BING
The Waters of the United States (WOTUS) rule was a regulation that expanded the definition of “waters of the United States” under the Clean Water Act (CWA) to include smaller streams and wetlands that flow into larger bodies of water. The rule was intended to protect the quality of drinking water for millions of Americans by regulating pollution in these smaller bodies of water. The rule was revoked by SCOTUS in 2023.
The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has made several rulings on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) during the Obama administration. One of the most significant was the 2015 ruling that struck down the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, which aimed to reduce carbon emissions from power plants1. Another significant ruling was in 2022 when SCOTUS limited the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon emissions from power plants1. In 2023, SCOTUS revoked Executive Order 13778 of February 28, 2017 (Restoring the Rule of Law, Federalism, and Economic Growth by Reviewing the “Waters of the United States” Rule), which resulted in promulgation of the NWPR2.
Learn more:
1. nytimes.com2.
The EPA works with state governments to ensure compliance with federal environmental laws and regulations. Many of the rules the EPA enforces place specific requirements on state governments or businesses. The EPA works with those entities to ensure they know the requirements and can follow them1. When the EPA wants to pursue a civil or criminal violation, they work directly with the U.S. Department of Justice or the states’ attorneys general2. You can learn more about what EPA is doing in your state by selecting from the drop-down menu or clicking on the map on this page 3.
Learn more:
1. learn.robinhood.com2. epa.gov
by The Washington Examiner Editorial Board
Last week, we looked at how the EPA manipulated the public comments process for its new rule defining protected waters under the Clean Water Act. The agency’s officials met behind closed doors and teamed up with left-wing environmental activists to get as many comments in support as possible. Like elections in pre-war Iraq, the drive was too successful to be remotely convincing; nearly 90 percent of the comments turned out to be in favor of the rule, a number that was then cited by EPA officials as evidence of how popular the rule was.
But as much as this rule was shaped by astro turfing, it will affect real people if it is allowed to take effect this summer.
If there is confusion about exactly what the rule does, the EPA can be blamed for that. In mounting its public defense, the agency has drawn up detailed fact sheets that attempt to minimize the additional lands over which the rule will give them power. Their propaganda for the layman, the purpose of which is to frighten the public into believing their drinking water won’t be clean without the new rule, does just the opposite. In one video posted online, EPA claims that “60 percent of our streams and millions of acres of wetlands” were unprotected or had an ambiguous status. These will now be regulated.
This propaganda provides needed context for what the rule will do. As the 2012 Sackett v. EPA Supreme Court case demonstrated, the agency is pretty much out of control in terms of its bullying and aggressive enforcement tactics against landowners even in cases where there is no real connection to water quality.
The new rule represents an attempt by the EPA to restore the near-universal power it wielded informally before the Supreme Court limited its activities last decade in two critical decisions. Its reason for doing so now is a 2006 Supreme Court split decision that offered two possible guidelines for regulators, who are naturally applying the guideline that gives them maximum power. And they want to finish this before Obama leaves office, naturally.
The biggest change in the rule is that it gives the EPA wide latitude to make “case-specific” determinations about any water within a 100-year floodplain or “within 4,000 feet of the high tide line or the ordinary high water mark” of a river, stream, or covered tributary. Landowners within a quarter-mile of a lake, river, stream, or tributary are pretty much at the agency’s mercy.
EPA and White House officials have gone out of their way to characterize the businesses that oppose the rule as bloodthirsty despoilers of the land, but federal treatment of farmers who oppose it is arguably worse. They must be irrational, it is implied, because the new rule does not change any of the Clean Water Act’s statutory exemptions for agriculture.
In fact, farmers oppose the rule because it will erode the already weak protections that those extremely narrow exemptions afford them. A wetlands determination on a farmer’s land can be devastating and costly even now, imposing stringent standards on their routine activities and requiring permits for bigger decisions. The new rule just makes a wetlands determination that much easier for the EPA to justify in court, which means that even if there are no additional requirements for permitting, many more permits will be required.
Already, majority bipartisan opposition to the rule has taken shape in both houses of Congress. Legislators should do everything they can to spike the rule and to forbid enforcement through the appropriations process until a new president with a less ideologically-charged EPA can rein the overweening agency in once again.
EPA a blessing or Curse
MARCH 30, 2023
WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Roger Wicker, R-Miss., a member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, highlighted the negative impact of the Environment Protection Agency’s “Good Neighbor Rule” during a full committee hearing. The rule, which falls under provisions of the Clean Air Act, will impose stringent federal regulations on states to control air pollution that crosses state lines. However, the rule has been plagued by confusing and inconsistent modeling, which has claimed that Mississippi impacts air quality in Houston and Dallas.
Wicker introduced Chris Wells, the Executive Director of the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ), to discuss the claims that Mississippi negatively impacts air quality in Texas.
“It is hard for us to grasp that somehow our relatively rural state is causing ozone problems for Dallas and Houston,” Wicker said. “That is the conundrum that this distinguished witness will be discussing today, and I’m delighted that the committee has agreed to hear from him.”
In his testimony, MDEQ Executive Director Wells noted that Mississippi had been unfairly treated under the Clean Air Act. See his full remarks here.
