278 The Environmental Debate
in this case CO2 emission reductions at power
plants, across the country. In fact, the emission
guidelines reflect strategies, technologies and
approaches already in widespread use by power
companies and states.
Source: http://www.gpo.gov/ “Rules and Regulations,” Federal
Register, Vol. 80, No. 205 Washington D.C. GPO (October
23, 2015), pp. 64662-64.required by this rule can be achieved without
compromising continued reliable, affordable
electricity, this final rule fully accounts for the
critical service utilities provide. As with past
rules under CAA section 111, this rule relies on
proven technologies and measures to set achiev-
able emission performance rates that will lead
to cost-effective pollutant emission reductions,
Document 183: Richard Manning on Agriculture Policy and
Undrinkable Water (2016)Federal farm subsidies are intertwined with government policies on a broad range of issues from energy and
biofuels to land use and water pollution. Subsidies encourage farmers to grow enormous amounts of corn
for making biofuels as well as corn syrup and soybeans for the production of soybean oil, a staple element of
packaged foods.William Stowe’s office sits near the confluence
of the Raccoon and Des Moines Rivers, which
were laid down by the Des Moines Lobe of the
Wisconsin glaciation more than 12,000 years
ago. The office was built there to superintend
the piping and delivery of river water to half
a million customers of the Des Moines Water
Works. Stowe is the head of the organization.
He trained as both an engineer and a lawyer, and
lately has needed the latter set of skills. His util-
ity has sued the county operators of drainage
districts in rural Iowa in a case that is pending
in federal court. Environmentalists nationwide
view the case as a bellwether; it may well pro-
duce the legal precedent they need to solve a
plague of continental scale. Many Iowans view
the dispute as a battle between the city and the
country; they see Stowe as a pariah.
“We have had death threats,” he says. “We’re
the ‘radicals.’ We’re the ‘revolutionaries’ who
are declaring war on rural Iowa. In reality we are
protecting public health, and we’re protecting
the economic viability of our consumers.”
The problem is simple enough. Rain falls
on Iowa pure and clean, but it arrives at Stowe’s
intake pipes a few hours later sufficiently pol-
luted to violate federal standards for drinking
water. Farmers have been raising corn and hogs
in Iowa, and the people of Des Moines have been
drinking river water, ever since the Civil War, but
only in the past decade or two have the nitrogen
fertilizers from industrial agriculture rendered
that water undrinkable.
Under the current reading of the relevant
federal law [see Document 116], pollution from
a factory pipe is called “point source” and is
regulated. If a factory or municipal sewage-
treatment plant sends concentrated nitrates and
phosphorus down a discharge pipe to a river, the
feds will put a stop to it. Runoff from a farm’s
field, “nonpoint source,” is not regulated at all.
Nationwide, any river or stream that wends
through farm country suffers pollution to the
point of death, but in the Upper Midwest, the
plague is nearly total. Agricultural fertilizers
traveling from the Corn Belt down the Missis-
sippi River have killed a Connecticut-size stretch
of the Gulf of Mexico that is now called the
Dead Zone. Iowa occupies less than 5 percent of
the land in the Mississippi basin, but it contrib-
utes 25 percent of the nitrate pollution respon-
sible for the Dead Zone, almost all of which is
attributable to farming.
In August 2014, Corn Belt fertilizer pollu-
tion led to a toxic algal bloom that poisoned
the water supply of Toledo. John Kasich, Ohio’s