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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Another subsidy for agriculture? Get freaking serious.
The best thing the government could do for the environment is to eliminate the current subsidies and let marginal farm land revert to forest.
“If it’s done right.”
“I don’t know a whole lot about how legislative sausage gets made, ”
Clearly.
Consider the odds that legislator get it right, along with the damage done if they get it wrong, and let me know if you’re still interested.
The whole cap and trade idea smacks of artificiality, mostly because of the cap side of the equation. The cap will inevitably be set by the predisposition of the current officeholders each year as the cap is determined. It is easy to see the Obama administration saying, “So, you are recommending a cap of x. I’d rather see x-.” Just as it is easy to see a less environmentally-friendly incumbent saying “I’d like to see x stay at x for a few years. Or, tell you what, make it x+. Yeah, that’ll keep your funding in place. Do that.”
It is inevitable that the politicians will screw around with the cap and that market players will screw around with the trade side of the equation, as they did here: http://goo.gl/aRhI and here: http://goo.gl/oiU8
It seems like a terribly wasteful and inefficient way to go about the stated purpose of reducing atmospheric carbon, when maybe, just maybe, that isn’t really a problem. See here: http://goo.gl/s1dl
Imagine if we had a process to remove billions of tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere safely, quickly and cost-effectively – while at the same time reversing desertification, boosting biodiversity, enhancing global food security and improving the lives of hundreds of millions of people in rural and regional areas around our planet?
We do – it’s called changed grazing management and soil carbon.
Please take a look at the presentations on http://www.soilcarbon.com.au/ to learn more.
Cap-and-trade worked very well to reduce sulfur oxides (SOx) emissions – a primary cause of acid rain in North America. This worked quite well as the acid rain resulting from SOx emissions was a relatively local phenomenon – generally falling only several hundred miles from the emission source.
However, I question the efficacy of a cap-and-trade system as applied to greenhouse gases – which are global in their effects. Such a system can only be implemented on a state-by-state basis, encouraging free riders.
States that implement cap-and-trade for greenhouse gas emissions will make fossil fuel usage more expensive within their borders. This will result in decreased consumption of fossil fuels with a corresponding drop in global price, which would encourage non-participating states to consume more fossil fuels.
The significant decrease in global greenhouse gas emissions in participating states will thus be greatly offset by increases by non-participants.
I am deeply pessimistic about our abilities to be proactive at all, much less when there is significant uncertainty about the results of inaction. I think that energies would be better spent trying to predict the effects of burning through all the fossil fuels that we have available on earth, and how we have to adjust to living on THAT planet, as that is where our grandchildren will almost certainly be living.
Droughts represent lack of water. Floods represent too much water. These are the contrasts that we see today. How can 350 ppm of CO2 be responsible for these?
Why is it that nobody is taking into account the fact that since after the last ice age, water has been going from the ice on land and sea up into the atmosphere? Why is it that no science is talking about the acceleration of the hydrologic cycle due to deforestation on a global scale?
What is in CO2 that scientist are no longer taking into account the contributions of the other variables in the changing of the climate? What about the wobble of the Earth? What about the continuing retreat of the ice since after the peak of the last ice age? What about the constancy of the ocean’s salinity or why is it that oceans have not been diluted by the melting ice from Antarctica and the Arctic ocean?
Why are we speculating on the submergence of lands when the waters are evaporating from the oceans, and the land masses are still rising? Why should the islands that will not carry the load of the melting waters be submerged when it will be the ocean basins that will be pushed down by the added waters being carried?
Why should it be CO2 that will cause to warm the Earth when it is heavier than air and not water vapor which is lighter than air? Why should it be CO2 and not water vapor when water can absorb more heat than CO2? Why should water vapor that is 40,000 ppm in the atmosphere not be the cause of warming, while CO2 is only 350 ppm?
Yes the climate is changing, but why does it have to be CO2, when there are many changing variables?