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The Supreme Court has curtailed the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to protect wetlands, siding with Chantell and Michael Sackett in their long-running legal battle to build their dream home near the shore of an Idaho lake. The anti-conservation Pacific Legal Foundation represented the couple.
Experts in environmental law say the decision will sharply limit the EPA’s authority to protect millions of acres of wetlands under the Clean Water Act, leaving them subject to pollution without penalty.
Kevin Minoli, who worked as a senior EPA lawyer from the Clinton through the Trump administrations overseeing the enforcement of Clean Water Act regulations, said the decision will have enormous practical consequences and estimated that it will affect more than half the nation’s wetlands.
“If you’re in an area with a lot of wetlands but those wetlands are not directly connected to a continuously flowing water body, then those wetlands are no longer protected by the Clean Water Act,” he told the New York Times.
The mining industry is integral to the future of clean energy. But it’s playing dirty.
The mining industry and its allies in Congress like to say America should promote domestic mining rather than outsource our mineral needs to other countries, because the U.S. has some of the strongest environmental and labor protections in the world. But these same companies and politicians are currently working to weaken existing protections as well as thwart efforts to modernize the law that governs mining on federal land, which is over 150 years old. Learn how the mining industry is working to influence policy makers in an effort to keep our mining laws stuck in the past in CWP's new blog.
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There, the majority’s non-textualism barred the EPA from addressing climate change by curbing power plant emissions in the most effective way. Here, that method prevents the EPA from keeping our country’s waters clean by regulating adjacent wetlands. The vice in both instances is the same: the court’s appointment of itself as the national decision maker on environmental policy.”
