Government Energy Policy, Business and Technology

EPA's Failure to Regulate Factory Farm Pollution Draws New Scrutiny

Inside Climate News: The Environmental Protection Agency's inspector general is examining the agency's failure to adequately measure potentially toxic air emissions from the nation's factory farms, a lapse that environmental groups say has allowed livestock operations to spew air pollution without government oversight for more than a decade.

Air emissions from livestock facilities—including larger farms known as concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs—can fall under three separate federal laws if the pollution they emit hits certain thresholds. But the government and livestock industry have struggled to agree on accurate ways of measuring those emissions, so livestock facilities have largely escaped government scrutiny.

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