"A federal court judge in Texas issued a preliminary injunction against the Biden administration’s waters of the US, or WOTUS, rule late Sunday. The injunction applies only to Texas and Idaho. The 2023 WOTUS rule takes effect Monday in the rest of the country and determines which waters and wetlands receive federal protection under the Clean Water Act."
"The House on Thursday voted to overturn the Biden administration’s protections for thousands of small streams, wetlands and other waterways, advancing long-held Republican arguments that the regulations are an environmental overreach and burden to business."
"At least five federal lawsuits challenging the EPA’s new waters of the US rule are expected to continue even if the US Supreme Court undermines the basis for the rule in an opinion coming this term."
"A group of 24 Republican-led states is suing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to try to knock down a rule governing which waters get federal protections."
"Like so many of the planet's natural habitats, wetlands have been systematically destroyed over the past 300 years. Bogs, fens, marshes and swamps have disappeared from maps and memory, having been drained, dug up and built on. Peatlands, a particular type of wetland, store at least twice the carbon of all the world's forests."
"The amount of dust generated by desert windstorms has grown markedly since the mid-19th century, helping to offset the global rise in temperature, new research shows."
"For centuries, a Native American tribe considered a large swath of land with cliffs jutting out along the Rappahannock River in Virginia’s Northern Neck as their ancestral heart and homelands."
"Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced Wednesday he filed a challenge against the new EPA and Army Corps of Engineers definition of which waterways and wetlands are subject to federal permitting requirements."
"After recovering from Saddam Hussein’s campaign to drain them, Iraq’s Mesopotamian Marshes are disappearing as a regional drought enters its fourth year and upstream dams cut off water flows. Marsh Arabs, resident for millennia, are leaving, and biodiversity is collapsing."
"A new rule revives an older set of protections for rivers, marshes and waterways, setting aside changes in the Obama and Trump administrations that led to years of legal wrangling." "The Biden administration is working to complete a clean water regulation before a Supreme Court ruling that could complicate the government’s ability to protect wetlands and other waters."
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