Wednesday, February 02, 2011

Spilled Milk

A previous post regarding the EPA regulating milk spillages seems to have had some errors (as astutely pointed out by Kelly, our Missionary to the Frozen, Northern Wastelands), so it's been removed. You can see the Thomas Sowell article it came from here.

Over at that link, commenter diehard raises the same objections as did Kelly. I'm very disappointed in Mr. Sowell and will read his articles with a rather jaundiced eye from now on.

7 comments:

Foxfier said...

Could you say what it is that is making you jaundiced?

Not sure why this is only making popular news now-- it's half a year old, was all over the ag news last summer.

Quote:
Today, U.S. Senator Charles E. Schumer released a letter to Lisa Jackson, Administrator of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), urging the agency to exempt dairy farmers from provisions of the Clean Water Act that could require them to develop and implement plans to handle a milk spill – the same provision that requires oil companies to develop plans to deal with oil spills.The EPA claims the authority to require such spill prevention plans because milk contains animal fat – an oil – but Schumer said that Congress meant for these regulations to apply to toxic substances and companies like ExxonMobil and BP, and to oil, not a 75-cow dairy farm and milk. The current administration has been considering a rule exempting farmers from these requirements since January of 2009 but has not yet acted to finalize the ruling.

The EPA is regulating milk as an oil, because that's the only way they could broaden their reach.

From a quick search on line, it seems that milk trucks at the small end are about 10,000 gallons, the size at which spill plans are required.

Foxfier said...

Another letter, that's not from Chucky.

K T Cat said...

So why didn't anyone over at the NR site mention this? Or did I miss it?

Foxfier said...

...You're wondering why nobody has responded to some troll in NRO comments when he "proves" that an article is wrong by linking to a rumor?

An OLD rumor? When it's false?

The guy is like 80 and writes articles, not blog posts. Even I don't go diving into NRO's comments, it's like reading youtube comments with slightly better spelling.

tim eisele said...

I have just one question: who says a spill prevention plan has to be onerous? I have had a number of occasions where the government required a hazardous materials containment plan as a matter of course, and I wasn't working with anything hazardous, so it was sufficient to have a sheet of paper that said "Spills are non-hazardous material, and will be disposed of in the municipal waste-disposal system" (or words to that effect). And these "plans" were accepted. All they really wanted was some assurance that I'd given some passing thought to the problem.

And on the dairy farm that I grew up on, we *had* a spill containment plan. It was, "Design the milking parlor so that any spills, milk or otherwise, are diverted to the manure runoff lagoon. The lagoon is a dug impoundment more than 500 feet from any river or potable water supply, where all liquid organic wastes can decompose prior to being spread onto fields as fertilizer". Bam, done. What's the big deal?

K T Cat said...

Yeah, I just didn't feel comfortable with this one and have been burned by conservative pundits who I followed in the past. (I'm talking to you, Hugh Hewitt.)

Not all who disagree with you are trolls and not all who support you avoid demagoguery.

Foxfier said...

Tim-
that would be a "self-certified" type, and they're classifying the butterfat as being the same as petroleum oil for this rule. As the rules stand right now, a tank the size of (in my insufficiently researched to brag about but probable) a single milk truck will need a certified spill plan that's more along the lines of what your gas station has.

Not all who disagree with you are trolls and not all who support you avoid demagoguery.

No, but if someone has only an old rumor as their proof, posts six times personally insulting other posters, has a probable sock-puppet and is personally insulting to an 80 year old man that wrote an article instead of a blog post, it's a safe bet he's a troll.

The answer to having questions about a pundit isn't to assume that they're lying, it's to try to find more info.

You KNOW headlines lie, and you know how random people on the internet aren't the best source. Don't let what someone else did make you blacken the name of any writer that's accused of anything.