Hidden in the thicket of the Obama
administration’s elaborate scheme to transform the U.S. energy sector away from
fossil fuels is a section that puts American farmers squarely in Washington’s
bull’s eye.
The Clean Power Plan, the final
version of which was unveiled on August 3, 2015, is generally understood to
target emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) from coal-fired power plants in the
name of combatting climate change, formerly known as global warming. It aims to
reduce CO2 emissions from power plants by 32 percent below 2005 levels within
25 years.
But the plan is about much more than
destroying the coal industry before closing in on natural-gas producers as a
means of clearing the path for otherwise uncompetitive wind and solar power.
The White House wants to use its alleged concern for the climate as an excuse to
subject farmers to “sustainability” standards cooked up by the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA).
In an eye-opening article in the Wall Street Journal (July 11), Bruce
E. Dale, professor of chemical engineering and materials science at Michigan
State University, points out that EPA “is counting biogenetic-carbon emissions
as if they were the same as fossil-carbon emissions. They are not.” Dale
explains that agricultural products such as grains and oilseeds contain
biogenetic carbon, which comes from the atmosphere and returns to the
atmosphere when these products are consumed, “such as when human beings eat
bread and then breathe out the carbon dioxide resulting from the breakdown of
bread in the body.” Biogenetic carbon, he says, “cannot contribute to climate
change.”
“Unjustified Carbon Tax on American
Farmers”
Lane notes that EPA’s Clean Power
Plan “proposes to penalize biogenetic carbon emissions unless food processors
(bakers, brewers, grain processors) or energy producers (like utilities using seed
hulls to produce electricity) can prove that they used ‘sustainably-derived’
agricultural feedstocks.” This, he believes, will impose “an unjustified carbon
tax on American farmers.”
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.”
Regulating “Sustainability” in the
Farm Field
Whatever the case may be for fossil
fuels’ influence on the climate, EPA has willfully distorted the issue with its
plan to regulate biogenetic-carbon emissions as if it were fossil-carbon
emissions. In so doing, Lane says, EPA is now “trying to regulate
‘sustainability’ in the farm field.
The Clean Power Plan has something
in common with another EPA scheme to assert regulatory authority over millions
of acres of private land, the “Waters of the United States,” or WOTUS rule.
Under the guise of “protecting” isolated bodies of water, WOTUS would impose
federal zoning on farms and other rural properties throughout the country. Like
WOTUS, the Clean Power Plan has been stayed nationwide by a federal court
pending the outcome of numerous lawsuits against EPA.
Neither rule was enacted by
Congress; both are products of Washington’s sprawling bureaucracy. Both show
the threat the administrative regulatory state poses to liberty and prosperity.
http://www.cfact.org/2016/07/15/farmers-under-the-gun-in-obama-clean-power-plan/?utm_source=CFACT%20Updates &utm_campaign=e550cef7f0-EPA_vs_farmers7_19_2016
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