As the Washington DC region thaws this spring, the run-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.
After a catastrophic failure of a major sewer line, hundreds of millions of gallons of untreated sewage flowed into the river, making it one of the largest wastewater spills in American history. The environmental damage is immediate, visible and inescapable.
President Donald Trump announced he would call in FEMA to assist with the cleanup and response efforts — a move that should be applauded. Whatever one’s politics, federal intervention signals the 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 remained silent. For leaders who often speak about environmental justice and public health, their silence is striking.
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One would expect that such a disaster, unfolding just miles from the seat of federal power, would dominate the national environmental conversation. Instead, it has struggled to cut through the noise. There have been no sweeping reckonings over aging infrastructure, no sustained cycles of outrage, and no urgent moral declarations from the climate establishment.
The muted response is especially striking when compared to the intensity of the response to a very different development in environmental policy the same week when sewage entered the river around the country’s seats of power.
This week, the Trump administration announced its decision to rescind the EPA’s 2009 “threat finding,” the legal determination that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and welfare. The response from progressive leaders and advocacy groups was swift and dramatic. Former President Barack Obama warned that reversing the finding would make Americans “less safe, less healthy and less able to fight climate change.” Major media outlets labeled this move as a fundamental attack on science and environmental protection.
The juxtaposition is revealing. A historic sewage spill in a major American river – an event with clear, measurable consequences for ecosystems and public health – has received scant attention in the national discourse. Meanwhile, a regulatory shift, the consequences of which will unfold gradually and remain contentious, is being treated as an existential emergency.
Over time, federal emissions regulations have led to a growing system of “off-cycle credits,” which reward automakers for technologies that reduce emissions under specific test conditions rather than over a vehicle’s entire life cycle. One of the most visible results is the now ubiquitous stop-start feature that shuts off a car’s engine at a red light and restarts it moments later.
This feature is generally disliked by drivers, but its popularity with regulators has little to do with the consumer experience. Mechanics and automotive analysts have increasingly expressed concern that repeated forced shutdowns and restarts place additional strain on engines, batteries and starting systems. These pressures lead to higher maintenance costs, more frequent mechanical failures and shorter vehicle lifespans – results 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 give the appearance of environmental action while passing the cost and inconvenience on to consumers. However, once embedded in regulatory frameworks, they are rarely subject to the same scrutiny that accompanied their adoption.
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This pattern reflects a broader trend in progressive environmentalism: “Following the science” often means appealing to scientific authority to justify new mandates, but much less often means using evidence to reassess whether those mandates are working as intended. Regulatory success becomes a matter of compliance and tokenism rather than measurable environmental improvement. Environmental concerns become performative – focused on visible controls on lifestyle – while less ideologically useful problems receive less attention.
The silence surrounding the Potomac sewage leak underlines this point. Infrastructure failure does not lend itself to moral theater. They imply governance, maintenance, budgeting and long-term competencies – areas where responsibility is more difficult to shift and political rewards are limited.
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Public confidence depends on consistency and proportionality. When policymakers expend enormous energy on 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, as they routinely do, they owe public proof that all environmental harms are treated with equal seriousness.
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Hundreds of millions of gallons of sewage in a river should be at least as urgent as tailpipe regulations.
As the country approaches a milestone meant to celebrate progress and stewardship, the contrast is hard to ignore. True environmentalism means fixing broken pipes and maintaining infrastructure, not just rewriting regulations. It means accountability for both local failures and federal debates. And it means recognizing that sometimes the most immediate threats to the environment are not abstract carbon models, but raw sewage flowing through the capital of the United States.
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