Factory Farms No Longer Have to Report Their Air Emissions. That’s Bad News for the Climate.
The experience of living near large-scale livestock operations: unable to use their porch or land on certain days, keeping windows closed, and worrying constantly about long-term health consequences.
LEAH DOUGLAS: ‘Lisa Inzerillo wonders how much longer she and her husband can tolerate living across the street from six chicken barns, one of the many concentrated animal farming operations (CAFOs) that make the area the poultry production epicenter of Maryland’s Delmarva peninsula… “At night, you see the dust from these fans,” she says. That’s fecal matter, that’s feathers, god knows what else. And if you’re seeing it, you’re breathing it”… The experience of living near large-scale livestock operations: unable to use their porch or land on certain days, keeping windows closed, and worrying constantly about long-term health consequences. Until recently, though, they could at least be assured that in the case of a major emission of hazardous waste, farm operators would be required by law to notify state and federal responders.
But in March, Congress added the Fair Agricultural Reporting Method (FARM) Act, which exempts farms from reporting air emissions under CERCLA, to its appropriations bill. And in November, Trump’s EPA issued proposed rules to exempt those same operations from air emissions reporting under the EPCRA. The agency’s public-comment period on the new rules ended December 14. In response, a coalition of national and local advocacy groups—including Food & Water Watch, the Humane Society, Animal Legal Defense Fund, and North Carolina’s Rural Empowerment Association for Community Help—is suing the EPA. Advocates say these exemptions only serve the biggest farms and endanger community health and the environment…
These latest moves to exempt farms from reporting requirements follow a decade of push and pull between the livestock industry and community advocates. In 2008, at the tail end of the second Bush administration, the EPA issued its first EPCRA and CERCLA reporting exemption for farms. The exemption had been prompted by lobbying from the National Chicken Council, the National Turkey Federation, and the US Poultry & Egg Association. At the time, the EPA defended its decision by saying that “reports are unnecessary because, in most cases, a federal response is impractical and unlikely.” But the exemption was overturned by the court of appeals for the District of Columbia in April 2017, which said that “reports aren’t nearly as useless as the EPA makes them out to be”.’ SOURCE…
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