Today Trump signed into law a fasted-tracked legislative disapproval of a Clean Water Act regulation called the Stream Protection Rule intended to limit harm to waterways and water quality from activities like inundating streams with rock and gravel debris from mountaintop removal mining. From Bloomberg’s story about today’s signing.
The Interior Department, which spent seven years crafting the rule, had said the regulation, which updates 33-year-old regulations, will protect 6,000 miles of streams and 52,000 acres of forests, primarily in Appalachia. It is meant to stop the practice of dumping mining waste in streams and valleys during mountaintop mining. They estimated compliance with the regulation would cost $81 million a year, or 0.1 percent or less of aggregate annual industry revenues, it said.
Under the fast-track disapproval statute -- the Congressional Review Act, designed to avoid debate and possible filibusters — this means that the Interior Department will be forbidden from adopting "substantially similar" regulations going forward.
This is the first actually completed environmental rollback of this Administration; it won't be the last, in what will be an all-out assault upon public health and environmental protections that have been a half-century in the making.