're doing and what we're working on so hard."
The eviscerating of the 2015 “Waters of the United States” rule—also known as the Clean Water Rule or WOTUS—is the latest example of just how big a lie that “top priority” claim is.
The Clean Water Act was passed to tremendous applause 48 years ago. It has since proved effective at cleaning up large bodies of water, from lakes and rivers to the ocean. But it was unclear what the law meant for smaller wetlands, ponds and streams, and sources that are intermittent, flowing only seasonally or after storms. A case went all the way in 2006 to the Supreme Court, where a plurality ruling didn’t resolve the ambiguity. Many wetlands thus remained unprotected. This is no small matter since pollution isn’t confined to those smaller bodies of water, 60% of which flow into larger bodies.
Enter the Obama administration. It took up what turned out to be a five-year effort to fix uncertainty in the law:
Under the Obama rule anybody seeking to dredge or fill these protected bodies of water with dirt or discharge pollutants—such as pesticides—into them had to get an EPA permit. No more. The Trump rule destroys that protection.
A year ago, Ken Kopocis, who led the Obama EPA's Office of Water, told E&E News reporters Ariel Wittenberg and Kevin Bogardus, "Saying you want clean water and excluding ephemeral streams is like saying you want universal health care, but you won't cover anyone not named Ken. It's a start, but it won't get you what you want."
But the Trump rule doesn’t just affect wetlands protected under the Obama rule. Some headwaters and other bodies of water that have been covered by the act for nearly half a century will no longer be protected. That also goes for some wetlands extended protection by the George W. Bush administration.
Made happy by the rollback are many farmers, as well as the Republican-dominated American Farm Bureau, which lobbied heavily against the Obama rule. For the past two years, Trump has spoken at the farm bureau’s annual convention, which this year was held in Austin. Last year at the bureau’s 100th anniversary conference in New Orleans, he said: "We're saving farmers and ranchers from one of the most ridiculous regulations ever imposed on anybody in our nation: the Waters of the United States rule. Disaster—other than the title. Such a beautiful title. It was a total kill on farmers, on builders, on everybody. It was a total kill. Sounds so nice."
There’s a disaster all right. When it comes to the environment, as in so much else, Donald Trump is the anti-Midas, turning everything he touches not into gold, but excrement.