Bush Seeks To Exempt Huge Factory Farms From Pollution Rules

by Katherine Stapp

(IPS) NEW YORK -- An imminent amnesty deal between the factory farm industry and federal regulators epitomises the laissez-faire approach toward enforcing pollution laws of the administration of President George W Bush, critics are charging.

The consent agreement between the industry and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would exempt huge animal feeding operations, which emit toxins like ammonia and hydrogen sulphide, from meeting their obligations under the Clean Air Act for at least two years, effectively shielding them from any legal action.

In return, the companies would pay a fee of between $200 - $1,000 per farm, plus a second flat fee of $2,500, to participate in a study to monitor their emissions. Industry would select the sites to be studied, as well as designate the third-party monitors.

Factory farms generate 300 million tonnes of waste in the United States each year, 90 percent of which goes untreated. Studies of people living in the vicinity of giant farms have documented an array of health problems, including headache, runny nose, sore throat, excessive coughing, diarrhea and burning eyes.

The amnesty deal would apply to so-called CAFOs -- concentrated animal feeding operations, where large quantities of livestock or poultry are housed inside buildings or in confined feedlots.

Environmental groups say the agreement simply postpones making the industry take concrete steps to cut emissions.

"We would like to see them enforce the Clean Air Act, instead of giving industry a free pass to study the problem," said Navis Bermudez, a Washington representative with the Sierra Club, which obtained documents detailing closed-door meetings between the meat and poultry industry and the EPA last September.

"This deal would allow factory farms to essentially regulate themselves, and fails to carry out any meaningful clean-up," she told IPS.

The EPA has increasingly shifted toward what its administrator Michael Leavitt terms a "smart enforcement" approach, favouring voluntary compliance from industry over criminal or civil enforcement of pollution regulations.

Leavitt recently defended the administration's strategy. "We use enforcement to achieve the desired environmental outcomes... we make decisions on which cases to pursue and we choose them very carefully." Leavitt added that he was not interested in "running up the score on fines".

Since Bush took office, 210 EPA enforcement jobs have been eliminated, and the monthly average of violation notices fell 58 percent compared with the number issued by the administration of former President Bill Clinton. Civil penalties plummeted 45 percent, and criminal penalties dropped 34 percent.

"It's a good example of the big philosophical difference [of the Bush administration] in thinking about environmental regulation," said David McIntyre, a staff attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

"The idea that these factory farms are finally coming into accord with the law and doing what they're supposed to be doing, so they shouldn't be held accountable for not having done what they were supposed to do for years, just doesn't make sense."

In its annual report card on Bush's environmental record, released in April, the NRDC cited numerous instances of a cosy relationship between the EPA and the companies it is tasked with policing.

Industry lobbyists have been especially influential in lowering the bar for mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants, critics say.

In January, an investigation by the 'Washington Post' found that at least a dozen paragraphs in the EPA's mercury proposal were drawn word-for-word from memos sent by a law firm that represents the utility industry. Other language in the proposal was traced back to another industry report.

The revelations provoked anger among some Democrats in Congress, where Bush's "Clear Skies" initiative, a pollution plan that critics say will result in greater emissions than if the existing Clean Air Act was simply enforced, has been stalled since July 2002.

"We are deeply concerned that the EPA's rule-making process has been improperly influenced by industry at the potential cost of the health of future generations of children," wrote Representative Henry Waxman of California in a Feb. 12 letter to Leavitt.

"Congress and the American people need to know how industry lobbyists came to write a significant portion of an EPA rule-making proposal."

Administration changes to a key component of the Clean Air Act called the "new source review", which forces aging power plants and factories to install cutting-edge pollution control technology when they increase their output, were also based in part on industry documents, says the NRDC report, titled 'Rewriting the Rules'.

Under the changes, the EPA estimates that as many as 50 percent fewer facilities would be required to install modern air pollution controls.

Clear the Air, a Washington-based environmental group, issued a report Wednesday revealing that power plant emissions contribute to the premature deaths of nearly 24,000 people a year and cause more than 38,000 heart attacks. It also asserted that the Clear Skies initiative would allow 4,000 preventable early deaths each year compared with simply enforcing current law.

Several high-ranking EPA officials -- including the directors of air enforcement and civil enforcement and the acting head of the office of enforcement and compliance assurance -- have resigned in the last two years, citing laxity in pursuing polluters as the main reason for their departures from the agency.

At least one EPA employee has also resigned over the new factory farm deal, in which lobbyists for the industry were permitted to develop legal language for the monitoring program, and even provided the PowerPoint slides used by agency officials in presenting its plans.

"Industry has always asked for the world," said McIntyre. "For the first time, they're getting it."