Industrial swine, poultry, and dairy operations emit planet-warming gases and toxic air pollutants that contribute to thousands of deaths a year. But these facilities have long skirted key provisions of air pollution laws under a deal pushed by livestock industry representatives and embraced by George W. Bush’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 2005.
Even as President Biden discusses his plans to reduce global greenhouse gases with other world leaders, his administration continues to allow climate-altering factory farm polluters to evade oversight.
Late last month, nearly two decades after the EPA adopted a confidential industry proposal to couple air monitoring with “protections from enforcement,” two dozen public interest groups filed a legal petition calling on the Biden administration to enforce federal laws meant to control hazardous emissions from industrial polluters like factory farms.
Nearly 14,000 industrial animal feeding operations (AFOs), also known as concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), signed on to the Bush-era deal, known as the Air Consent Agreement. The agreement was intended to help the EPA develop reliable ways to measure emissions so it could better enforce clean air laws. The agency justified the deal, in a notice seeking public comment, as a way to achieve “real environmental benefits to protect public health and the environment while supporting a sustainable agricultural sector.”
The fact that there’s been no regulation of industrial animal farms under federal air pollution laws since the Bush era is “pretty shocking.”
Yet 16 years later, the promised estimation methods have still not emerged in final form, allowing factory farms to continue emitting hazardous air and climate pollutants without adequate oversight.
The fact that there’s been no regulation of industrial animal farms under federal air pollution laws since the Bush era is “pretty shocking,” said Emily Miller, an attorney with Food and Water Watch, one of the lead organizations on the petition.
The EPA also exempted AFOs from two federal laws that require facilities to report emissions of hazardous substances that exceed set thresholds, including the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act, which requires those reports to be publicly accessible.
The whole point of the EPA’s deal with the industry, Miller said, was to generate data and develop methods that would allow federal and state regulators, as well as citizens, to calculate factory farm air pollution and begin enforcing clean air laws.
“The amnesty deal was supposed to end in 2010, when EPA basically committed to putting out these methodologies,” Miller said. “But because EPA has yet to put out any final emission estimating methodologies like they said they would do over a decade ago, 14,000 AFOs continue to enjoy this amnesty from EPA enforcement of federal air pollution laws.”
Asked why the EPA has continued an “enforcement amnesty” policy that allows industrial animal farms to remain major sources of climate and air pollutants, Tim Carroll, a spokesman for the agency, responded: “We will review the petition.”
The EPA has the authority to rescind the safe harbor provisions of the consent agreement but has instead granted extended immunity to AFOs that emit significant air pollution and cause adverse public health impacts in surrounding communities, the petitioners wrote.
Beyond agreeing not to enforce the law for thousands of factory farms, the EPA has held back from taking other regulatory actions with respect to this industry, said Brent Newell, a senior attorney with the Public Justice Food Project, a lead signatory on the petition. As a result, safe harbor for the livestock industry has become “a broader de facto policy platform at the agency,” he said.
“Multiple administrations have carried on this policy of agricultural exceptionalism where ag, cloaked in a false narrative of family farmers, has expanded the industry,” said Newell, who has filed other petitions urging the EPA to regulate AFOs and their pollutants under the Clean Air Act.
“Over the last several decades, the number of industrial dairy and hog operations have grown, and the amount of liquefied manure creating methane has increased while EPA is standing idly by,” Newell said. “EPA needs to end the consent agreement.”
Consolidating Farms Along with Risks
Over the last several decades, U.S. livestock production has shifted from small pasture-based farms to increasingly concentrated industrial facilities to improve profitability. As operators concentrated more and more animals and their waste in confined—and often relatively small—areas, communities and researchers documented numerous threats to public health and the environment.
Regulators first recognized they lacked the information needed to rein in emissions from the rapidly consolidating livestock industry during the Clinton administration.
In 1997, the Department of Agriculture estimated that livestock generated 1.1 billion tons of manure, six times the amount of waste produced by people. Around the same time, the EPA realized its staff lacked the necessary data to develop what the agency calls emissions estimating methodologies, or EEMs.
"Factory" - Google News
November 13, 2021 at 02:46PM
https://ift.tt/3qxhvLR
Public Interest Groups Urge the EPA to Regulate Factory Farm Emissions - Civil Eats
"Factory" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2TEEPHn
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Public Interest Groups Urge the EPA to Regulate Factory Farm Emissions - Civil Eats"
Post a Comment