If you’re anything like me, you don’t think twice about drinking the water that comes from your kitchen sink. Maybe that’s a bad thing now, and maybe I should be more careful, since I don’t necessarily know what’s in the water. All I know for sure is that I have been doing this for as long as I can remember and I have been fine.
That’s because we, as Americans, usually have the luxury of just turning on the tap and getting drinkable water. This luxury is being taken away from 1 in 3 Americans soon, thanks to the EPA’s administrator, Scott Pruitt. In a recent decision, Pruitt is working on another move to undo the work of President Obama’s environmental policy progress. The Clean Water Rule is, in the most basic sense, an act to “protect the water of the United States.”
According to Ryan Emanuel, associate professor at the NC State College of Natural Resources, the rule was “put in place by the EPA in 2015 to clarify ambiguities in which waterways are covered by the federal Clean Water Act and other laws, and which waterways are exempt from such regulations.”
Essentially, the rule is in place to define the bodies of water in the United States, in efforts to regulate their use, among other things. For North Carolina specifically, it was found that more than half of the streams in North Carolina are “at risk of uncontrolled filling and pollution.”
The Clean Water Rule, according to Emanuel, “basically clarifies the standards for determining whether or not a water body can be regulated under the federal Clean Water Act.” The Clean Water Act itself dates back over 40 years, to 1972, but this was when the definition of which waters were protected under the act were unclear. President Obama’s administration worked on creating a more workable definition when it was revised in 2008.
Pruitt justifies his actions in retracting the act in order to “provide clarity.” Revoking the Clean Water Rule would affect the drinking water of 1 in 3 Americans, something Rhea Shuh, the president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, says “strikes directly at public health.” That means that it “would strip out the needed protections for the streams that feed drinking water sources for one in every three Americans.”
The work on the Clean Water Act did not come as a surprise, since the act was targeted in an executive order signed by President Trump in February. The main justification for targeting this act is because “[the act] was something that created a substantial amount of uncertainty and confusion,” according to Pruitt.
It is also in an effort to “[take] sufficient action to return power to the states and provide regulatory certainty to our nation’s farmers and businesses.” However, revoking the rule means that it would be easier for developers and others “to contaminate waters and send the pollution downstream.”
Even though this is clearly a huge change environmentally for our country, it is important to remember that this is as much of a political issue as it is environmental. Professor Emanuel states that it has become a partisan issue, and is considered by some to be an example of “too much government regulation.”
In terms of how Pruitt specifically is as EPA administrator for the Trump presidency, Michael Cox, a worker for the EPA for 25 years, stated that, “This is the first time I remember staff openly dismissing and mocking the environmental policies of an administration, and by extension you, the individual, selected to implement the policies.”
Ultimately, since this is becoming an issue between political parties, there are partisan interests in mind when creating the new guidelines for the rule. Although it may seem appealing to return “the power to the states” by changing the rule, retracting to fewer guidelines in the newer version can create uncertainty — an uncertainty that Professor Emanuel sees as making the entire process “cumbersome and less efficient.”
What was concerning to farmers of certain states is that a “puddle on their farmland could be regulated.” In rescinding the rule to how it was prior to the changes from the Obama administration, farmers, among other parties, would have control over their waterways.
According to the National Wildlife Foundation, without the Clean Water Rule, “state programs are vulnerable to attack in the state legislature and in the courts.” Even by giving North Carolina the state power to control the waterways, rivers and streams from other states are still at risk of contamination considering those states may have different regulations.
When looking at the work that is being done to the Clean Water Rule, it’s clear that the direction the work is being taken into is not as efficient as it could be. Rather than taking away information from the rule and making it less specific, making it more ambiguous to “provide clarity” seems to be a way for there to be misunderstanding in the jurisdiction of the waters, which is exactly what the last and present administrations are attempting to do.
In the process of creating more freedom with the rule, water quality will suffer considering there are fewer rules to ensure the regulation of the water. To put it bluntly, as the National Wildlife Foundation has, “waters can be polluted and destroyed.”
For North Carolina specifically, there is a chance of pollution and contamination in rivers and streams that provide drinking water to around 4.7 million North Carolinians — about half our state’s residents. One of the bodies of water that needs protection is Jordan Lake, only 20 minutes from our campus.
So, if the change in the Clean Water Rule continues on the route that Pruitt has for it, remember to think twice when you’re filling your (hopefully reusable) water bottle with your apartment’s tap.
