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.
Jackson began her “myth buster” denial campaign during her March 10 hearing testimony before the House Agriculture Committee: “We have no plans to expand regulation of dust from farms.”
Nobody on the committee had asked her about that. But what she said next riveted the committee’s attention:
“Let me be clear. The Clean Air Act passed by Congress mandates that the agency routinely review the science of various pollutants, including particulate matter, which is directly responsible for heart attacks and premature deaths.
“EPA’s independent science panel is currently reviewing that science, and, at my direction, EPA staff is conducting meetings to engage with and listen to farmers and ranchers well before we even propose any rule.”
If that sounds like a threat, it is. Farmers and ranchers saw it instantly. When I called their farm bureaus and cattle associations, I quickly found that “farm dust” was the new rural American cuss word.
Jackson’s threat also stirred 101 members of the House of Representatives to send her a letter politely telling her to back off on farm dust.
Jackson must have realized that damage control was in order, because in April she and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack hit the road with a dog-and-pony show in the important farm state (and early primary state) of Iowa “to promote better communication between EPA and U.S. agriculture.”
There, in Prairie City, Jackson reassured the voters with a classic bureaucratic weasel word: “Right now, folks have nothing to worry about with respect to dust.” Nobody asked, “When, then?”
While Jackson and Vilsack “busted myths” in Iowa, Rep. Kristi Noem, R-S.D., took no chances in Washington, and introduced her Farm Dust Regulation Prevention Act, with 74 bipartisan co-sponsors.
If it becomes law, Noem’s proposal would stop agencies from regulating farm dust for one year (when it could be extended).
Sensing the growing anger on America’s farms and ranches, Obama signed an executive order three weeks ago creating the White House Rural Council, consisting of 25 Cabinet and agency heads and chaired by the secretary of agriculture. Its mission, Obama wrote, is “to coordinate my administration’s engagement with rural communities.”
Obama’s insulting We-Love-Country-Hicks gesture appears to be backfiring. Instead of misdirecting attention away from the catastrophe that EPA’s farm dust regulation would bring, it has sharply focused the debate on Obama’s disdain for rural Americans. And it may be encouraging voters to make America an Obama-Free Zone in 2012.
Examiner Columnist Ron Arnold is executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise.
