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September 3, 2003
EPA
Makes it Easier to Spray Pesticides into Our Water
In
November, 2002 the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a Clean
Water Act permit is required before spraying pesticides into or
above waters of the United States. Rather than abide by the Court
ruling and work to protect aquatic life, the EPA has issued guidance
that abandons its responsibility for overseeing these pesticide
applications. The guidance makes it possible to spray pesticides
directly into water to control pests or weeds without obtaining a
permit, jeopardizing fish and other living organisms in and near the
water.
July 16, 2003
EPA Fails
to Protect Communities from Drinking Water Contaminated by Rocket
Fuel
Every five years the EPA is required to review
whether or not health standards should be set for additional
contaminants under the Safe Drinking Water Act. Now, seven years
after the rule went into effect, the EPA has announced that no new
health standards are needed. The agency reached this decision
despite its own research indicating that perchlorate, a salt found
in rocket fuel, presents a public health threat. According to an
article in the Los Angeles Times, “government officials have
determined that perchlorate may cause health problems, even in trace
amounts.” Greenwire reports that perchlorate is known to have
contaminated water supplies in 22 states.
June 6, 2003
EPA Letting
Water Polluters Go Unpunished
According to their own
internal analysis, as leaked to the Washington Post, the
EPA is allowing polluters to get away with serious violations of the
Clean Water Act, endangering public health and the environment. In
the past four years, the EPA found that formal enforcement actions
were taken against less than a quarter of the facilities that were
in significant violation of the law. About 860 major facilities
across the nation -- roughly 13 percent -- exceeded limits set to
protect public health by more than 1,000 percent. The EPA reports
that they and state agencies took "timely and appropriate" action
against serious offenders nine percent of the time in 2001. As a
result, many facilities may find it easier and more cost effective
to ignore Clean Water Act limits, leaving our nation’s lakes, rivers
and streams in danger.
May 29, 2003
Bush
Administration Seeks to Expedite Mountaintop-Removal
Mining
The Bush administration released a long-awaited
assessment of the impact of mountain-top removal, a mining technique
that involves blasting the tops off mountains and dumping the waste
into the nearest valley, completely burying streams. The study finds
that this type of mining has destroyed more than 700 miles of
streambed since 1985 while polluting another 500 miles. The Bush
administration's "preferred alternative" for addressing this
destruction: Speed the process for granting mountaintop-removal
permits under the Clean Water Act, and eliminate a surface mining
rule that requires a 100-foot buffer between mining operations and
streams.
January 14, 2003
EPA to
Allow Polluters to Buy Their Way Out of Reducing Water
Pollution
The Bush administration announced plans to
allow polluters to purchase "pollution credits" from other polluters
rather than reducing the pollution they discharge into waterways.
This trading system would likely result in toxic "hot spots" in
river and lakes as polluting facilities buy credits rather than
clean up their wastewater.
January 10, 2003
Bush
Administration Issues Guidance and Advance Rulemaking Notice,
Jeopardizing the Nation's Waters
The Environmental
Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers issued an Advance
Notice of Proposed Rulemaking and policy guidance concerning the
Clean Water Act's definition of "waters of the United States." The
agencies claim that the Supreme Court's 2001 decision on Clean Water
Act jurisdiction in Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County v.
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (SWANCC) prompted these actions to
establish regulatory clarity.
But these initiatives go well beyond the limits the Court
established, threatening the Clean Water Act's goals of restoring
and protecting the nation's waters. Even if the agencies do not
proceed with rulemaking, the implementation of this guidance alone
could threaten "isolated" and other waters that the Clean Water Act
has long protected. The administration's actions could place at risk
a significant portion of the nation's waters that have been
protected from unregulated pollution and filling for more than 25
years. The guidance and rulemaking also may result in huge
additional costs to states and local communities to clean up water
pollution that will escape federal protection.
December 15, 2002
EPA
Puts Factory Farm Polluters Ahead of Environment
In
compliance with a consent decree, the Bush administration issued a
new rule that will continue to allow factory farms to pollute rivers
and lakes with animal manure. Although the 30-year-old rule for
factory farms badly needed updating, the Bush administration rule
effectively makes it worse.
The new rule fails to update technology standards, legalizes
runoff of animal waste into already polluted rivers and streams,
shields corporations that own the livestock from liability for the
environmental damage they cause, allows factory farms to write their
own waste management plans, and defers many critical decisions to
state agencies, many of which have ignored these pollution problems
for years. The Bush administration's actions do nothing to protect
waterways from the massive pollution caused by factory farms.
September 19, 2002
Bush
Administration Threatens Clean Water Act
The Bush
Administration announceds plans to consider new rules restricting
the jurisdiction of the Clean Water Act. If adopted, periodically
dry streams found in the upper reaches of headwaters, non-navigable
tributaries, and wetlands adjacent to tributary streams may lose
protection that the Clean Water Act currently provides. The
administration cites a Supreme Court decision as the rationale for
the initiative, but the court's ruling did not provide for the
wholesale elimination of protections for isolated wetlands, let
alone any tributary streams.
August 7, 2002
EPA to
Weaken Key Provision of Clean Water Act
The U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency is planning to issue a rule that
would weaken a key provision of the Clean Water Act. The Total
Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) program sets limits for how much of each
pollutant a given body of water can hold, then restricts pollution
sources to meet those established limits. The new rule would create
ways for states to remove waterways from the cleanup list without
reducing pollution, while also allowing increased discharges from
factories and sewage treatment plants based on speculative and
unenforceable reductions in pollution run-off. The new rule also
attempts to weaken the EPA's mandate to issue cleanup plans when
states fail to do so.
May 14, 2002
EPA Proposes
Water Pollution Trading Plan
Rather than making all
polluters meet the standards set by the Clean Water Act, the
Environmental Protection Agency has proposed a voluntary scheme to
enable polluters to continue discharging waste at
higher-than-permitted levels as long as they pay someone else to
reduce their pollution instead. In such a scheme, the burden of
polluted water falls unevenly upon communities. Environmentalists
want the EPA to enforce the Clean Water Act rather than negotiating
over industries' right to pollute.
May 3, 2002
EPA Allows
Mine Waste to be Dumped in Rivers
The Sierra Club
condemned the Bush Administration for allowing mining companies to
dump waste into America's rivers and streams. The rule, announced by
the EPA, could have far-reaching impacts on rivers, streams and
wetlands across the entire country, but especially in Appalachia,
where the practice is already common. There, mountaintop-removal
companies operating under permits issued by the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers have made a habit of dumping “overburden” from mining
sites into adjacent valleys and river drainages, burying thousands
of miles of rivers and greatly exacerbating flooding in the region.
March 13,
2002
Administration Dodges Salmon
Protections
The Bush Administration attempted to
circumvent important environmental laws in a proposed settlement
agreement that would remove critical habitat protections for salmon
and steelhead in the Northwest. As part of that settlement, the
National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) would rescind its current
critical habitat designation for 19 West Coast salmon and steelhead
populations, effectively caving in to the demands of the National
Association of Home Builders (NAHB). The judge in the case must
still accept the proposed settlement.
January 15, 2002
Wetlands
Threatened
The Bush Administration today,
notwithstanding objections from the EPA, wetlands scientists and the
environmental community, threatened the nation's wetlands and
streams by weakening the Clean Water Act’s Nationwide Permit (NWP)
program. The new nationwide permits allow the Corps to waive many of
the environmental conditions adopted in March 2000 that were meant
to limit the use of these permits, and continue activities that
damage or destroy thousands of acres of wetlands and miles of
streams every year. Wetlands filter pollutants from our drinking
water, protect our homes by storing floodwater, and provide homes
for fish, shellfish, and wildlife. Despite to need to protect our
wetlands, the Fish and Wildlife Service reports that roughly 58,500
acres of wetlands are lost annually.
July 17, 2001
Clean Water
Rule Put on Hold
On July 16, 2001, the EPA asked a
federal court to delay for 18 months a water cleanup rule issued on
July 13, 2000. The EPA maintains that this delay will enable it to
"review and revise the rule to achieve a program that is workable
and meets the goal of clean water."
Some 20,000 water bodies, almost 40 percent of the nation's
waters, do not meet basic standards for fishing, swimming or other
uses. Last year's rule, which the Sierra Club generally supported,
would have created a more specific process for identifying and
cleaning up waterways that fail to meet clean water standards. It
gave the EPA and the states a more effective framework for reducing
runoff pollution.
Runoff is the main cause of water quality problems in many
watersheds. Polluters vigorously opposed the rule and successfully
persuaded Congress to withhold funding for the program for one year.
The Sierra Club and other environmental groups opposed the Bush
Administration's request for a delay of the clean water rule and
expres sed skepticism that any revisions the Bush Administrations
developed will be effective in cleaning up polluted waters.
April 27, 2001
Bush
Reopens Sensitive Waters to Polluting Personal
Watercraft
Despite strong public support for protecting
our National Parks from loud, dangerous and polluting personal
watercraft or jet-skis, the Bush Administration is preventing
National Park managers from protecting sensitive waterways from
these damaging machines. In late April, the Department of Interior
suspended restrictions on these vehicles at some National Parks and
ordered others not to implement new bans.
The sites effected include the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore,
Cumberland Island National Seashore on the Georgia coast, Cape
Lookout National Seashore on North Carolina's Outer Banks and at the
Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area in Pennsylvania and New
Jersey. An Interior Department study has shown that personal
watercraft produce noise levels reaching 115 decibels, compared with
105 decibels for jackhammers and 100 decibels for chainsaws. An
Environmental Protection Agency study found that the two-stroke
engines used by most personal watercraft discharge 25 percent to 30
percent of their fuel unburned into the water. President Bush should
allow Park managers to protect sensitive waters from these
destructive machines.
April 16, 2001
Wetlands
Protections
The Bush Administration decided not to block
an effort to protect America's wetlands. President Bush let stand a
decision by the Clinton Administration limiting a loophole in the
Clean Water Act allowing destruction of streams and wetlands.
Developers had used the loophole in the Act to destroy an estimated
20,000 acres of wetlands and 150 miles of streams. Developers are
challenging the protections in court, and the Bush Administration
has yet to announce if they will vigorously defend these standards
against court challenges.
April 12, 2001
Dioxin
Report Put On Hold
The chemical, beef and poultry
industries are waging an intense campaign to further delay an
Environmental Protection Agency study showing that consumption of
animal fat and dairy products containing traces of dioxin can cause
cancer in humans. EPA scientists and officials say they are
confident of the report's findings, which they began circulating
last June and they are urging EPA Administrator Christine Todd
Whitman to issue the report in final form this summer. But the
study, more than a decade in the works, has drawn such intense
opposition from industry groups and congressional Republicans that
it could be held up for several more years according to a Washington
Post story.
April 9, 2001
Eliminate
the Wetlands Reserve Program
President Bush cut funding
for popular farm conservation programs, like the Wetlands Reserve
Program. Currently, there are 1300 farmers waiting to protect
570,000 acres of wetlands under this program. The program also
serves as a useful tool for curbing suburban sprawl, which is
chewing up over 2 million acres worth of farmland and open space a
year. His father worked with the Sierra Club to expand this program
in the 1990 Farm Bill.
April 9,
2001
Environmental Protection Agency Budget
Cuts
The Bush includes cuts of $158 million from the
EPA's core efforts to enforce laws that keep polluters from fouling
the air we breathe and the water we drink. President Bush talks
about needing to do more research on a range of issues, but his
budget slashes $56 million that would be used to study how best to
protect our families' health. Overall, President Bush is cutting
$500 million (over 6%) from the EPA budget.
March 23, 2001
Hardrock
Mining Standards
A Federal Register notice was printed
March 23 notifying the public that the Department of Interior is
proposing to suspend the new "3809" rule in order to impose the old
rule. The new hardrock mining standards would have required mining
companies to develop and put in place plans to protect water from
contamination and to post bonds to guarantee the cleanup of the
site. The old rule, now made current, allows mining companies to
pollute public lands with little oversight.
March 20, 2001
Arsenic
Standards for Drinking Water
EPA Administrator Christie
Todd Whitman announced that she would delay a rule that would have
restricted the amount of arsenic allowed in tap water. That rule was
scheduled to take effect March 23. The National Academy of Sciences
has said that the standard for arsenic in drinking water needs to be
improved “as promptly as possible.”
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