look out! Here comes the big bad E.P.A.
Posted on 02/26/2015 1:59:07 PM PST by E. Pluribus Unum
RALEIGH — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has decided to investigate whether lenient regulation by North Carolina’s environmental agency of industrial hog operations harmed minority neighbors.
The Waterkeeper Alliance and other groups released an EPA letter Wednesday stating that the federal agency will launch a civil rights investigation of North Carolina’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources. The groups had asked the EPA last fall to investigate whether state officials would have been tougher on 2,000 North Carolina swine operations raising 10 million hogs if the neighbors were not black, Hispanic or American Indian.
“What they’re looking at is whether or not living in proximity to the facilities is harmful and whether or not that harm disproportionately impacts” minorities, said Marianne Engelman Lado, an attorney for the advocacy group Earthjustice, representing the complaining groups. “The community has for generations at this point, for decades, been crying for more protection from the waste.”
The EPA letter dated Feb. 20 said its decision to investigate doesn’t suggest it has found evidence backing the complaint.
“We understand that the EPA has agreed to review the complaint and will provide any information the agency needs during that process,” DENR spokesman Drew Elliot said in an emailed statement.
EPA said in a statement that its Office of Civil Rights is trying to resolve the complaint informally while it investigates the state agency.
Neighbors of industrial-scale hog farms have complained for decades that collecting manure in cesspools before spraying them onto farm fields generates unbearable smells and harms health.
EPA said it needs more information before it decides whether to investigate a second allegation — whether North Carolina’s DENR failed to enforce its regulatory or statutory requirements for swine farms.
The EPA complaint is part of a raft of efforts by environmentalists, community groups, and local governments from Washington state to Iowa and North Carolina pressuring the livestock industry to change its methods. The arguments are based on studies that increasingly show the impact phosphorous, nitrate and bacteria from fertilizer and accumulated manure have on lakes and rivers and find that air pollution related to livestock operations may be harmful to respiratory health.
The activism comes decades after hog and other livestock operators joined other types of farm producers in consolidating. For example, the hog industry had more than 200,000 farms in the early 1990s, a number that fell to about 21,600 by 2012.
The one meat that’s still affordable is pork. So the left’s gotta do something about that.
I think the drafters of the U.S. Constitution would have a snort or two about the Fed’s getting involved with smelly farms.
They gotta do sumpin to make the muzzies happy donch know...
I’ve investigated the EPA, establish during the Nixon Administration, and have found that it has no constitutional authority to exist.
The other white meat is racissss.
IslamoNazi in chief about to close down piggeries.
Makes sense
Signing the EPA into law turns out to be the biggest crime of Nixon’s presidency.
Well there’s three very smelly “farms” in D.C....
North Carolina needs to invoke the Sovereignty of the Tenth Amendment and arrest any fed EPA pukes that enter the state!
Especially all people with the middle name Hussein.
Might even have been directed by executive order.
look out! Here comes the big bad E.P.A.
Does this mean there can be such a thing as an environmental hate crime?
Pray tell, WHY does the environmental extortion agency have an “office of civil right”?
Your tax dollars at work.
So I guess the EPA has decided they have not ruined enough livelihoods and made things painful and unpleasant for enough ordinary citizens. What a shock.
“The activism comes decades after hog and other livestock operators joined other types of farm producers in consolidating. For example, the hog industry had more than 200,000 farms in the early 1990s, a number that fell to about 21,600 by 2012.”
A little background.
https://web.duke.edu/mms190/hogfarming/
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