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US supreme court weakens rules on discharge of raw sewage into water supplies
(www.theguardian.com)
Shithole country. Literally.
this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2025
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Its not as if this saves money. It just shifts the expense. Purified water treatment plants are going to have to compensate for increasingly contaminated source water. I'd wager this will negatively impact nitrification. Just pollution for no societal gain. Greed, I assume.
Ugh. I think I've hit my limit for bad news today. Be well, all.
You're from the UK, yes? The issue here is combined sewers; these produce overflow during periods of heavy rainfall. They're a characteristic of older cities. You guys in the UK, with older cities, have considerably more of these than does the US, especially the western US, which are mostly newer cities built after separate sewers became the norm.
I don't know how you'd measure public views on the matter.
kagis
These guys are UK-based and studying public opinion on the matter:
In our review, we found that CSOs in the U.K. do receive a higher level of public attention and are more heavily scrutinized than in European Union (EU) countries, while the U.S. is further ahead in terms of public awareness and stakeholder involvement.
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What do you need clean water for? You can purchase it from Nestle anyway as part of your essentials subscription.
But I've reached the maximum allotment, and I wanted to bathe this week!
Would you like to upgrade to the Essentials+ with ads plan?
I....would not? Ugh, I have to think about it
Better hurry! This discounted offer only lasts through this weekend!
Until we find that Nestle is just bottling the same tap water at twice the price. Oops!
Is America great now?
FINALLY! God it feels like I've been saying it forever but OUR WATER IS TOO CLEAN! Cannot tell you how much I miss sewage and dead animals in my water. Puts hair on your chest! Kids these days barely know what it's like to get a little cholera or typhoid. By the time I was six I had e coli twice, and salmonella. Wouldn't trade it for the world. MAGA!!
Maybe they'll have the best dysentery? That's not nothin.
Let's bring back lead paint.
Let's bring back coal refineries in full swing.
Let's bring back rulings against having warning labels.
Let's just go all the fucking way in how we can truly bastardize this country even further.
Don't forget good old asbestos!
Great, so now asshole industrialists can pollute with whatever new-fangled chemicals they want, and if it’s not on the blacklist (good luck navigating the red tape to add to that list btw), they are free of liability and the public can get sick. Wonderful.
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Mmm, this Freedom Water tastes amazing
It’s got electrolytes!
It's what plants crave ⚡
ruled that the EPA must impose specific pollutant limits instead of broad, “end result” requirements.
Any scientists out there who can talk to the specifics of this?
To a layman like me, this seems like six and a half of one, a half a dozen of another.
Is asking for specificity a bad thing, scientifically and environmentally speaking?
~This~ ~comment~ ~is~ ~licensed~ ~under~ ~CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0~
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.
I also don't know, but get really suspicious if Alito needs to invent a "new term" to frame the case with
I also don’t know, but get really suspicious if Alito needs to invent a “new term” to frame the case with
Yeah, there's definitely a " 'WTF?' Factor" going on with that.
I can't wait to hear what the Legal Eagle on YouTube says about that.
~This~ ~comment~ ~is~ ~licensed~ ~under~ ~CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0~
I haven't read the exact statutes, so take what I say with a grain of salt.
Some compounds, like phosphates and nitrates, are well studied, and so experts can put limits in place that they know will result in good outcomes. Unfortunately, there are an infinite number of potential contaminates someone could dump into a body of water, so for anything less well studied, it's really hard to make limits. The EPA apparently just set a backstop that said something along the lines of "whatever you put in the water has to still result in good water quality".
Now that the Supreme Court has shut that down, a polluter can put anything in the water that isn't specifically disallowed. For a (fake) example, maybe Forever Chemical x2357-A is shown to hurt wildlife at concentrations over 2 parts per billion (after lots of expensive, taxpayer funded research), so the EPA rules that they have to keep it below 2 ppb. The company could adjust their process so their waste is Forever Chemical x2357-B instead, and they can release as much as they want.
The EPA basically just gets forced to play whack-a-mole spending lots of money to come up with specific rules to the point that they can't actually do their jobs.
From a legal perspective I think it means that the permits are only able to set pre-requisite limits, but any end result can not be used to revoke it. Basically a CYA permit that allows the permitted entity to have oopsies as the end result that do not invalidate the permit. That's my poorly informed take on the legalese.
"Let them drink shit."
- Clarence Thomas probably
The founding fathers didn't have water treatment so you don't get it either!
This decision doesn't sound like its in the best interest of the people. And no corporations are not people. This can only end badly.
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Nothing learned:
Will getting cholera make eggs affordable?
More deaths, less consumers?
I guess the invisible hand of the market belongs to Death
The case is City and County of San Francisco v. Environmental Protection Agency. Here are the legal specifics:
Something something "drain the swamp".
The joke about Republicans letting the likes of Bronzo the Clown take a shit in their mouth if they thought a liberal would have to smell it now became very close to literally true.
"Not having to eat actual shit from our water supply is just a lot of woke bullshit!" -magamorons, probably
Why don't we just drain the swamp right into the drinking water supplies of schools? It's a win-win-win!
Entering Flavor Country
If the EPA are the experts wouldn’t it make sense they should set specific requirements for water safety? What am I missing here?
The repeal of chevron deference apparently
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The EPA 100% has a spreadsheet showing which pollutants lead up to those "end results". Hopefully a swath of specific limitations comes out very, very, quickly.
Filthy water strengthens the white nation!
Get your RO systems now before they are tariffed.
I thought San Francisco were supposed to be good guys? Why are they pulling the EPA in front of the Supreme Court? Just to save some money on their infrastructure at the cost of the public?
The city government of San Francisco is fucking broke because they built their entire budget and town around shitty tech startup open offices and nobody ever wanted that so now it all sits empty and decaying.
San Francisco has been shifting conservative for a while. A bunch of tech millionaires want to turn it into a futuristic dystopia.
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Thanks, I hate this.
Time to start clogging the pipes
This cornucopia of corruption is unprecedented. It seems we’re seeing all of his buyers receiving their benefits in real time.
Yes California has one Sewage Crisis. But what about Second Sewage Crisis?
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