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US supreme court weakens rules on discharge of raw sewage into water supplies:
The US supreme court has weakened rules on the discharge of raw sewage into water supplies in a 5-4 ruling that undermines the 1972 Clean Water Act.
The CWA is the principal law governing pollution control and water quality of the nation's waterways.
The Republican super majority court ruled on Tuesday that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cannot employ generic, water body-focused pollution discharge limits to Clean Water Act permit holders, and must provide specific limitations to pollution permittees.
The ruling is a win for San Francisco, which challenged nonspecific, or "narrative," wastewater permits that the EPA issues to protect the quality of surface water sources like rivers and streams relied upon for drinking water.
In a 5-4 ruling written by Justice Samuel Alito, the court blocked the EPA from issuing permits that make a permittee responsible for surface water quality, or "end result" permits – a new term coined by the court.
"The agency has adequate tools to obtain needed information from permittees without resorting to end-result requirements," wrote Justice Samuel Alito, who was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh, along with Justice Neil Gorsuch, who joined part of the majority opinion.
The EPA issued San Francisco a permit allowing it to discharge pollutants from its combined sewer system into the Pacific Ocean. The permit's conditions include prohibitions on discharges that contribute to a violation of applicable water quality standards. The permit included generic prohibitions on the impacts to water quality, as part of the EPA's efforts to halt San Francisco's releases of raw sewage into the Pacific Ocean during rainstorms.
San Francisco challenged these conditions, arguing that EPA lacks statutory authority to impose them. The US Court of Appeals for the ninth circuit in July 2023 upheld EPA's authority to issue generic limits on discharges under the Clean Water Act. San Francisco took the case to the supreme court.
The case drew the attention of powerful business groups including the National Mining Association and US Chamber of Commerce, which wrote amicus briefs in support of San Francisco's position. It was the first case to grapple with Clean Water Act regulations since the court struck down Chevron deference in Loper Bright Enterprises v Raimondo in June 2024, though it was barely mentioned during oral arguments.
"The city is wrong," according to Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who wrote the dissenting opinion, which was joined by the three Democratic justices, Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson. "The relevant provision of the Clean Water Act directs EPA to impose any more stringent limitation that is necessary to meet... or required to implement any applicable water quality standard."
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 11, @01:47AM
Description of a new job: the ones who are tasked to add lead salts to water to disinfect it.
You'll be fine.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 11, @03:33AM (3 children)
Finally liquid shit refreshment to go with my shit sandwich.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Tork on Tuesday March 11, @04:10AM (1 child)
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 11, @03:05PM
Protecting me from myself too, I hope. Thank God for heroic Leadership from my betters.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 11, @05:19AM
Now they only need to move you in darkness.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by deimtee on Tuesday March 11, @09:02AM (6 children)
So why don't they just give them specific limits on what they can discharge? It sounds like the old permits were "the river must be this clean" which is pretty vague if there are multiple sources of wastewater. To quote a car analogy it is like telling Ford the exhaust standard is "Los Angeles air must be this clean".
Regarding the minority opinion
Doesn't that just mean they can keep tightening the limits until the water quality standard is met?
One job constant is that good employers have low turnover, so opportunities to join good employers are relatively rare.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 11, @11:53AM
> tightening the limits until the water quality standard is met?
Not sure how it works for water quality.
For the car analogy, in USA the emission standards are a moving target. For the traditional pollutants - Hydrocarbons (HC), Carbon Monoxide (CO), and Nitrogen Oxides (NOx), some of the recent standards result in cars cleaning the air that they use (in polluted areas like the LA basin). While the car companies have been able to meet these standards, it's at a significant cost and may (depending on who you ask, and where you are) be diminishing returns.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 11, @03:55PM (4 children)
>So why don't they just give them specific limits on what they can discharge?
Because that would be ultimately more restrictive than necessary to achieve the goal of: a river clean enough to not bork the ecosystem.
I mean, if those discharging the waste would comply with residual pesticide level safety margins (typically 100:1), then sure... take that regulation and comply with it and the river will be fine.
>Doesn't that just mean they can keep tightening the limits until the water quality standard is met?
In an ideal world, sure. In the real world every change is a political battle which can fall either way: for or against new or changed regulations.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 12, @03:00AM (3 children)
Unless it's not. Illegal dumpers and less regulated sources can make those restrictions pretty onerous because no matter how perfect your emissions are, you can reduce pollution from these other sources.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 12, @03:14AM
>you can reduce pollution from these other sources.
Freudian slip? Yes, you can reduce illegal dumping, what is often lacking is the will to do so. The days of "we just don't know" are pretty much behind us, if we care enough to really monitor a situation.
Now, some situations like smog in the LA basin can be tricky because there is a natural propensity to collect pollution there and the simple presence of so many people can bring about pretty heavy smog even if they all drove Priuses and regulated industry to zero emissions.
Ultimately, population control does come into play.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Thursday March 13, @03:27AM (1 child)
Assuming you actually meant "cannot reduce pollution" why not?
Presumably the same laws that let the EPA control San Francisco's releases would let them control "less regulated sources". And as JoeMerchant says, the days of being unable to find illegal dumpers are over.
One job constant is that good employers have low turnover, so opportunities to join good employers are relatively rare.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 13, @10:02PM
Same goes for those nonpoint water pollution sources - especially their potential for illegal dumping. How are you going to police someone changing the oil in their backyard and dumping it in a corner? Or excessively using fertilizer on their lawn? Or a leaky sewer pipe? Or dumping some leftover waste chemical? And so on. Unless someone rats them out, it's not even worth trying to catch them. But this affects the parties who have to comply fully with US regulation. They get to make up the difference.
There's another source of nonpoint pollution - international pollution. California happens to be downwind from China and sometimes that substantially increases the local pollution. That's completely unregulatable since it's not US jurisdiction.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Username on Tuesday March 11, @02:27PM (2 children)
So, basically, EPA sells permits to utilities or companies, which protects them from criminal or civil lawsuits. Then applies limits to the pollution levels in bodies of water and fines permit holders if it's over the limit.
So non permit holders, the illegal dumpers, don't get any kinds of fines, while those that went through the process do.
Do i have this correct?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 11, @02:54PM
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 11, @04:17PM
>So non permit holders, the illegal dumpers
Yep. That's reality. Maybe the permit holders are now incentivized to rat out the illegal dumpers, like their competitors.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by lars_stefan_axelsson on Sunday March 16, @09:20AM
An acquaintance of mine was responsible for monitoring radio active cooling water emission from the local nuclear powerplant here on the west coast of Sweden many years ago and told me that he never met the requirements. The cooling water always exceeded the requirements with a comfortable margin.
That's not because the plant actually emitted any radio active isotopes through the cooling water (pressure water plants really shouldn't if they're healthy) but because the intake water was already more active than the permit allowed. But his arguing for a delta requirement, i.e. you cannot add more than this to the overall activity, always fell on deaf ears, and they had to continue never meeting their permit.
He had actually, on a lark, looked into if it would even in theory be possible to filter the intake water to meet requirements, but that turned out to be as financially impossible as you might expect; and the engineering challenge would also put you on one of those "Engineering wonders of the world"-shows that used to run on Discovery.
He even learned to identify individual Soviet/Russian nuclear submarines as they passed through the straights outside only by looking at the isotope composition of what they leaked in their wake. So tightening Swedish regulations regarding nuclear emission wouldn't have helped one bit.
And that's really how it should be. You can as an entity only be responsible for your emissions. If you following your permit doesn't lead to a desirable end result then society needs to step in to look at the whole picture, to see who needs to do what. You cannot require single entities to be responsible for matters that are outside their control. Madness that way lies.
In this case of course a nuclear powerplant operator cannot be held responsible for the Soviets shoddy engineering. Society as a whole need to adress that problem.
Well in this case I imagine the only way that would have worked would be to sink the submarines. But as that would probably have started world war three, I'm happy they just let it slide.
Stefan Axelsson