\When Congress overwhelmingly passed the landmark Clean Water Act in 1972, we set an incredibly ambitious goal: eliminate all water pollution. Before the Act, rivers like the Cuyahoga caught fire, Lake Erie was declared “dead”, untreated waste was routinely dumped in rivers and streams and wetlands were thought to be useless swamps that needed to be drained for development or agriculture. The Clean Water Act changed all of that. Over the past forty years we have seen amazing progress for our water.

Brown Not Supporting Key Chemical Reform Legislation

 

kick coal ash

The Senate has tried time and time again to make it harder to protect our communities from coal ash. So far, we've been able to stop them. These various bills have failed to provide meaningful protections to the thousands of communities living near dangerous coal ash dumps.  The latest bill (S. 3512 - which is "dead" would have permanently barred the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from ever establishing enforceable standards to protect human health and the environment from harmful coal ash pollution. We expect to a similar bill introduced in the new Congress.

Tell your Senators to oppose any giveaway to polluters!

Washington, D.C. – The following statement is from Clean Water Action, Earthjustice, Environmental Integrity Project, Natural Resources Defense Council and Sierra Club regarding the introduction today of the Coal Ash Recycling and Oversight Act of 2012, legislation in the U.S. Senate dealing with the disposal of toxic coal ash:
 

We Must Re-Elect President Barack Obama

This is the most important environmental election in years.  On November 6th, we’re either going to re-elect a President who has enacted an ambitious new fuel standard of 54.5 mpg , a standard that will reduce our dependence on foreign oil, save consumers money, create jobs and fight climate change--or we’ll elect a candidate who laughed at climate change in his acceptance speech. The race is incredibly close, but the choice is clear – re-elect President Barack Obama!

The U.S. House of Representatives will vote Thursday on a measure to urge the Transportation Conference Committee to strip the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of the ability to designate toxic coal ash as a hazardous waste. This spring, the House approved H.R. 4348, the Surface and Transportation Extension Act of 2012.  In this bill the House included an amendment by West Virginia Republican Representative David McKinley, that would prohibit the EPA from ever setting federally enforceable safeguards for the disposal of toxic coal ash. Now McKinley and the coal lobby are fighting to keep his amendment from being stripped out during House-Senate conference committee negotiations.

Eight environmental groups are circulating a letter to senators warning against mostly GOP amendments to the farm bill that the groups say would dangerously scale back water quality protections. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said this week that Republicans hope to use the bill to undo what they consider burdensome federal regulations.

h.r. 4965: another dirty water bill

The dirty water votes in Congress continue.  On Thursday, June 7 the U.S. House Transportation and Infrastructure will consider an bill to block the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers from issuing policy guidelines to close gaps in Clean Water Act protection.  This is part of a continuing string of efforts to block this common sense policy proposal.

Watch the hearing here

Washington, D.C. - The transportation conference committee, comprised of members from both the House of Representatives and Senate, is working to iron out a deal on a massive transportation bill designed to fund and maintain America's highways, mass transit infrastructure and two million American jobs. The Senate version was a meaningful bipartisan compromise.

Unfortunately, what the version passed by the House lacked in transportation policy, it made up for in unrelated controversial "riders." These riders would prohibit the EPA from ever regulating toxic coal ash dump sites, eviscerate public participation-oriented environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) on complex transportation projects, and automatically permit the Keystone XL pipeline.

In a letter to Senate conferees from 14 states, 140 groups from those states joined together to ask the Senate to reject these corporate giveaways, particularly the coal ash provision, and pass a clean transportation bill.

WASHINGTON, D.C.— A new poll commissioned by the nation’s leading environmentalists and sportsmen organizations in key Great Lakes and Rocky Mountain states shows that the public overwhelmingly supports an Obama administration proposal to restore protections for America’s rivers, lakes, streams, and wetlands.

Read the full summary here.

The poll confirms that – across party lines and in all age groups – voters demand clean water for safe drinking water and oppose the pollution of places where their families fish and swim. This poll comes at a time when the Obama administration is set to finalize its Clean Water Act guidance, yet the House majority is preparing to ignore the will of the public and instead continue dirty water politics.