Coral Davenport and Lisa Friedman

The rollback of the 2015 measure, known as the Waters of the United States rule, adds to a lengthy list of environmental rules that the administration has worked to weaken or undo over the past 2 1/2 years. Those efforts have focused heavily on eliminating restrictions on fossil fuel pollution, including coal-fired power plants, automobile tailpipes, and oil and gas leaks, but have also touched on asbestos and pesticides.

An immediate effect of the repeal is that polluters will no longer need a permit to discharge potentially harmful substances into many streams and wetlands. But the measure, which is expected to take effect in a matter of weeks, has implications far beyond the pollution that will now be allowed to flow freely into waterways.

The Obama administration implemented the rule in response to a Supreme Court ruling that opened the door to a more expansive legal definition of “waters of the United States” under the 1972 Clean Water Act. With Thursday’s announcement, the Environmental Protection Agency is aiming to drastically narrow that definition, a move that could be difficult for future administrations to undo.

Patrick Parenteau, a professor of environmental law at the University of Vermont, said that, for conservative states and leaders who hold the view that the Clean Water Act has been burdensome for farmers and industry, “this is an opportunity to really drive a stake through the heart of federal water protection.”

Overhauling the rule had been a central campaign pledge for President Donald Trump, who characterized it as federal overreach that impinged on the rights of farmers, rural landowners and real estate developers to use their properties as they see fit. Trump signed an executive order in the early days of his administration directing federal agencies to begin the work of repealing and replacing it.

“Today’s final rule puts an end to an egregious power-grab,” Andrew Wheeler, the administrator of the EPA, said Thursday in a news conference to announce the repeal.

Wheeler said the rollback would mean “farmers, property owners and businesses will spend less time and money determining whether they need a federal permit and more time building infrastructure.”

Agricultural groups, an important political constituency for Trump, praised the repeal. Zippy Duvall, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, said the water rule had sparked outrage from thousands of farmers and ranchers across the country and led to the largest effort to kill a regulation in his organization’s history.

“When you take private property rights from a man who’s worked all his life,” Duvall said, “that is very intrusive to him and it’s something he just can’t stand for.”

But environmentalists assailed the move. “With many of our cities and towns living with unsafe drinking water, now is not the time to cut back on clean water enforcement,” said Laura Rubin, director of the Healing Our Waters-Great Lakes Coalition.

The Obama rule was designed to limit pollution in about 60% of the nation’s bodies of water, protecting sources of drinking water for about one-third of the United States. It extended existing federal authority to limit pollution in large bodies of water, like the Chesapeake Bay and Puget Sound, to smaller bodies that drain into them, such as tributaries, streams and wetlands.

Under the rule, farmers using land near streams and wetlands were restricted from doing certain kinds of plowing and from planting certain crops, and would have been required to obtain EPA permits to use chemical pesticides and fertilizers that could have run off into those bodies of water. Those restrictions will now be lifted.

The Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers, which had worked together to write the original Obama rule, are expected to issue a new, looser replacement rule by the end of this year. It is expected that the new rule, still being developed, will retain federal protections for larger bodies of water, the rivers that drain into them and wetlands that are directly adjacent to those bodies of water.

But it will quite likely strip away protections of so-called ephemeral streams, in which water runs only during or after rainfalls, and of wetlands that are not adjacent to major bodies of water or connected to such bodies of water by a surface channel of water. Those changes would represent a victory for farmers and rural landowners who lobbied the Trump administration aggressively to make them.

Lawyers said the interim period between the completion of the legal repeal of the Obama rule and the implementation of the new Trump rule this year could be one of regulatory confusion for farmers and landowners, however.

“The Obama clean water rule had very clear lines defining which waters are protected by the Clean Water Act, versus which waters are not, while repealing the rule means replacing those lines with case-by-case calls,” said Blan Holman, an expert on water regulations with the Southern Environmental Law Center.

Holman said the administration was replacing “clear, bright-line rules” with a case-by-case system. “This will be very unpredictable,” he said.

Legal experts also predicted a barrage of lawsuits across the country.

Under the provisions of the Clean Water Act, legal challenges must be heard in district court rather than federal appeals court. Richard J. Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard Law School, said that meant that opponents of the Trump administration would focus their challenges in states they perceived as friendly.

“It’s going to be chaos,” Lazarus said. “We’re going to see suits brought all over the country.”

This article originally appeared in

Trump Administration Rolls Back Clean Water Protections

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Thursday announced the repeal of a major Obama-era clean water regulation that had placed limits on polluting chemicals that could be used near streams, wetlands and other bodies of water.

The repeal of the water rule, which is expected to take effect in a matter of weeks, has implications far beyond the pollution that will now be allowed to flow freely into streams and wetlands from farms, mines and factories. With Thursday’s announcement, the Environmental Protection Agency is aiming to establish a stricter legal definition of “waters of the United States” under the Clean Water Act, a precedent that could make it difficult for future administrations to take actions to protect waterways.

Weakening the rule had been a central campaign pledge for President Donald Trump, who characterized it as federal overreach that impinged on the rights of farmers, rural landowners and real estate developers to use their properties as they see fit. Trump signed an executive order in the early days of his administration directing federal agencies to begin the work of repealing and replacing it.

Trump Administration to Roll Back Clean Water Protections

“When you take private property rights from a man whose worked all his life,” Duvall said, “that is very intrusive to him and it’s something he just can’t stand for.”

The Obama rule, developed under the authority of the 1972 Clean Water Act, was designed to limit pollution in about 60% of the nation’s bodies of water, protecting sources of drinking water for about one-third of the United States. It extended existing federal authority to limit pollution in large bodies of water, like the Chesapeake Bay and Puget Sound, to smaller bodies that drain into them, such as tributaries, streams and wetlands.

Under the rule, farmers using land near streams and wetlands were restricted from doing certain kinds of plowing and from planting certain crops, and would have been required to obtain EPA permits in order to use chemical pesticides and fertilizers that could have run off into those bodies of water. Those restrictions will now be lifted.

Lawyers said the interim period between the completion of the legal repeal of the Obama rule and the implementation of the new Trump rule this year could be one of regulatory chaos for farmers and landowners, however.

“This will be very unpredictable,” Holman said. “They are imposing a chaotic case-by-case program to replace clear, bright-line rules.”

Harris unveiled her plan hours before a CNN town-hall-style event on global warming, which 10 Democratic candidates are scheduled to attend — the first time in a presidential campaign that the question of what to do about the heating planet has merited its own major forum on prime-time television.

Harris’ announcement came one day after three other candidates released climate plans, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, a leading rival for the nomination. And Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, also put out a plan Wednesday morning.

Harris, a former California attorney general, styled herself as a uniquely qualified prosecutor-in-chief who would maximize the power of the legal system to penalize corporate polluters and deliver “climate justice” to poor communities that suffer disproportionately from the impacts of climate change, like flooding, heat waves and food and water shortages.

Political analysts cited the sudden rush of new plans before the CNN event as evidence that the issue has gained significant traction on the national stage. Over the past year, multiple scientific reports have concluded that climate change has already led to dangerous outcomes for humanity, and to severe costs to the U.S. economy, including more powerful hurricanes, stronger droughts and spreading fires.

As the candidates headed to the forum in New York on Wednesday, Hurricane Dorian was lashing Florida after inflicting devastating damage to the Bahamas, where at least seven people have been killed in the storm.

Harris initially declined an invitation to the forum, citing a scheduling conflict, but her campaign later reversed that decision as criticism mounted from some environmental groups.

“Climate is obviously an important issue to Democratic primary voters, and the candidates are responding,” said Robert Shrum, a veteran Democratic consultant and director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California.

Many of the candidates’ plans, including Harris’, bear similarities to proposals championed by Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington, who focused his presidential campaign on combating climate change but dropped out last month after it became clear he was unlikely to qualify for the next primary debate.

Inslee would not have been invited to the climate change forum, either, having failed to reach 2% support in enough polls. But analysts said that Inslee’s influence on the rest of the Democratic presidential field was clear.

“Jay Inslee wrote a super-set of climate policy options, and candidates are taking subsets of Inslee ideas,” said Kevin Book, an analyst with ClearView Energy Partners, a nonpartisan Washington research organization.

Inslee released six detailed climate plans, totaling over 200 pages. He said he hoped they would help “raise the ambition” of other candidates’ climate policies, and he has since had conversations with several candidates about how to incorporate his ideas into their plans, said his former campaign spokesman, Jared Leopold.

On Tuesday night, Warren released a broad new climate change plan — her third such plan of the campaign — in which she explicitly adopted some of Inslee’s policies. “While his presidential campaign may be over, his ideas should remain at the center of the agenda,” Warren wrote.

Four other Democratic presidential candidates — Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey; Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota; Julián Castro, the former housing secretary; and Buttigieg — have also released climate change plans since Sunday.

Harris’ plan includes many of the same basic policy elements as those of her rivals: a blueprint to end fossil fuel pollution from electricity generation by 2030, a halt on new fossil fuel leases on public lands and the imposition of aggressive new regulations on vehicle tailpipe pollution.

Environmental policy experts noted that Harris’ record on advancing climate change policy was thin, though she was an early advocate of the Green New Deal. But they said her focus on using the courts as a muscular tool to push through concrete greenhouse gas reductions could be effective, given that Congress has failed to do so.

“She’s going to throw the book at climate,” Book said. “It could be one way to meet the challenge of making radical new change with decades-old laws.”

In her new proposal, Warren adopts Inslee’s plan to eliminate planet-warming emissions from power plants, vehicles and buildings over 10 years, and adds an additional $1 trillion in spending to subsidize that transition. The spending would be paid for, she said, by reversing the Trump administration’s tax cuts for wealthy individuals and corporations.

Like Inslee’s proposal, her plan would set regulations aimed at retiring coal-fired power plants within a decade, but also fund health care and pensions for coal miners. It would create new federal regulations on tailpipe emissions with the goal of achieving zero emissions from new light-duty passenger vehicles, medium-duty trucks and buses by 2030.

Castro’s plan also includes several ideas either directly adopted from or developed in consultation with Inslee, such as a plan to replace all coal-fired power generation with zero-emissions sources by 2030, and a proposal to marshal $10 trillion in federal, state, local and private spending on jobs associated with the transition from polluting to nonpolluting energy.

At least some echoes of Inslee’s proposals are also included in Booker’s plan, which calls for $3 trillion in spending to achieve a carbon-neutral economy by 2045, and in Klobuchar’s plan, which calls for reinstating Obama-era regulations on fossil fuel emissions to put the nation on track to a carbon-neutral economy by 2050.

Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a rival of Warren’s on the left, has not explicitly taken up Inslee’s ideas. Instead, analysts said, he is trying to win over the progressive wing of the Democratic Party with a climate plan that takes its name from the Green New Deal and has the biggest price tag of all the candidates’ proposals — $16.3 trillion over 15 years. He has called for banning fracking to extract natural gas, and for halting the import and export of coal, oil and natural gas.

“I think Sanders is looking for ways to prove that he’s the true progressive in the race,” said Paul Bledsoe, a lecturer at American University’s Center for Environmental Policy.

Buttigieg’s plan also makes no reference to Inslee. It calls for putting an unspecified price on carbon that will rise over time and quadrupling spending on clean energy research and development to $25 billion per year to achieve net-zero emissions by midcentury. The Buttigieg campaign said total federal spending would range from $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion.

Bledsoe said Wednesday night’s forum could be an opportunity for former Vice President Joe Biden to burnish his image. Biden’s climate plan, which calls for $1.7 trillion in spending over 10 years, initially won praise from environmental activists. But he came under attack from other candidates at the second Democratic debate for not being ambitious enough.

Polls reflect that climate change is a rising concern among voters.

In a survey published by Quinnipiac University last week, a majority of registered voters nationwide, 56%, say that climate change is an emergency. That majority included 84% of Democrats, but 81% of Republicans say that climate change is not an emergency.

Voters also think that the United States is not doing enough to address climate change, with 67% of voters saying more needs to be done.

Republican officials say the plans that Democrats have devised to address climate change will decimate the economy.

Mandy Gunasekara, a former policy adviser at the Environmental Protection Agency under the Trump administration, branded Democrats’ plans as socialist takeovers of the economy.

“Most Americans who talk about climate change, when you ask them, ‘OK, how much are you willing to pay,’ it’s minimal to none. These trillion-dollar plans that each of them are putting up need some measure of honesty,” she said.

Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign, wrote in an email, “The Democrats’ radical approach to energy is to eliminate the use of all fossil fuels, which would kill more than 10 million jobs and inflict economic catastrophe across the country.”

Bledsoe said there was some political danger for Democrats in attempting to outdo one another.

“In all honesty, every one of the climate plans proposed is more ambitious than anything that’s ever been remotely contemplated before,” he said. “But the danger is that they ignore the nuts and bolts of energy politics of swing states and risk handing Trump the election.”

Ahead of Climate Town Hall, Kamala Harris Releases $10 Trillion Plan

WASHINGTON — Sen. Kamala Harris of California released an ambitious new climate change plan early Wednesday, calling for $10 trillion in spending over a decade to combat human-driven global warming and a new tax or fee on companies that emit greenhouse pollution.

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Coral Davenport and Lisa Friedman

Articles written by the author

Trump Administration Rolls Back Clean Water Protections

Trump Administration Rolls Back Clean Water Protections

Trump Administration to Roll Back Clean Water Protections

Trump Administration to Roll Back Clean Water Protections

Ahead of Climate Town Hall, Kamala Harris Releases $10 Trillion Plan