{beacon} Energy & Environment Energy & Environment The Big Story Trump considers narrowing water pollution protections The Trump administration on Friday said it will consider further narrowing protections for streams and wetlands under the Clean Water Act © Mike Catalini, Associated Press The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and…
Page B3From§Eachthe wee small hours edition — 5 September 2026
Days after UN warns climate threshold nears, Trump's EPA takes a sledgehammer to Clean Water Act protections.
As it ran on the front
Federal protection for many of the nation's streams and wetlands took another blow Friday, when the Trump administration proposed a supplemental rule further narrowing what counts as a "water of the United States" under the Clean Water Act. The Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers said the proposal builds on one they issued in November, which itself went further than the Supreme Court did in its 2023 decision in Sackett v. EPA. Common Dreams, which has tracked the law's decline since that ruling, called Friday's filing "yet another sledgehammer."
The timing was not lost on the family. On Wednesday, United Nations scientists reported that the world has already moved past the point where holding warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius is possible, a threshold now expected sooner than forecast, after which sea levels, heatwaves, hurricanes, wildfires and flooding all get worse regardless of what happens next. CBS News carried the same warning again Friday, in an interview with one of the report's lead authors, the same day the EPA and the Army Corps published their own filing. Nobody at either agency was asked to explain the coincidence, and nobody offered to, which is its own kind of malarkey.…
…(cont) The proposal was promoted on its way out by Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works Adam Telle and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, joined by the American Petroleum Institute and Republicans in Congress who welcomed the further narrowing. Environmental and public health advocates sounded the alarm instead, calling the underlying Sackett decision "an inexcusable assault on clean water."
None of this is new, exactly. In August, a separate global survey found the world's coral reefs had declined nearly 10 percent from 2020 to 2024, compared with the three decades before, and that the oceans have grown warm enough to close the window for the reefs to recover too. No supplemental rule has been proposed for that, either.
The public now has a comment period to weigh in on the proposal, assuming the streams and wetlands in question are still there to comment on by the time anyone reads them. In lieu of flowers, the family asks only that the comments get filed, and read, while a window remains open to file and read them.
“They tell you there's no money for clean water enforcement, then they find a whole legal team to write a rule shrinking what counts as water in the first place. The U.N. says the planet's already blown past the safe number, and days later the EPA's paperwork makes fewer streams worth protecting — same week, not a coincidence, a strategy. Somebody's kid is gonna drink out of a creek that used to have a lawyer looking out for it and doesn't anymore.”
“Look, this is just regulatory clarity — the Supreme Court told them to narrow the definition, they're narrowing the definition, that's called following the law. The timing with the UN report? Totally unrelated, these are career processes, they don't coordinate with — okay, they've been building this since November, so maybe some coordination. But it's not deregulation, it's right-sizing. Did I just defend right-sizing a wetland? That's not usually a line I use.”
The receipts
President Donald Trump's administration sparked fresh fury on Friday when it proposed a supplemental rule to further gut Clean Water Act protections for streams and wetlands in the wake of a " catastrophic " US Supreme Court ruling three years ago. The supplemental proposal from the Department of the Army and Environmental Protection…
In a new report, officials with the United Nations say the world is close to crossing the global warming temperature threshold sooner than expected. Kristie Ebi, one of the lead authors, joins CBS News to discuss the findings.
· With Planet Set to Overshoot 1.5°C Threshold, Emissions Must Still Be Cut Rapidly to Limit Damage: UN Report from the morgue, 2 Sep 2026
· Health Aid Cuts in Secret Trump Deals Will Inflict 'Preventable' Death, Disease on Global South: Report from the morgue, 31 Aug 2026
· As Ocean Temperatures Rise, Coral Reefs Face Closing Window for Recovery From Climate Damage from the morgue, 31 Aug 2026
· The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that July was the hottest month globally since record keeping began in 1880. Global temperatures were 1.46°F (0.81°C) warmer than the 2 from the morgue, 20 Aug 2015
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.