Is the EPA leadership incompetent or malicious?
The agency's steady stream of oversights, lapses, and rotten decisions -- which I tried to come to grips with here -- demands a reckoning. The answer appears to be a kind of toxic mix of the two: a malicious desire to please industry interests over public ones, leavened by a dose of sheer idiocy.
The GAO has come out with a report confirming what everyone who has ever been near a factory animal farm (aka, a concentrated animal feedlot operation, or CAFO): the EPA has utterly failed to protect the public from pollution from the industrial-meat industry.
The GAO seems genuinely shocked at the scale of the problem:
The amount of manure generated by large farms that raise animals depends on the type and number of animals raised, but large operations can produce more than 1.6 million tons of manure a year.
Some large farms that raise animals can generate more raw waste than the populations of some U.S. cities produce annually.
Full Story: http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/9/24/72239/6984?source=food
