Report: EPA Can't Regulate Pollution From Livestock Ops Since It Doesn't Know How Many Farms Exist

[hatrack]

CHICAGO - The report to Congress was blunt: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had failed to regulate pollution from the nation's livestock farms , many capable of generating more waste than some cities , because it lacked information as basic as how many farms even existed.

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 , a decision they said puts the EPA right back where it started.

EDIT

http://www.philly.com/philly/wires/ap/news/nation/20120802_ap_epacantregulatelivestockfarmsitcantfind.html

[Trillo]

1. This ↓ kinda reminds me

But ranchers in some areas were outraged when they heard about the program earlier this year, and Republican lawmakers have since introduced a bill in the U.S. House to prohibit the EPA from using flyovers to enforce the Clean Water Act unless the agency has written voluntary consent, provides public notice or obtains a court order.

of the German court which held that circumcision of male infants was illegal, so German leaders have reportedly been making exceptions for folks who assert religious reasons to have their male newborns circumcised.

This is the kind of world people like Rmoney apparently thrive in, where there are exceptions to exceptions to execptions, which means loophole after loophole. At some point, one wonders where the law begins, if ever.

Personally, I find it absurd the agency can't get that information, while SC justice Scalia screams 'there is no right to privacy in the Constitution.' (that's a paraphrase at best)