Dear Newt: There Is No EPA War On Dust

 

During Sunday morning’s NBC News/Facebook debate in Concord, New Hampshire, former Republican front-runner Newt Gingrich picked a fight with a familiar boogeyman—the Environmental Protection Agency. The fact that the EPA is a prime target for the 2012 GOP field is no real surprise, but Gingrich has zeroed in on a particularly obscure subject: The EPA’s “dust regulation.”

Gingrich scored some laughs from the audience on Sunday by knocking the inanities of the EPA’s effort to regulate dust. It is “an absurdity” that a government agency should be so uptight about dust in Iowa, the former House speaker said, as he explained how the regulation would hurt the families and workers of the Hawkeye State.

This issue has been in Gingrich’s sights for some time. In Atlantic, Iowa before the state’s caucuses last week, he slammed the EPA as a “job-killing dictatorial bureaucracy” and invoked the name of one of Iowa’s top Republicans to make his case against the big-government War on Dust:

Many of you have probably followed Sen. [Chuck] Grassley’s fight for the dust regulations…The EPA technically has the ability to regulate ‘particulate matter,’ as part of the Clean Air Bill, which I don’t think any congressman thought of as ‘dust.’ But of course it’s now interpreted to include dust. If you were to plow on a windy day, and some of the dirt was carried by the wind into your neighbor’s field, you would be polluting your neighbor’s field with your dirt. Now, since your neighbor’s field is exactly the same geologic dirt as your field, it’s implausible that you would actually be hurting it.

At least he’s been consistent on this. Too bad what was wrong then is still wrong now. The heart of the EPA-is-out-to-micromanage-America’s-dust hysteria is based almost entirely on a poor interpretation of language and law. The Des Moines Register did their share of debunking on the matter, and my colleague Tim Murphy did the same:

[T]he EPA does not regulate dust as we might think of it, at least not the kind of dust you’d laugh at if a candidate brought it up in a speech. Instead, they go after “particulate matter,” which, although it just sounds like a euphemism for dust, is actually a euphemism for “things that will produce uneconomic health and environmental effects if you breathe too much of them.” Soot would be the best example (and incidentally, something the EPA has been pretty lax about), or coal dust. Contra Gingrich’s assertion that the agency had taken the initiative to looking into regulating dirt, the EPA was required by law to review its standards on particulate matter to make sure that it was keeping up with the science. That was interpreted by the agriculture industry as a sign that new regulations were imminent, but EPA chief Lisa Jackson told Congress she had “no plans” to regulate dust, and, sure enough, no new regulations were issued.

For Gingrich, denouncing the EPA’s alleged jihad on dust and dirt might be an easy applause line, like, say, threatening to purge federal courts. But that’s really all it is.

 

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate