Sunday, July 03, 2011

A huge political storm is stirring over farm dust

What is the doom of America? To borrow a mystical metaphor from an old Bob Dylan song, "The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind." And what might that mighty answer be? Farm dust, everyday rural American farm dust. That's crazy. How can farm dust determine the destiny of this great nation? Easy: outlaw farm dust. Of course, there's no way to really stop farm dust, what with all those plowed fields, grazing lands, harvesters, roundups, processing plants, pickup trucks on unpaved roads, all that dirt -- and lots of wind. But the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency can stop farms and ranches dead in their tracks with President Obama's new Coarse Particulate Matter National Ambient Air Quality Standard, which would double current rural air quality restrictions. Then watch for a few years until the last farm and the last ranch die off, still struggling to comply with an impossible rule. But would Obama really do that? Use farm dust to turn America into a food-free zone? My intuition says yes, because a few months ago EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson began repeatedly denying it. Arnold's Iron Law of American Bureaucracy: If they deny it, expect it...more

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