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Restoring Clean Water Protections
On June 18th, the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee approved the Clean Water Restoration Act, S.787 to ensure that all of our rivers, streams, and wetlands are once again protected from polluters. The Committee approved an amendment offered by Senators Baucus and Klobuchar that codifies longstanding exemptions for prior-converted cropland and waste ponds but rejected all proposals to add new loopholes for other polluters.
What's at stake
Over the last 30 years, we have made significant progress in cleaning up our water, but we still have important work to do. Many of America’s great waterways from the Mississippi River to the Chesapeake Bay to the Great Lakes are struggling from too much pollution.
But instead of curbing this pollution, the Bush administration spent much of the last eight years creating loopholes that enabled it. First, Bush officials exempted various types of pollution – from pesticide spraying to mountaintop mining – from standard clean water protections. Then these officials used court decisions to issue a “no protection” policy, which put thousands of wetlands, headwaters, and streams beyond the reach of the Clean Water Act.
Now Environment America is working with Congress and the Obama administration to reverse these rollbacks – so that all of our waterways are protected from all types of pollution under the Clean Water Act.
