A couple of beverage blogs awakened from their slumber to discover that back on March 7 59 craft breweries sent a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers about changes to the Waters of the U.S. Rule.
The brewers are partners in the Natural Resources Defense Council‘s “Brewers for Clean Water” campaign.
The letter says they oppose changes to the rule because it “would endanger critical wetlands and streams across the country.” The proposal, they acknowledge, doesn’t affect major rivers from which drinking water, and the water used to brew beer, is drawn.
Rather, “it would prohibit applying federal pollution-control safeguards to rain-dependent streams and exclude wetlands that do not have a surface connection to other protected waters.” (Emphasis added.)
In short, the EPA/Corps proposal simply reverses an Obama Administration rule that applies Clean Water Act protections for wetlands without surface water connections to larger waterways. It also would apply to streams that only flow following rainfall.
The blogs also don’t tell their readers that the U.S. District court for the Southern District of Texas just a week or so ago ruled the Obama Administration violated the law when it issued its definition of the meaning of “waters of the United States” in the Clean Water Act.
The rule would have regulated waters within 100 feet of waterways and those within the 100-year floodplain of a waterway or waters 1,500 feet from the Great Lakes. This would have been a significant change, because it would for the first time ignore a requirement that there be a demonstrated connection to the navigable waterway.
The decision, in other words, was a highly technical one finding the EPA/Corps didn’t comply with the Administrative Procedures Act. It stopped enforcement of the rule in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi.
Meanwhile, the legal battle rages on in other states.
NRDC says it worries that rolling back the rule “invites polluters to ask for even greater rollbacks, such as eliminating protections for seasonally-flowing streams.”