The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Army announced on December 30 the establishment of a clear, durable definition of U.S. waterways to secure the EPA’s oversight of U.S. waterways after long legal battles and debate over the expansiveness of the Clean Water Act. The Clean Water Act, which has been around in […]
By Jessica Corbett With the nation focused on the coronavirus pandemic and protests against U.S. police brutality that have sprung up across the globe, the Trump administration continues to quietly attack federal policies that protect public health and the environment to limit the legal burdens faced by planet-wrecking fossil fuel companies. The Environmental Protection Agency […]
The Trump administration has finalized a rule making it harder for states and tribal communities to block pipelines and other infrastructure projects that threaten waterways. The change concerns Section 401 of the Clean Water Act, which essentially gives states and tribes veto power over projects that would hurt their water quality, The Hill explained. The […]
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the Trump administration Thursday in a case Earthjustice called “the clean water case of the century.” The case concerned a Maui, Hawaii wastewater treatment plant that pumped around four million gallons of sewage a day into groundwater, where some of it reached the Pacific Ocean, The New York Times […]
On Thursday, a federal district court required the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to issue long-overdue protections against worst-case scenario spills of hazardous materials, like in the case of extreme storms, fires, or flooding. The decision approved a negotiated consent decree between the EPA and a coalition of community and environmental organizations, including NRDC, the Environmental […]
By Vijay Limaye The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s 2018 censoring science proposal aimed to undercut the agency’s application of landmark public health science by severely restricting its use in decision making. The proposal was a dangerous disaster that lacked any sound legal basis and threatened to impose draconian and hugely costly restrictions on the types […]
Today, the Trump administration will finalize its replacement for the Obama-era Waters of the United States (WOTUS) rule in a move that will strip protections from more than half of the nation’s wetlands and allow landowners to dump pesticides into waterways, or build over wetlands, for the first time in decades. President Donald Trump has […]
By Julie Dermansky On the afternoon of Jan. 15, activist Diane Wilson kicked off a San Antonio Estuary Waterkeeper meeting on the side of the road across from a Formosa plastics manufacturing plant in Point Comfort, Texas. After Wilson and the waterkeeper successfully sued Formosa in 2017, the company agreed to no longer release even […]
By Brett Walton Defying a vote of the County Council, Maui Mayor Michael Victorino said on Oct.18 that he will not settle a Clean Water Act lawsuit that holds national implications for water pollution permitting. Instead of the settlement that the council authorized last month, Victorino prefers to have the nation’s highest court decide whether […]