EPA’s appetite for control appears insatiable.
Indeed, EPA is poised to apply obscure provisions of its energy-sapping “Clean Power Plan” to impose fuzzy “sustainability” standards on farmers.
EPA now wants to count “biogenetic CO2” emissions. These emissions are not from power plants, but from agricultural products such as grains and oilseeds that contain biogenetic carbon ‚Äì carbon which comes from the atmosphere and returns to the atmosphere when these products are consumed.
These natural emissions do not increase overall atmospheric CO2 and should not be looked at as CO2 from fossil fuels. But that is exactly what the EPA plans to do.
CFACT senior policy analyst Bonner Cohen explains this latest EPA overreach at CFACT.org:
“By appointing itself the biogenetic overlord of American farmers, EPA, not for the first time, is engaging in ‘mission creep.’ It is intruding on bureaucratic territory that has traditionally belonged to the Department of Agriculture. As Brian Seasholes, a former research fellow at the Reason Foundation, pointed out in a recent email, ‘The growing reach of land-use-control laws, coupled with increasingly aggressive pressure groups looking to find regulatable things on people’s land, and the growing power of remote sensing devices (satellite and drone imagery) is a massive and growing threat to landowners.'”
The concept of “sustainability” arises from the “Earth Summit” the UN held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 (CFACT was there as a watchdog!) and the UN’s “Agenda 21” scheme that flowed from it.
In practice, this ill-defined term means giving the Green-Left whatever new control over our economy it desires. EPA should not be playing this game.
If EPA and its ideological soul mates truly cared about “sustainability,” they would support our free-market system and the science-based modern agriculture it has produced.
Instead, they seem more intent on plowing under our nation’s farmers with more junk science and unfruitful red tape.
For nature and people too.
