Green rhetoric, polluted water: The Left’s DC sewage failure is a disgrace
As the Washington, D.C. region thaws this spring, the lead-up to America’s 250th birthday will bring renewed attention to the capital’s monuments, parks and waterways — symbols of national continuity and civic pride. Along the Potomac River, however, the thaw will also bring something else: the unmistakable stench of raw sewage.
Following a catastrophic failure in a major sewer line, hundreds of millions of gallons of untreated wastewater spilled into the river, making it one of the largest sewage releases in U.S. history. The environmental damage is immediate, visible and inescapable.
President Donald Trump announced that he would call in FEMA to assist with cleanup and response efforts — a move that should be applauded. Whatever one’s politics, federal intervention signals recognition that this is not a minor bureaucratic mishap but a major environmental crisis. In contrast, the governors of Maryland and Virginia and the mayor of Washington, D.C. — all Democrats, some with ambitions for higher office, who routinely champion aggressive climate policies — have been silent. For leaders who speak often about environmental justice and public health, their silence has been striking.
One might expect such a disaster, unfolding just miles from the seat of federal power, to dominate the national environmental conversation. Instead, it has struggled to break through the noise. There have been no sweeping reckonings about aging infrastructure, no sustained outrage cycles and no urgent moral declarations from the climate establishment.
The muted response is especially striking when set against the intensity of reaction to a very different development in environmental policy the same week as sewage spilled into the river surrounding the nation’s seats of power.
This week, the Trump administration announced its decision to rescind the EPA’s 2009 "endangerment finding," the legal determination that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare. The response from progressive leaders and advocacy groups was swift and dramatic. Former President Barack Obama warned that undoing the finding would make Americans "less safe, less healthy, and less able to fight climate change." Major media outlets framed the move as a fundamental assault on science and environmental protection.
The juxtaposition is revealing. A historic sewage spill into a major American river — an event with clear, measurable consequences for ecosystems and public health — has barely registered in the national discourse. Meanwhile, a regulatory shift whose effects will unfold gradually and remain contested has been treated as an existential emergency.
Over time, federal emissions rules have produced an expanding system of "off-cycle credits," which reward automakers for technologies that reduce emissions under specific testing conditions rather than across a vehicle’s full life cycle. One of the most visible results is the now-ubiquitous stop-start feature that shuts off a car’s engine at red lights and restarts it moments later.
The feature is widely disliked by drivers, but its popularity with regulators has little to do with consumer experience. Mechanics and automotive analysts have increasingly raised concerns that repeated forced shutdowns and restarts place additional strain on engines, batteries and starter systems. That strain leads to higher maintenance costs, more frequent mechanical failures and shorter vehicle lifespans — outcomes that run counter to the environmental goal of reducing resource consumption over time.
Like paper straws that disintegrate before a drink is finished, these measures offer the appearance of environmental action while shifting costs and inconvenience onto consumers. Once embedded in regulatory frameworks, however, they are rarely subjected to the same scrutiny that accompanied their adoption.
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This pattern reflects a broader tendency in progressive environmentalism: "Following the science" often means invoking scientific authority to justify new mandates, but far less often using evidence to reassess whether those mandates are working as intended. Regulatory success becomes a matter of compliance and symbolism rather than measurable environmental improvement. Environmental concern turns performative — focused on visible lifestyle controls — while less ideologically convenient problems receive less attention.
The silence surrounding the Potomac sewage spill underscores the point. Infrastructure failures do not lend themselves to moral theater. They implicate governance, maintenance, budgeting and long-term competence — areas where responsibility is harder to shift and political rewards are limited.
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Public trust depends on consistency and proportionality. When policymakers devote enormous energy to marginal regulatory changes while downplaying acute environmental crises under their own jurisdiction, skepticism is not cynicism — it is common sense.
Environmental science should guide priorities, not serve as a selective rhetorical tool. If leaders want Americans to accept costly and disruptive regulations in the name of environmental protection, which they routinely do, they owe the public proof that all environmental harms are treated with equal seriousness.
Hundreds of millions of gallons of sewage in a river should command at least as much urgency as tailpipe rules.
As the nation approaches a milestone anniversary meant to celebrate progress and stewardship, the contrast is difficult to ignore. Real environmentalism means fixing broken pipes and maintaining infrastructure, not just rewriting regulations. It means accountability for local failures as well as federal debates. And it means recognizing that sometimes the most immediate environmental threats are not abstract carbon models, but raw sewage flowing through the capital of the United States.