The EPA wants to drop emissions reporting requirements for largescale farming operations:
Under pressure from agriculture industry lobbyists and lawmakers from agricultural states, the Environmental Protection Agency wants to drop requirements that factory farms report their emissions of toxic gases, despite findings by the agency’s scientists that the gases pose a health threat.
The EPA acknowledges that the emissions can pose a threat to people living and working nearby, but it says local emergency responders don’t use the reports, making them unnecessary. But local air-quality agencies, environmental groups and lawmakers who oppose the rule change say the reports are one of the few tools rural communities have for holding large livestock operations accountable for the pollution they produce.
Opponents of the rule change say agriculture lobbyists orchestrated a campaign to convince the EPA that the reports are not useful and misrepresented the effort as reflecting the views of local officials. They say the plan to drop the reporting requirement is emblematic of a broader effort by the Bush-era EPA to roll back federal pollution rules.
Old MBA saying: if you can’t measure it, you can’t control it.
This is way outside my area of expertise but somehow I don’t see this as good news. I can see how large agricultural operations would want to avoid doing such reporting, particularly in the case of livestock operations where the emissions are substantial as anyone who’s driven by one on a warm day could tell you. But if we want to continue the progress we’ve made over the last 40 years in making the air, water, and soil cleaner, we’re going to have to measure what’s actually happening. Additionally, I see exemptions like this as effective subsidies to largescale farming operations.
If we exempt enough sectors of the economy from environmental regulations it makes it that much harder for the rest to take up the slack.
I’ve been told that largescale farming operations cannot be photographed without prior consent of the owner. After 9/11, they were added to a list of facilities like nuclear power plants that are a terrorist threast if they are blown up. The person who told me this, a environmental activitist, said that when she went to Congress to testify on the risks of these operations she was careful to point out that the pictures she was using of a huge waste lagoons were pre-law. A Congressman asked what she meant and expressed amazement that that was in the bill he voted for.
These places either pose a potential danger or they don’t.