Sen. Grassley ridicules wave of EPA farm regulation, but isn't sure how to stop it
March 31, 2009
Iowa Senator Charles Grassley is up in arms over a wave of proposed Environmental Protection Agency regulation - rules that Grassley says "defy common sense."
Among the controversial measures are greenhouse gas regulations, federal water permits for pesticide application, air quality and emissions regulation for use of ethanol and biodiesel fuels.
"I wonder whether or not anybody at the EPA understands the reality of agriculture. I wonder what planet these people come from," Grassley said in an interview from Washington with Iowa reporters. "I wish I could confront the faceless bureaucrats that come up with these ideas.
"Let's take a dairy cow - $175 of tax because they poop? It'll put every dairy farmer out of business."
Grassley says the EPA is also pushing for a fugitive dust requirement. "You know, you're supposed to keep the dust inside your property line. I wonder if they realize that only God decides when the wind blows or only God decides when beans get down to 13 percent so you can harvest them and whether they realize that there's dust coming out of a combine? And if the wind blows, there's no way that Chuck Grassley can keep it inside my property lines."
Grassley said he is concerned over court decisions backing up the EPA in non-point pollution issues.
"If you spray on your land, it's always been assumed that the Clean Water Bill applied to water coming out of what we call point source pollutions, not non point. Point would be sewer lines coming out of a city. Non point would be wherever it rains in the face of this earth, there's runoff. That's non point," Grassley says.
"And so it rains five inches on the Grassley farm and some pesticide runs off, how do I control that? Well, how do they even - since it's so ridiculous, where do they even get the authority to do it? So this court says, well, a nozzle on a sprayer is a point - a point source of pollution not some pipe coming out of the sewer.
"And so you get this ridiculous thing. If you spray, what falls on the plant, it's OK, but the stuff that falls on the ground, if it ends up in the river, it's your fault. And I just wonder if they know at EPA how you separate that?
"And so doesn't it all sound ridiculous, and the more ridiculous it sounds, the more stupid you think are the people making the recommendations. And the more you think they just really can't mean it, but they do mean it. So we've got to fight it."
Grassley said one option would be to launch a bill to change the EPA proposals - but the committee that would launch such a bill "is controlled by environmentalists that don't understand agriculture."
"The second thing is to make it sound ridiculous and, hopefully, maybe EPA backs off. You write letters to EPA telling them how stupid it is is a formal way of doing it," the senator says.
In fact, Grassley and fellow Iowa Senator Tom Harkin are among a dozen leaders who recently signed a letter of protest to the EPA calling for the agency to drop a proposal for regulations assuming that greater U.S. biofuels use would increase carbon dioxide emissions. The senators argued the data and methods for calculating such data is not adequately developed, and thus should not be used in ways making it harder for ethanol and biodiesel to meet requirements of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 for reduced carbon emissions.
As a last resort, Grassley said a rider could be attached to anappropriations bill saying that none of the funding going to the EPA could be used to enforce such rules. "Probably every appropriation bill has some language like that in it," he says. "I don't mean that it's easy to get it put in because environmentalists have a strong voice around here. And there's nothing wrong with environmentalists having a strong voice, but you want their voice and decisions to be based upon sound science."
There is no science behind the proposals on ethanol, Grassley says.
"Today, ethanol is considered environmentally positive. But if you assume that there's farmers down in Brazil that are going to plow up land just because we're using more corn up here for ethanol, then they're going to take that indirect land use into consideration because when you break up virgin land, you put carbon into the air," he said.
"And, you know, just how silly it is to think that there's people down in Brazil just sitting around waiting to see if Chuck Grassley plows up another acre of land for ethanol so that they can plow up an acre of land down there... but that's the rule that they're starting to consider."