This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience while browsing it. By clicking 'Got It' you're accepting these terms.
Most recent
Trending
Top Videos

The best of EcoWatch, right in your inbox. Sign up for our email newsletter!
Like the 104th Congress when Republicans controlled the House of Representatives, the House is swinging a sledgehammer at a cornerstone of contemporary American democracy and undermining the most extraordinary body of environmental law in the world.
Chief among the attacks is HR 2018, known as the "Clean Water Cooperative Federalism Act of 2011." The bill, currently working its way through the House, hogties the federal government's role in administering the federal Clean Water Act and gives states a veto power over a host of critical water quality decisions that the Clean Water Act currently authorizes the Environmental Protection Agency to make. This approach will foster a 1950s-style race to bottom as shortsighted and self-interested state politicians dismantle their clean water laws in order to recruit filthy polluters.
Corporate polluters—through massive campaign donations and relentless fear-mongering—can easily dominate the state political landscapes. Their indentured servants in Congress—many flying the Tea Party banner—are working to disrupt the existing balance between state control and federal oversight in our environmental laws by returning us to the days of limited federal supervision—a time when local government was on the side of polluters in a partnership that was stealing people's livelihoods, their recreation, their health, safety, property values and their childhoods.
The original drafters of the Clean Water Act were keenly aware of the problems inherent in leaving all responsibility to the states. Prior to 1972, that scheme had ignited rivers and firestorms and left Lake Erie declared dead. We saw the results first hand here on the Hudson River in the 1960s—where hundreds of fishermen lost their jobs because their beloved waterways had become too polluted to allow anyone to safely eat the fish. The Clean Water Act, enacted shortly thereafter, created a beautifully simple yet powerfully effective tool to help address these problems: a federal safety net for water quality that guarantees a minimum level of protection to all Americans, no matter where you live. And for nearly 40 years this approach has been working.
Indeed, the Clean Water Act is one of our most important environmental laws, and it is a model—both in the U.S. and abroad—for achieving a sensible balance between state officials' familiarity with local conditions and the important role the federal government plays in protecting all citizens from a race-to-the-bottom by polluters and politicians intent on short term gain at the expense of local communities and long-term prosperity.
Having this shared authority is essential because state agencies face intense pressure to ignore the Clean Water Act in favor of the most powerful corporate interests. It is no coincidence that many of the bill's sponsors are from states where EPA has used its authority under the Act in recent years to make sure minimum levels of protection are achieved, such as West Virginia and Florida.
Unfortunately, HR 2018 rewards states for their past failures and rolls back the clock nationally by promoting an agenda that benefits only those who seek to pollute our waterways—not the communities that depend on them.
Representative Tim Bishop of New York, to his credit, offered an amendment in committee that would have protected water bodies that serve as drinking water supplies, flooding buffers, recreation destinations and habitat for fish and game prized by anglers and hunters from these sweeping rollbacks. But sponsors of the bill would have none of it—further revealing their disinterest in the protection of the American public from the threats of water pollution.
Poll after poll shows the public's support for clean water. The American people didn't stand for these congressional attacks to our environmental laws in the mid-1990's. And we must not stand for them today.
EcoWatch Daily Newsletter
Under 45? Lowering Your Cholesterol Now Could Prevent Heart Disease Later, Study Suggests
Many people don't begin worrying about their cholesterol levels until later in life, but that may be increasing their odds of heart problems in the long term.
Measles Killed More Than 140,000 People in 2018, Mostly Young Children, Despite a Safe Vaccine
Measles infected nearly 10 million people in 2018 and killed more than 140,000, according to new estimates from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Most of the people who died were children under five years old.
Nestlé cannot claim that its Ice Mountain bottled water brand is an essential public service, according to Michigan's second highest court, which delivered a legal blow to the food and beverage giant in a unanimous decision.
A number of supermarkets across the country have voluntarily issued a recall on sushi, salads and spring rolls distributed by Fuji Food Products due to a possible listeria contamination, as CBS News reported.
Trending
If you read a lot of news about the climate crisis, you probably have encountered lots of numbers: We can save hundreds of millions of people from poverty by 2050 by limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, but policies currently in place put us on track for a more than three degree increase; sea levels could rise three feet by 2100 if emissions aren't reduced.