Donald Trump’s EPA Administrator, Scott Pruitt, released a loathsome letter this week voicing his intent to ‘reconsider’ the 2015 Effluent Limitations Guidelines (ELG) that strengthened clean water protections against coal plants dumping their industrial sludge into America’s waterways. These guidelines hadn’t been updated in 30 years and were cheered as a major step forward for public health by doctors, policy experts, and community activists when the Obama Administration heeded their calls for more protective guidelines after major scientific studies showed that people’s water was at risk.
The 2015 guidelines severely curtailed coal-fired power plants from dumping their toxic wastewater (read: industrial sludge) laden with heavy metals like arsenic, lead, mercury and other harmful chemicals into nearby rivers, lakes, and bays. Exposure to these toxic chemicals through swimming, drinking contaminated water, or eating contaminated fish can cause skin lesions, birth defects, cancer and other serious health problems. So when Pruitt’s letter came to light, thousands of people’s hearts collectively sank because they know what “reconsider” means in his polluter-friendly vernacular.
It means Pruitt is going to try and find ways to weaken, delay, or scrap the 2015 guidelines, all because coal plant owners wanted to avoid having to comply with the new, common sense safeguards. These billionaires don’t care about the health of American communities - they only care about their own profits. Protections against their sludge will cost them money (but very little of it at that), which to them is far worse than abiding by science and the law and protecting children in nearby communities from drinking water contaminated by their waste.
Before the 2015 guidelines, these executives’ coal plants dumped 2.2 billion pounds of contaminants directly into our water sources annually. That’s over 250,000 pounds of pollution an hour. No other industry comes even close to polluting our nation’s waters like the coal power plant industry. It is by far the largest toxic water polluter in the country, responsible for 30 percent of all toxic pollutants discharged into surface waters by all industrial water polluters regulated under the Clean Water Act.
For decades power plants have passed the cost and burden of cleaning up their toxic mess onto downstream communities and residents, and Pruitt’s letter is essentially an attempt to keep up the status quo. Our fight is to break this horrific norm and to remedy the grave injustice against people who should have a right to clean water. We are gearing up for a major fight to keep these guidelines in place by strategizing, organizing, and executing strong campaigns by every means we have.
-- Dalal Aboulhosn, Sierra Club's Deputy Legislative Director for Land and Water