Are Republicans crazy for wanting to expressly EPA from regulating farm dust?
Jarret Stepman writes in Human Events:
Rep. Ed Markey (D.-Mass.) compared [the House GOP bill to bar EPA from regulating farm dust] to an Internet hoax spread to gin up anger about a fake e-mail tax increase, and then compared it to a bill regulating fairy dust.
“Just like the e-mail tax hoax, there is no plan to regulate farm dust any more than there is to regulate fairy dust. There is no attempt to accomplish that goal,” said Markey.
Although Democrats insisted that the bill was just a fantasy based on trumped-up, imaginary regulation, backers of the bill said otherwise.
Rep. John Shimkus (R.-Ill.) asked [Rep. Kristi Noem (R-S.D.)], who was on the panel of witnesses, “How many agricultural groups are in support of this bill?”
Noem answered, “Over 100.”
Shimkus then said, “Are they just crazy? They have nothing else to worry about but just the EPA?”
The draft Community Rolling Action Plan (CoRAP) for REACh [No joke!their unfortunate choice of an acronym, not mine] released 21 Oct http://echa.europa.eu/doc/reach/evaluation/corap_2011.pdf
proposes ‘for evaluation’ to be regulated a list of 91 “substances for which there is a suspicion that their use could pose a risk to human health or the environment”, including silicon dioxide (aka sand, dirt, soil).
If the EU wants to regulate it, can the EPA be far behind?
I don’t know if agriculture dust has any impacts on living in Atlanta, GA but I can think of one form of pollution the EPA could take aim at. This is gasoline-powered leaf blowers. They are commonly used in North Atlanta by yard companies paid by a large number of Atlanta citizens. They blow the yard leaves and clippings into the streets and stir up a lot of dirt that is annoying to those living in the area. The noise is unbearable, especially at 7 a.m. There are no catalytic converters on gasoline powered leaf blowers and I suspect they cause more air pollution than the 3 million cars in the Metro Atlanta area. Let EPA get on this to eliminate the leaf blowers and then the EPA workers can go back to their play pens. This will cut down on noise,pollution, and create more jobs for our illegal immigrants because they will have to use rakes or brooms to clean yards.