I’m here to back the nomination of Lee Zeldin of New York to be Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.
My vote will be yes in a few hours from now.
The EPA plays a very important regulatory role in the United States.
Not only does it regulate pollution like many Americans already know, but it also regulates many areas that impact Americans every day.
As many farmers in Iowa know, the previous administration’s EPA put out a regulation that would overregulate, what we know in this town as, Waters of the United States, or as the leader just put it, WOTUS.
This would have regulated 96 percent of the land in the state of Iowa, and would subject that land to federal water regulations.
It would be almost impossible to do regular farming operations without wondering whether you were violating some regulation.
The EPA also oversees issues critical to agriculture, such as the approval and labeling of pesticides and other important tools for farmers.
The EPA also oversees the Renewable Fuel Standard and protects its integrity.
The Renewable Fuel Standard provides an important framework for biofuels, which benefits farmers by sustaining an additional market for their commodities.
In Iowa, because we’re number one in the production of ethanol, we like to say it’s good for agriculture, it’s good for good paying jobs in rural America that we’d never have without the ethanol industry, it’s good for the environment because it’s clean burning and it’s good for our national security because of less reliance on foreign sources of energy.
Everything about biofuels is good, good, good. There’s not a negative you can come up with about them.
In our meeting earlier this month in my office, Mr. Zeldin came there, I impressed upon him the far-reaching impact that his agency has over the lives of farmers and all Americans.
Mr. Zeldin assured me that he would be responsive to Congress, and that he would provide ample time to provide transparency and market stability before regulations from his agency are promulgated.
Mr. Zeldin’s assurance about making decisions on time is important because previously the Required Volume Obligations dealing with biofuels and small refinery exemptions had not been finalized in time to make the RVOs whole.
This leads to less ethanol blending, which goes against President Trump’s commitment to farmers and the ethanol industry, which Mr. Zeldin assured me, he supports.
For the sake of Iowa farmers, I’m hopeful that Mr. Zeldin stays true to his word.
Just in case you wonder whether or not we have anything to fear from EPA in agriculture, I want to give you a little history, that is now history.
It just shows you how this town is an island surrounded by reality… a few years ago, [EPA] was going to promote a rule that you’d say is just “unbelievable,” you’d say, “you’ve got to be telling us a story, because they wouldn’t be proposing this rule.”
It was called the Fugitive Dust Rule.
The theory of the EPA’s Fugitive Dust Rule is that, if you’re farming and you create dust during normal operations – plowing, discing, planting, spraying, whatever it might be, combining the harvest – you’re supposed to keep that dust within your property lines.
That’s what EPA tried to promulgate.
In fact, I think one time we thought we had it killed and a couple years later it came up again.
Now, I think it’s dead forever because it doesn’t meet the commonsense test – that a farmer working his fields can keep the dust within his property lines.
I tried to explain it to EPA administrators this way – in regard to the harvesting of soybeans, which leaves a lot of dust – I said, “When soybeans are 13 percent moisture, it’s very necessary that you very quickly harvest them because at 13 percent it’s the most ideal time… only God determines when the wind blows. Whether the wind’s blowing or not, if your soybeans are at 13 percent, you got to get in there and combine them and not worry where the dust goes. You’ve got about two weeks during a harvest season to accomplish that goal.”
No kidding, that’s what the EPA was trying to do to agriculture a few years ago.
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