I must have been under a rock somewhere and missed this entire controversy, but Pam Austin at And So It Goes In Shreveport has a piece all about how the EPA is in the process of attempting to wrap its tentacles around coarse particulate matter as an offensive substance under the Clean Air Act.

In other words, dust. They want to regulate dust on farms.

This has actually been going on since 2006, when Bush’s EPA first waded into it. But as you might imagine, the current administration is now turbocharging their efforts to get hold of the emitters of poisonous, toxic, dangerous…dust.

What does this mean? We’re not sure. If you have a dirt road on your property, are you subject to inspections and fines? Are you going to have to put tarps down on your land if the wind kicks up? The idea of the government attempting to regulate what is pretty much the most natural phenomenon under the sun just shows the absurd lengths to which a run-amok federal agency can go when not shackled to its mission.

Don’t forget that it was the EPA which completely botched the Corexit discussion during the now-thankfully resolved Macondo spill, by caving to environmentalist nuts who made the dispersant out to be the most toxic substance known to man and demanding BP stop using it and then being forced to repeatedly admit that it’s less harmful than the oil it was used on. It’s the EPA which shut down Texas’ oil refineries over a dispute with Texas’ Commission on Environmental Quality last month. It’s the EPA which has attempted to gain power for itself to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. It’s the EPA which essentially destroyed agriculture in California’s San Fernando Valley, the most fertile farmland in the world, by shutting off its water in favor of a baitfish called the Delta Smelt.

And on, and on. 

For decades conservatives have groused about the existence of federal agencies like the Departments of Education and Energy, and mused about one day being in a position to dismantle them and disperse their functions to the states. But with the current ridiculous direction being pursued by Lisa Jackson’s thoroughly incompetent and overreaching cabal at EPA, and particularly given that each state has a regulatory body which duplicates the EPA, perhaps it might be more politically advantageous to put that agency atop the target list.