Trump’s EPA Will Abandon Efforts to Limit Air Pollution From Factory Farms
This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The Environmental Protection Agency late last week announced it would end a 20-plus-year effort to develop methods to monitor air pollution from factory farms, effectively shuttering the agency’s stop-and-start attempts to regulate the potentially pollutant-spewing…
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has announced it will abandon efforts to limit air pollution from factory farms, effectively ending its 20-year attempt to regulate emissions from these facilities under the Clean Air Act. The decision, announced just days before the midterm elections, is seen as a victory for the farming community, which is a key constituency for the Republican Party.
Factory farms, which house tens of thousands of animals in one place, emit a range of pollutants including fine particulate matter, ammonia, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, and volatile organic compounds. These emissions contribute to a toxic mix and have been linked to approximately 12,700 deaths in the United States annually.
Despite being required to obtain permits and report emissions under the Clean Air Act and related laws, factory farms have been granted amnesty from legal action for over 20 years through a deal with the EPA and the livestock industry. This arrangement, known as the Air Consent Agreement, was implemented in the early 2000s after the EPA struggled to develop tools to measure emissions from these facilities.
However, the EPA has failed to produce any air "emissions estimating methodologies" since the agreement's adoption, and the Trump administration has further dismantled reporting requirements for factory farms to report air pollutants.
Brief written by urgent.news from Mother Jones's own syndicated text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
