Rich assholes who are upset they can't throw their trash on the ground. Anyone else is parroting propaganda generated by said rich assholes.
Yeah, that guy who owns a liquor store on 7-mil and can't make the $100k underground stormwater treatment it would take to pave his dirt parking lot pencil out and that city in the rust belt who saw a major manufacturer pack up and leave for a desert state because environmental compliance precluded expanding their site, all their grievances are illegitimate, they're just simping for billionares and BigCos who wanna dump crap in the river.
People looking down their nose and categorically denying that there is collateral damage when you wave the wand of legislation is a large part of how the current populist got elected.
The one that's about to whine and demand Federal assistance when their water gets cut off because it ran out?
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/21/climate/colorado-river-wa...
Edit:
They had a facility with a rail siding. Cheaper to relocate to a new site with expansion potential in another state than pay the state a million bucks an acre to let them fill in wetland (a ~100yo mill pond). The city did what they could to facilitate things but it basically just came down to the discretion of the state officials who live a few hundred miles away amongst all sort of moneyed tech and medical and finance industry and don't really see any upside to economic development in the poor end of the state, especially manufacturing. We're just a line item on the welfare bill as far are they care.
The real cherry on top is that the wetland went away "naturally" as the result of a low head dam removal a few years ago, at the behest of the same agency that said you can't fill in any of the mill pond.
The site is still vacant. It got sold to a REIT that's headquartered a couple blocks from the statehouse and environmental agency. Supposedly Waste Management or Republic Services wants to buy the old site now for it's rail siding and development potential.
At the end of the day has very little to do with MAGA(TM) or Liberals(TM). They're just the current characters in a script that's been played a bunch of times. Kinda like how you can set the basic plot of Romeo and Juliet in any century. From the Tea Party to the Ron Paul thing to the Bernie bros to MAGA the populist movements will keep arising so long as the "we know what's best we're so smart" crowd continues to do things at the expense of the average person. Whether that's back handed environmentalism or facilitating monopolistic big business (or both, for these two examples often go hand in hand) doesn't really matter. The average person doesn't like it even if they can't quite articulate why. And so the populists will keep coming, until one day one shows up that the system can't de-fang. Who knows what'll happen then but I'd bet a lot of money we won't get a stronger EPA or a more favorable environment for big business out of it.
The former sounds like a guy being told his trash needs to be picked up and not being able to afford it so not being allowed to generate trash, and the latter was provided with no details at all so I can't evaluate it.
I chose 7-mile for my hypothetical example because the road is an absolute goldmine for "you can't do that these days it's too dense" site plans and there's at least one liquor store with a dirt lot on it but I don't recall where. The "we want to make it nicer but it's not worth the stormwater treatment cost" example is from a business down the street from me. These things get stopped at the engineer/lawyer phase when the true costs become known to the owner.
Basically all the stormwater rules BS come at the expense of incentivizing sprawl. Doesn't really matter if you're walking past 1000ft of strip mall or 500ft of fancy multi level retail with a parking garage in back with 250ft of empty grass on either side, you're still 1000ft from the bus stop.
Nobody's interests, except some spreadsheet pusher who's missing the big picture, and some idiot ideologues, are effectively served by putting a ton of "built to the bare minimum" green space that the users don't actually want anywhere the economic potential of the land supports more density of actual use. And if you have that density there's more than enough money kicking around to manage your stormwater more cheaply than piecemeal private solutions (basically all the same pro/con as septic vs sewer but with less digits in front of the decimal).
Yeah it's nice to have parks and recreational green space, but those are planned to be fit for that purpose. The catchment basin behind the shopping center's parking garage is only fit for making the parties that got to construct and maintain it a little richer.
Considering how accessable the basics are, I'm having trouble believing your argument is in good faith.
Same basic argument in favor of municipal sewer over super fancy super high cost septic systems.
Aquifer replenishment isn't a concern in many states so that's a non-issue as far as I care, let the places who need to deal with it deal with it.
And those people are the ones making these bifurcated rules undermining the EPA. The destruction is the purpose, it's not incidental
This is the playbook generally - PE vulturism, but for government agencies. And to their credit it kinda works. Just… not for citizens of the country they have sworn to protect.
Currently in progress at GSA, OPM, CFPB (for a decade+), Interior, EPA, labor, education… Nevermind I should’ve started with an exclusion list instead.
You're neithersidesing an issue where clearly one partisan group is doing evil things to actively make the situation worse and then "see, told you!"
Edit: actually since the 1st term as mentioned below
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_policy_of_the_fi...
The beginning of the end of the EPA started the day Trump was sworn in. In the last few years several cases have been decided by this Supreme Court that have effectively reduced the EPA to an advisory board, like a group of consultants that have no real authority over anything.