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:

https://www.jacobs.com/newsroom/thought-leadership/combined-sewer-overflows-uk-what-can-we-learn-other-countries

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.

But I’ve reached the maximum allotment, and I wanted to bathe this week!

Until we find that Nestle is just bottling the same tap water at twice the price. Oops!

Maybe they’ll have the best dysentery? That’s not nothin.

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!!

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 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.

It’s a bit nutty!

It’s got electrolytes!