SUMMARY:A new Trump administration proposal would reduce safeguards to millions of acres of waterways by removing federal oversight over smaller streams and tributaries. Judy Woodruff talks with Coral Davenport of The New York Times about how the plan would reverse decades of policy and how both industry and environmentalists are responding.
SUMMARY: EPA chief Scott Pruitt recently promised an aggressive rollback of regulations that had been put in place by former President Obama, and President Trump made good on Pruitt's promise with an order to dismantle a rule about smaller bodies of water. William Brangham learns more from Juliet Eilperin of The Washington Post about what today's move means for water regulations.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM (NewsHour): It's called the Waters of the United States rule, and it has to do with which smaller bodies of water, like streams and wetlands, should be regulated and protected by the federal government under the Clean Water Act.
That question has been litigated in court battles for years.
And so for more on what today's move is all about, I'm joined now by Juliet Eilperin, who's been reporting on this for The Washington Post.
Juliet, welcome back to the NewsHour.
Before we get into the rollback, can you tell me what this rule is really about? And this was, as I understand it, a very big part of Obama's environmental legacy.
JULIET EILPERIN, The Washington Post: This is a 2015 rule, which has been subject to litigation, which tries to clarify what, as you alluded to, has been really a 30-year battle over what jurisdiction the federal government has over these smaller streams, some are intermittent, some wetlands, and essentially what the federal government can tell Americans, including farmers, ranchers, homebuilders, what they can and cannot do, even when it has to do with private property, because it has implications for smaller water bodies that are crucial water supply for larger water bodies across the United States.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: So, is this about a rule that is trying to protect these waters from pollution? Is that the issue here?
JULIET EILPERIN: Partially, it's pollution, but what it pertains to many often is whether they can be drained or filled in. All of those actions, which are in some ways the inevitable product of these operations that happen in various different sectors of the economy, have implications for whether that water will then flow into larger water bodies.
And so it is usually a restriction on whether you can drain something or dig up something, as opposed to, for example, just dumping in pollutants into a small water body, although, technically, it could apply to that as well.
SUMMARY: The San Francisco Bay’s wetlands are disappearing at an alarming rate due to encroaching development, leaving the local ecosystem at risk. Moreover, the wetlands can store as much carbon as a tropical rainforest, an invaluable asset in the effort to slow global warming. Sonia Aronson of the PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs takes a look at a new and contentious proposed tax to save the bay.
SONIA ARONSON (Student Reporting Labs): These local high school students have volunteered their Saturday to clean up the San Francisco Bay.
CHRIS LA, Volunteer, Save the Bay: We are helping restore and replant and reinstall native plants into this area of the wetlands.
SONIA ARONSON: They are here with Save the Bay, a local organization that mobilizes the community to restore the thousands of acres of wetlands surrounding the bay.
They also educate volunteers and student groups like this one about the crucial role that wetlands play in sustaining the bay.
Chris La is a sophomore at Oakland High School.
CHRIS LA: We should be connected to our environment, because that’s what we should be worried about first. Without the world, without nature, we wouldn’t be here. And we’re slowly doing a better job at sustaining ourselves, but, so far, we kind of screwed up over the last 200 years.
SONIA ARONSON: In that time, the wetlands that surround the bay have been disappearing at an alarming rate, which could endanger not just the local ecosystem, but the worldwide effort to address global warming and sea level rise.
PATTY OIKAWA, University of California, Berkeley:So, originally, this was all wetlands. About 150 years ago, people came in and drained those wetlands and started growing crops like corn and alfalfa.
SONIA ARONSON: Patty Oikawa, a postdoctoral researcher at U.C. Berkeley, is studying the unique ability of wetlands to store carbon, a trait that can offset the effects of climate change.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): Much of our reporting on climate change has focused on the impact it could have on people or on the environment in which they live.
But one area that tends to get less attention is how climate change will affect wildlife. There’s a major habitat restoration project in San Francisco Bay that’s trying to address that very issue.
The NewsHour’s Cat Wise has our report.
RACHEL TERTES, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service: So, welcome, everyone, to our first morning of trapping.
CAT WISE (NewsHour): On a recent morning, a small group of volunteers clad in rubber boots gathered at a park on the edge of the San Francisco Bay.
RACHEL TERTES: So when the animal walks in, he sets the trap off.
CAT WISE: They’d come to help U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials gather traps in a restored tidal marsh to determine if an endangered species, found only in this area of the bay, is making a comeback.
Wildlife biologist Rachel Tertes carefully opened the first trap and out spilled a tiny creature, just what they were hoping to find.
RACHEL TERTES: This cinnamon belly would tell us pretty much right away that this is a salt marsh harvest mouse.
CAT WISE: The endangered harvest salt marsh mouse is, well, pretty cute. It’s lost about 90 percent of its habitat due to human development along the bay, and now, according to Tertes, it faces a new threat, climate change.
RACHEL TERTES: The mouse is really tied to this habitat of pickleweed. They live on this plant. They move up and down the plant throughout the tide cycles.
One of the concerns with the climate change is really going to be the sea level rise portion of it, so, as the tide increases, you have more water covering more plants, and so they have less areas for those — for the mice to move up.
I am Retired U.S. Navy (22yrs) and a Vietnam Veteran. After my Navy retirement I was in the computer related industry, now retired. In 2000 I was a registered Republican and voted for George W. Bush. Six months of having Bush in the Whitehouse forced me to re-evaluate my political stance. I had always thought of myself as a Moderate Republican, but was a Republican by "default" NOT because of close examination of the GOP. Due to what has happened in America since 2000, I now consider myself a progressive, and registered as a Non-Affiliated voter.
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