The EPA: Selling Out the Environment

The environmental laws that are already on the books are largely toothless, and to make matters worse, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) often fails to enforce the laws or leaves enforcement up to the states. Like all government agencies, the EPA is increasingly staffed with people who have close ties to the factory-farm industry or intend to get industry jobs after they leave the public sector. In an expression of gratitude to all its factory-farm industry donors, the Bush administration has also put pressure on EPA officials not to fully enforce environmental laws and to create new laws that benefit the farmed-animal industry.

Lack of Enforcement

Rather than taking action against factory farms that are polluting the environment, the EPA has a hands-off policy that has put the polluters in charge of monitoring and controlling pollution. Former EPA attorney Michele Merkel, who currently works with the Washington, D.C.-based Environmental Integrity Project, told reporters that the agency "hasn't initiated one investigation [into factory-farm pollution] in four years. They're not doing anything."⁴⁶

Enforcement of federal environmental laws is largely left up to the states, but many states fail to enforce these laws because local governments are already overburdened and don’t have the time, money, and willingness to crack down on factory farmers who often have a lot of sway in local politics. Only half of states claim to require that large factory farms comply with the EPA’s air-quality standards, and fewer than 10 states ever bother to enforce EPA regulations on toxic gases emitted from factory farms.⁴⁷ Sierra Club attorney Barclay Rogers explains that since neither the EPA nor the states are doing their part to enforce the law, "there are essentially no pollution controls on these [factory-farming] operations whatsoever. The environment is being wrecked by these operations."⁴⁸

In 2006, the largest meat, egg, and dairy products corporations started a front group, cynically named "Farmers for Clean Air and Water." The goal of the front group is to use high-priced lobbyists and enormous campaign contributions to persuade politicians and the EPA to keep massive pollution-causing factory farms from having to comply with some of our nation's most important public health and environmental protection laws. So far, this kind of pressure by these giant industries has been extremely successful.⁴⁹

New Pro-Industry Policies

In addition to failing to enforce the rules it already has, the EPA has also recently made new regulations that benefit the meat, dairy, and egg industries. In 2003, for example, the EPA issued a rule that would have allowed factory farms to apply animal excrement to fields (where it would eventually run off into surrounding waterways) without any government oversight. The Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Waterkeeper Alliance filed a lawsuit to have the rule overturned, and in early 2005, the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York held that the EPA's rule did indeed violate the Clean Water Act. According to a summary of the ruling by public interest groups, the court found that the EPA allowed factory farms to avoid satisfying water-quality standards by failing to require that they control the amount of pathogens in their water waste.⁵⁰

A new EPA plan announced in January 2006 will grant factory farms immunity from the federal Clean Air Act if they agree to monitor their own pollution and submit the data to the EPA. The factory farms will not be fined for breaking environmental laws as long as they are participating in the study—in other words, the EPA is giving some factory farms a free pass to pollute as much as they want without fear of punishment. Ed Hopkins of the Sierra Club explains, “The largest corporations in the livestock industry are being let off the hook in exchange for agreeing to ‘study’ their air pollution and paying small fees.” ⁵¹ Industry lawyer Richard Schwartz calls the new plan “a very cheap insurance policy.” ⁵²

This new pollution amnesty plan is the result of the close relationship between EPA officials and meat industry lobbyists. According to a report in The Chicago Tribune, "Internal EPA documents show that the proposed program to monitor air pollution at livestock farm—a contentious topic in rural America—was largely conceived and heavily influenced by lobbyists for the livestock industry."⁵³ Some EPA officials even used a slide show produced by meat industry lobbyists in their presentations about the new plan.⁵⁴ When reporters asked Sierra Club attorney Barclay Rogers about the slide show, he responded: "That is being co-opted to the greatest extent the government can be. They are putting words in their mouth."⁵⁵ Timothy Jones, an EPA attorney who decided to use the meat industry slide show in EPA presentations, left the EPA after he was given a job with meat industry giant Tyson Foods.⁵⁶

The EPA has also come under fire recently for other policy changes that benefit polluters at the expense of the environment and public health. For example, a new EPA rule will allow some power plants to continue to release mercury into the environment if other plants reduce their mercury emissions to balance out the first plant. Environmentalists and scientists warn that this pollution points swapping system could lead to “hot spots” around plants that don't cut emissions.⁵⁷ Mercury seeps into our waterways and builds up in the bodies of fish, and people who eat the fish can suffer from a range of serious illnesses.

As a testament to how things work in Washington, shortly after the EPA announced this relaxed mercury standard, one of the corporations that would benefit greatly from the change hired a senior EPA official.⁵⁸ John Walke, director of the Clean Air Project at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told reporters, "Industry bought and paid for the Bush administration's assault on our clean air protections, so it's fitting that one of the nation's biggest polluters should reward this EPA official by putting him on its payroll."⁵⁹

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