Trump Removes Pollution Protections for America’s Rivers and Streams
By Elliot Hannon
Jan 23, 20206:27 AM
Oil lays in a creek bed after a spill, on June 23, 2016, in Hall Canyon in Ventura, California.
Michael Owen Baker/Getty Images
The Trump administration is set to continue its dismantling of Obama-era environmental protections for the country’s waterways on Thursday, issuing new rules that remove federal protections for half the nation’s wetlands and hundreds of thousands of small waterways. Trump repealed Obama’s 2015 “Waters of the United States” regulation in September, a set of rules restricting dumping and development that affected the country’s rivers, streams, and wetlands. Now, the Trump administration is finalizing its own set of water rules that will, for the first time in decades, allow for pesticides and fertilizers to be dumped in waterways and open up wetlands to new development.
The Obama water rule was loathed by farmers, a crucial vote bank for Trump in 2020, as well as developers and the fossil fuel industry. It covered 60 percent of American waterways, including large waterways like the Chesapeake Bay or Mississippi River and smaller rivers and streams as well as seasonal waterways. Those protections limited, for example, the pollution runoff from fertilizers and pesticides from nearby farms, the dumping of industrial chemicals by extraction companies, and wanton development on real estate that affected nearby waterways. Golf course developers (like Trump) were vocal opponents of the Obama rule. |
