On the Monday after New Year’s we look ahead to a few of the topics to watch in 2015. This week in CIB.
Judicial Watch: What’s Happened to the Stink Over Hog Stench?
What’s happened over the two decades since passage of new rules on factory-style hog farms helped to halt the opening of new swine CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) in North Carolina?
According to hundreds of plaintiffs in dozens of lawsuits now pending in federal court, not nearly enough. Claimantsassert that the stench of existing open-pit hog lagoons, sprayfields, and tightly-packed growing houses continues to sicken them and slash their property values.
Now, says the article from the Charlotte Observer’s environmental reporter Bruce Henderson, new litigation is pending to attempt to force progress on the issue. In addition to the private lawsuits against one major pork producer (Murphy-Brown LLC), advocacy groups have filed an environmental justice claim against the Environmental Protection Agency for lax standards.
Perhaps in 2015 the courts will bring the first fresh air in decades to the problem of air pollution from hog farms in our state. It’s a worthwhile topic to watch.
Washington Watch: New Threats from the House
With both chambers of Congress in the hands of actively anti-environmental leadership for the next two years, what was once largely irrelevant sound and fury from the US House is now cause for new concern. Conservationists can no longer count on help from the Senate to bury the worst outrages moving forward from the larger chamber.
Thus, it’s noteworthy to observe that one of the House’s most relevant committees has been reorganized under hostile new leadership. That committee is the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. This is the board tasked with peering into the doings of agencies within the executive branch, in theory to determine whether they’re addressing issues according to standing law and proper procedure. Signals from that committee’s new leadership make clear that it is being especially charged with going after pro-environmental initiatives from the Obama Administration.
The Oversight committee will have a special subcommittee set up to focus on attempting to delay, undermine, and block positive regulatory initiatives (and existing programs) within the Environmental Protection Agency and other natural resource management agencies. Since those executive branch agencies are likely to be the only game in town for environmental progress from Washington over the next two years, this is a meaningful threat to be watched.
See here for names and more details.
Around the State: Power in the Wind?
Will 2015 be the year that wind generation finally starts to join solar energy as a real factor in the production of renewable energy in our state?
We see increasing wind energy generation in the western states of the United States, and we already know that offshore wind is a huge potential source of power along the mid-Atlantic coast (including North Carolina). Now, according to a story in the Fayetteville Observer, new developments in wind power technology may make wind turbine farms on the coastal plains of our state a more practical alternative as well.
Scientists with the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory say that wind turbines keep getting more efficient. One Florida-based company is studying a potential site in Hoke County near the South Carolina border now. More details can be found here.
That’s our report for this week.
