The website Politico reports:
Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson is raising a stink over manure.
Fed up with manure runoff from farms polluting his state’s waterways, Edmondson is suing a batch of upstream poultry farms, including several owned by Tyson Foods, which he says have been irresponsible with their waste management and should be prosecuted under the Superfund law.
The suit, which has been ongoing since 2005, has set off a panic in the agriculture community and a lobbying frenzy on Capitol Hill, where many fear the case will open the door for other large-scale or factory farms to be penalized with hefty pollution taxes.
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Nearly identical pieces of the legislation have been introduced by agriculture committee members Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) and Rep. Collin Peterson (D-Minn.), who both have the same mission: protecting industrial farms from being named as environmental hazards or Superfund sites.
The bill, which would keep large manure producers from being prosecuted under Superfund, has already won bipartisan support and has more than 150 co-sponsors in the House and about 25 sponsors in the Senate — many, like Rep. Ralph Hall (R-Texas), from farming-intensive states.
This has not been covered much in the news but obviously is a major environmental battle brewing in Congress--and one that crosses party lines. In reality, of course, if anyone in Washington still believed in federalism (most don't), they would conclude that exempting industrial-farm manure from CERCLA ("Superfund") does not mean that such manure would necessarily go unregulated.
After all, affected States could still prosecute polluters under States' own environmental laws. Then again, that would mean recognizing that the federal government does not necessarily need to control everything. What a novel concept.
