The EPA’s decision to regulate carbon emissions, made on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit, immediately incurred the wrath of industry. Businesses are petrified, as Iain Murray writes in The National Review online, that the agency will regulate “everything larger than a Gore-sized mansion.”
What are we to make of this fear?
There’s really no need to panic over the prospect of EPA dominance. Instead, industry should take the hint that’s it high time to push hard for climate-change legislation. Sure, the move by the EPA to exercise regulatory authority over carbon — a power granted to it by a 2007 Supreme Court ruling — was designed to give President Obama moral leverage in Denmark. But it also serves as a presidential prod to Congress to pass a climate-change law. No matter how you feel about global warming, greenhouse-gas emissions are not going to go unregulated. I suspect Obama ultimately nudged the EPA because he wants the U.S. Congress to do the regulating. Industry should support him on this.
But here’s the less obvious point: the EPA’s wake-up call — assuming it’s listened to — will have as much impact on agriculture as it does industry. Climate-change legislation — insofar as it hinges on cap-and-trade rather than a carbon tax — could be quite advantageous to agriculture.
Cap-and-trade is a policy that aims to limit greenhouse-gas emissions by requiring certain industries to buy carbon offsets if emissions exceed the legal cap. According to the House version of the bill (and almost certainly the Senate’s), agriculture would not be capped.
This matters primarily because farmers would be in a position to sell carbon offsets. Indeed, through a wide variety of carbon sequestering techniques that are achievable in most agricultural operations — things like preserving pastureland, improving soil quality, planting trees, transitioning to no-till farming, cultivating perennials, reducing fertilizer application, etc. — agriculture could significantly counteract the increasing costs of fuel and fertilizer that cap and trade would cause while improving a much-maligned agricultural environment. It could profit while going eco-correct.
Financial projections on this score are optimistic. Fred Yoder, former president of the National Corn Growers Association, claims that, with “a properly constructed system,” farm revenues could grow by as much as $13 billion a year. A recent study undertaken by the University of Tennessee’s Bio-Based Energy Analysis Group (and released in November by the 25x’25 Carbon Work Group) found that, even with the increased energy costs, farmers would see positive net returns on all major crops.
Commenting on these findings, Bart Ruth, chairman of 25x’25, explained, “The study has found that income from offsets and from market revenues is higher than any potential increase in input cost, including energy and fertilizer, if cap-and-trade is done right.”
If it’s done right. Agricultural interests would be well served to focus on this caveat as the Senate churns away at a bill. I don’t know a whole lot about how legislative sausage gets made, but I do know that a bill done right for agriculture will be a bill that protects cap-and-trade from EPA regulation, confirms the right of industry to buy offsets, and ensures that big agriculture will, as long as it is selling offsets, remain exempt from being capped.
The EPA’s aggressive dodge toward regulatory diktat frightens many because of the specter of unchecked power. It frightens me, however, because it threatens to deny agriculture this very real chance to do what critics have been asking it to do for decades: get greener. The EPA would not rely on cap and trade. Instead, it would rely on the Clean Air Act of 1970, thereby setting a carbon limit and fining anyone who exceeds it. Growers would not only find themselves in the same regulatory group as cars and coal-fired power plants, but they would be denied the financial incentive to become something that our farming forbears would have well understood: carbon farmers.
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Carbon offsets would not just be limited to farmers. Other environments (free-standing forests, restored wetlands) could also help to sequester carbon dioxide, and landholders in these areas would benefit, too. The Obama administration should look at ways that immediate conservation projects, such as tree plantings in the Mountain West and marsh restoration in coastal Louisiana, could be funded with income streams from carbon offset sales. This could prove a big boon for “green” stimulus initiatives in the next few years.
But only certain farmers stand to benefit from this. Others, including farmers who grow vegetables, are unlikely to profit from cap and trade.
As farmers turn to carbon markets for profits, yields will only decrease. That’s bad for people who eat, especially poor people.
And a reminder of the last time agriculture was seen as the great savior of the modern world: ethanol. That turned out to be a huge mistake.
If my car runs into a tree at 40MPH the irrefutable laws of physics that come into play will create, more likely than not, an undesirable outcome. So if there is a technology such as an air bag that exists that will lessen the detrimental outcome but vehicle manufacturers are at loath to incorporate them, then Government regulation requiring their installation is probably a good thing. Creating regulations based on scientific THEORY, however, is something else. In order for science to be, well, scientific, it must be of a questioning mercurial nature. Due to a never ending quest for deeper understanding theories, some long-held, that were true today are are no longer so. You know what they are so I won’t bore you with reiterating them. Science’s impartiality to “common wisdom” prevents us from living in the dark ages and is absolutely necessary for society to advance. But when governmental regulations are created based on scientific theory it brings life to stagnation through self-interest. Evidence of this can already be seen in the documents procured via the climate gate scandal. If people allow legislators to enact laws based on scientific possibilities laws will be set in stone and it will bring us into a new era of scientific unquestionability. That my friends is when the quest for deeper scientific understanding will simply stop and a new era of control will begin.
This article misses the point that the EPA’s oversight role of Carbon will be a short-lived phenomenon.
How does the EPA propose to prove that the emissions of a specific farm/ factory/ person do harm to any other? An overabundance of chemicals in the air, ground or water will usually manifest itself as a localized health crisis, such as a cancer cluster. The root cause can then be traced to a specific chemical, and a specific source. The EPA will never be able to prove a Carbon emitter did harm to a specific person or community. As a result, this concept will last until the first lawsuit, and then be gone forever.
Wasted Wealth in not a good way to go through life.
I rather like the idea of sequestering carbon as charcoal–
Take all the wood scraps and burn them in a low oxygen environment (and extract THAT energy). The remainer is almost pure carbon that is plowed into farmers fields (but not used for fuel) with beneficial effect.
Who pays for this, and how, is a problem to be resolved.
“farm revenues could grow by as much as $13 billion a year.”
…while producing fewer goods for market. So farmers get another subsidy, in returning for doing less work and providing fewer goods. How is this good for anybody??
Cap-and-trade / carbon credit schemes have one key, essential characteristic: some governmental institution will have to have authority over what industries get to expend how much energy. No matter how you slice it, this means that some govt panel will decide who produces what, and how much. We could skip the whole enviro-friendly facade, and just switch over to soviet-style five-year planned economies, where they have decades of familiarity with the top-down managment of productivity. The worst part of all of this is that the “developed” wealthy nations are using this scheme to get control over the “developing” nations: Colonialism 2.0. Want to pave roads to help your country lay down infrastructure? Better ask the UN for approval. Want to foster some mineral industry or hard-goods industry? Better ask the UN, with members from nations who do not want you to enter the market. Copenhagen made this painfully obvious that the haves are getting a tighter hold on the have-nots, restricting them to be competitive internationally with raw materials and labor, and not much else. Colonialism 2.0.