No. of Recommendations: 3
Your link addresses ongoing pollution; not superfund sites that polluters cannot and/or will not deal with.
Also from your link:
As successful as the law has been, the country still has a long way to go if we are going to achieve the Act's goals of ensuring fishable and swimmable waters and eliminating pollutant discharges (both of which were supposed to be accomplished by the mid-1980s).
The Bad News: The Clean Water Act Hasn't Achieved its Goals
As successful as the law has been, the country still has a long way to go if we are going to achieve the Act's goals of ensuring fishable and swimmable waters and eliminating pollutant discharges (both of which were supposed to be accomplished by the mid-1980s).
Look at the state of water bodies today: 53 percent of assessed rivers and streams; 71 percent of assessed lakes, reservoirs and ponds; and 80 percent of assessed bays and estuaries don't meet one or more state standards meant to ensure that waterways are safe for things like fishing and swimming.
In addition, a massive toxic algae outbreak has closed all of Mississippi's Gulf Coast beaches, with the state warning that people are at risk of 'rashes, stomach cramps, nausea, diarrhea and vomiting.' These outbreaks are fueled by water pollution and are popping up all around the country, with scary reports coming in from New Jersey to the New York Finger Lakes to California. And the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently warned that the Gulf of Mexico 'dead zone,' an area where algae decomposition sucks oxygen from the water and can kill aquatic life, will be very large this summer, due to major rainstorms washing pollution down the Mississippi River.
The Ugly News: EPA's Assault on the Clean Water Act
Against this backdrop of significant, but also significantly incomplete, progress, the federal agency responsible for implementing and enforcing the Clean Water Act'the Environmental Protection Agency'has launched a broad and relentless attack on numerous protections in the law. If EPA succeeds in making these radical changes, the agency will make water pollution substantially worse.
First, EPA proposed to repeal the 2015 Clean Water Rule, which clarified what water bodies EPA would protect from harm and which was based on a robust scientific record. In its place EPA proposed the Dirty Water Rule, which would exclude at least 18 percent of streams (the actual figure is likely much higher) and more than half of wetlands from protection. Remarkably, however, EPA utterly failed to assess what its Dirty Water Rule will mean for drinking water safety, its potential to render waterways too polluted for fishing or swimming, the likely increases in flooding-related damages to property when protective wetlands are destroyed, or the viability of water-reliant businesses. The Dirty Water Rule is so poorly conceived and reckless that states, tribal nations, fishermen, landscape architects, river guides, brewers, and lots of scientists (to name a few) told EPA to drop it.
Second, EPA also plans to make it easier for wastewater plants to release partially-treated sewage during rainstorms. As 69 conservation groups told EPA, pursuing this rollback makes no sense given how little evidence the agency has that authorizing increased sewage blending will not cause harm
We cannot keep up with the population. Maybe 'we could' but we aren't, and that's what matters. (If wishes were fishes...)
Your argument ignores the fact that offshoring production to regions without environmental protections is just peeing in another part of the pool.
