Okay, this is the full text of the
American Clean Energy And Security Act of 2009.
Why is it that when I try searching for "bovine," "cow," "flatulence," "flatulent," "dairy," or "farmer," I get zero results? Yeah, something smells, but I am going to look in the direction of the writer of that piece. A real writer would have provided a link to the relevant part of the Act, but she doesn't provide any. But then, she is a journalism major who has the gall to say, "President Obama has the economic sense of a six-year-old child." I'm really not surprised that this would pass as "journalism" at townhall.com. She'll have a bright future at Faux News!
Cow belches & farts exempt from EPA regs The EPA under President Barack Obama has said it has no plans to regulate the gas, even though the agency recently included methane among six greenhouse gases it believes are endangering human health and welfare.
The message circulating in Internet chat rooms, the halls of Congress and farm co-ops had America's farms facing financial ruin if the EPA required them to purchase air-pollution permits like power plants and factories do. The cost of those permits amounted to a cow tax, farm groups argued.
"It really has taken on a life of its own," said Rick Krause, a lobbyist with the American Farm Bureau Federation, which coined the term cow tax and spread it to farmers across the country. "This is something that people understand. All that we have to say is that (cows) are the next step with these proposed permit fees. And people are still talking about it."
Administration officials and House Democratic leaders have tried to assure farm groups that they have no intention of regulating cows. That effort, however, has done little to ease the concern of farmers and their advocates in Congress about the toll that regulating greenhouse gases will have on agriculture.
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EPA administrator Lisa Jackson has called rumors of the cow tax "ridiculous notions" and a "distraction."
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The origins of the cow tax can be traced to last July, when President George W. Bush's EPA released documents outlining how the Clean Air Act could regulate greenhouse gases.
Even though the Bush administration had no intention of using the law, farm groups seized on a single paragraph deep in the comments from various federal agencies. The Agriculture Department warned that if EPA decided to regulate agricultural sources of greenhouse gases, numerous farms would face costly and time-consuming process to acquire permits for barnyard burping.
The Farm Bureau quickly did the math and figured farms would have to pay about $175 for each dairy cow, $87.50 per head of beef cattle and $20 for each hog to purchase permits for emissions.
The cow tax was born.
Taxing Flatulence
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