EPA Under-Regulates CAFOs, Not Fighting Water Pollution Hard Enough

Last updated on 2012.08.09

The running Republican narrative is that the Obama Administration, embodied in its fullest evil in the Environmental Protection Agency, is out to regulate every man, woman, and child out of business.

Wait a minute:

Four years after the U.S. Government Accountability Office raised concerns and 40 years after the Clean Water Act gave the EPA the authority to protect the nation's waterways, the agency still doesn't know the location of many livestock farms, let alone how much manure they generate or how the waste is handled, because most of that information is kept by various state and/or local agencies -- or not collected at all.

At the same time, water-quality experts throughout the country cite livestock waste as a major contributor to water-quality problems, including in areas like the Chesapeake Bay, where manure runoff is believed responsible for up to one-fourth of phosphorus, which stimulates algae growth. If the EPA knew all the sources of that waste, it might be easier to stop it, environmentalists say.

So they were flabbergasted when the EPA recently decided against adopting a rule that would require livestock operators to provide the agency with information, opting instead to try to cobble it together from other state, local and federal sources... [Tammy Webber, "EPA Can't Regulate Livestock Farms It Can't Find," AP via Yahoo, August 2, 2012].

The EPA proposed its CAFO rule to settle a lawsuit from the Natural Resource Defense Council, the Waterkeeper Alliance, and the Sierra Club. Even that proposed rule failed to require CAFOs to provide essential information like their owner names and addresses. But then those sneaky devils at the EPA went further down the road the industry wanted and withdrew its rule completely.

So please, don't tell me that the EPA is a regulating everyone out of business. If anything, the EPA isn't taking its job of protecting the environment seriously enough.