Spray-and-trade

Can climate legislation survive the Senate Ag Committee’s embrace? 4

three tractorsReal climate action—or agribusiness as usual?Photo: mike138After the House narrowly passed the Waxman-Markey climate legislation, there was some talk that the bill might be “strengthened” in the Senate.

The bill’s sponsors had faced a serious slog in getting it through the House, and were forced into making large compromises with the energy and agribusiness industries. Perhaps a more effective bill, the thinking went, might emerge from the Senate.

I remember thinking, really? Have these people not heard of the Senate Agriculture Committee?

I watched with deep cynicism the proceedings of last week’s ag committee hearings on climate change (video here).  The terms of debate were not encouraging for anyone who takes the threat of climate change seriously.

Essentially, debate broke down into an unedifying dichotomy between those who argued (like USDA chief Tom Vilsack and ag committee chief Tom Harkin [D-Iowa]) that climate legislation can be rigged to benefit Big Ag, and those who argued (like American Farm Bureau kingpin Bob Stallman and Sen. Saxby Chambliss [R-Ga.]) that climate change is a liberal fantasy in search of big taxpayer bucks (unlike, say, the agribiz lobby’s ruthlessly defended ethanol program).

Having watched from afar as House Ag Committee chair Collin Peterson essentially mugged Waxman and forced him to write an agribiz-friendly code into the climate bill, I sense a similar hijacking in the works in the Senate. Indeed, like Peterson, committee chair Harkin has already signaled that he plans to use the legislation to boost corn-ethanol interests: he aims to insert a clause that would raise the maximum ethanol blend to 15 percent from 10 percent, usurping the EPA’s authority to decide on this issue. “It is my feeling that EPA has a strong bias against ethanol,” he complained earlier this month.

Around the time of the the hearings, Vilsack unveiled a USDA study showing that agriculture would benefit from the cap-and-trade legislation that came out of the House. Not long before, the Environmental Working Group released a stinging assessment of the agriculture provisions of the House bill

The agriculture provisions of the bill ... open two loopholes that threaten to let coal-fired power plants and other big climate polluters off the hook and slow progress toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

EWG’s analysis essentially backs up my own at the time of the House negotiations—that the concessions won by Peterson essentially pay farmers for upholding the (chemical-intensive) status quo.

Indeed, the agribusiness lobby is rather desperate to turn climate legislation into a tool for maintaining the status quo. A cap-and-trade regime that raised the price of synthetic fertilizer and diesel would cut into profits of the agribusiness giants, because it would leave farmers with less cash to spend on pricey inputs like GMO seeds. Farmers might even experiment with different systems! The trick is to rig cap-and-trade to deliver “offset” payments to farmers for essentially doing what they’re already doing.

By rigging up a robust offset market for input-intensive practices, the higher costs imposed by climate legislation can be negated or more than negated, preserving markets for agrichemical giants.

I understand the necessity of getting a climate bill through Congress, and I realize that in our political system any climate legislation will inevitably be deeply compromised by industrial interests. Of course, it will be a bitter irony if our nation’s first comprehensive climate policy ends up bolstering a chemical-intensive, greenhouse-gas-spewing food system.

For another vision for the future of agriculture, check out the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition’s excellent policy paper [PDF] on the very real climate benefits of doing precisely what climate legislation seems unlikely to do: create incentives for less chemical- and energy-intensive farming systems.

Grist food editor Tom Philpott farms and cooks at Maverick Farms, a sustainable-agriculture nonprofit and small farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Follow my Twitter feed; contact me at tphilpott[at]grist[dot]org.

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  1. Palouser Posted 8:38 pm
    02 Aug 2009

    Let me say that I am a farmer, I rent all my land, I belong to no farmer organization, and I have a history of battle agribiz on the PR/policy level, know my markets and the issues .... and more, but we'll let that go.I will say that I find the tone of the article, the smugness, the mock horror, and especially the implied ignorance of the market systems, as unhelpful at best and laughable at worst.For instance, the implication that  "...a regime that raised the price of synthetic fertilizer and diesel would cut into the profits of the agribusiness giants, because it would leave farmers with less cash to spend on pricfey inputs like GMO seeds. Farmers might even experiment with different systems!"A few observations. The idea putting a price squeeze on farmers will encourage them to try a system you might think more favorable to your ideology is doubtful at the very best. Changing systems virtually ALWAYS calls for additional investment in machinery and equipment. Not counting the cost of a new management style that almost always entails higher risks until art least several years have gone by. A price squeeze motivating farmers to try the unknown? I assure you that just the opposite is likely to occur.Buy less pricey GMO seed? The reason it is bought now is because it is providing a return on the money invested. And not necessarily because of yield because generally, say in corn, the GMO would be yield neutral in absolute terms. But the management and loss of yield to bugs and the use of pesticides, and fuel gobbling mechanical weed control is burdensome.Farmers will go for the markets and demand. Unfortunately, the market return for using other unproven suystems (in marketing or performance) that would equal the raw return on present practices - which are much improved in everyway over yesteryear before notill - don't ecnourage switching. No farmer is likely to turn down a better return with another system that is continually marginally better. But I will not lose my land to another renter because I have a much lower return to the landowner than everyone else in the area,  and deny myself the chance to incrementally improve my stewardship and return in the future. And the majority of farmers rent much of their land.
    I could go on at length, but I find the implication that one way to get at the hated 'giant agribizness' is by putting the squeeze on farmers  a detestable argument - besides the fact that it wouldn't work. The morality at play is unbelievable used by those who pretend they are on the high ground. 

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    1. Tom Philpott's avatar

      Tom Philpott Posted 10:52 am
      03 Aug 2009

      Believe me; i don't want to squeeze farmers, who are already plenty squeezed between stubbornly high input costs and commodity prices that are well below ethanol-bubble highs. I can see where you're coming from: increasing farmers' costs through a carbon cap, without any offsetting income increase, would be a hard squeeze indeed. But the concerns you raise could be addressed by a cap-and-trade system actually designed to pay farmers to cut down on GHG emissions and store carbon in soil--which the one embedded in Waxman-Markey, particularly after Collin Peterson got his paws on it, does not do.And let's not forget: large-scale commodity farmers get lots of public support, mainly in the form of billions of dollars in annual commodity payments. (There is also, of course, the $5 billion or so spent each year to prop up corn ethanol.) I don't oppose that on principle; societies should support their farmers; the market, as I have argued many times, is not sufficient. But as I (and others) have argued so many times before, the subsidy system has been rigged to serve not the interests of farmers but rather their input suppliers (eg, Monsanto) and customers (eg, the big grain-trading firms and meat producers). With climate change entering an advanced phase, the time has come to use public policy and the public purse to nudge farmers in climate-friendly directions. And that means applying less GHG-intensive nitrogen fertilizers and switching to practices to build organic matter (ie, carbon) in the soil. Those goals are not accomplished, I'm afraid, by the practice of chemical no-till that would be so generously rewarded  under W-M.

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  2. Palouser Posted 12:25 pm
    03 Aug 2009

    As a wheat farmer I'm not opposed to cap and trade if it helps finance the required investment in equipment and revenue losses associated with higher residue systems. That is a quid pro quo, and quid pro quos are the basis of most of the farm programs in force. I agreed to manage my farm in prescribed ways in order to recieve payments. If I'm out of compliance I can be thrown out of the program, and auditing is a part of the system. Many are not aware this is a fundamental foundation of the public programs - or are ignorant of that history. Except for the linkage to 'cap and trade' this is not a new approach at all. I find most popular assumptions for the existence of the farm programs are completely erroneous because the person making those assumptions is completely unaware of their purpose and history.The ethanol program is a good case study. It was multi purpose. The primary drivers were very low corn prices, and energy security. Without low corn prices the subsidies to fuel blenders would never have been initiated. The recipients of the benfits are many. Before the program there were complaints that grain prices were too low, threatening farmers in developing countries. When they rose as a result of the ethanol program they were considered too high for the people in developing countries to import (though it also resulted in much lower outlays for the farm program in the US). No mention of the positive effect that was supposed to benefit farmers in those countries anymore. One of the main conclusions has to be that, whatever the current ideologies opposing these efforts, they cannot understand or credit complex realities.One of my biggest PR battles was with Cargill over the foundations of current farm programs. They were adamantly opposed to these programs. They understood that farmers under economic pressure still plant every acre w/o knowing what their return will be (a contradiction to the industrial model usually applied erroneously to ag) and less able to hang on to crops until higher prices might arrive, and ultimately selling cheaply the raw material needed for vertically integrated industry. They wanted a complete dismantling of the farm programs for 'free market' reasons, despite the fact that the rest of the globe, almost without exception, is one of protected markets using tariiffs, embargoes and government controls. Our remaing farm programs are the only stick we have to try and fight for an even playing field in global markets - and that effort has basically stalled completely.
    One last point, though this is lengthy. First, the idea that chem no-till (commonly understood to be glysophate based) does not contribute to building organic matter and conservation, vs traditional cultivation intensive methods based on fuel consumption and LOSING soil and OM, is simply an intellectual and factual nonstarter. But, if you want farmers to jump further to a grazing based or 'plow down' crop approach to fertility, then there are so many gargantuan problems to contemplate in switching that the idea that torching current policy would result in change in that direction has to be considered delusionary. Just a few cursory issues - switching to pasteurs would simultaneously demand huge outlays for fencing, animal purchases, not counting significant reductions in revenue during a long interval of nonproduction (did I mention labor?), and less grain available for consumption on the world market. I won't even get into the problems of finding appropriate meat processors, shipping, and market access costs - or worse, the huge costs of market creation (Want a headache, try that? Been there done that). Spreading animal maneur on large scales REQUIRES confinement. And meat eaters.In short, I find that many of the assumptions by ideologists who want to move ag toward 'sustainability' are far enough from basic reality that they become irrelevant and don't contribute. I'm all for the ultimate goal, but there needs to be a realistic and informed approach. Ideology isn't enough to accomplish the that. The organic producers I know are hard headed and practical people who are usually exhausted from the man hours to fuillfill all the functions required to maintain income with too little available help.  

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  3. alaskamom Posted 12:19 pm
    07 Aug 2009

    It seems mankind has really dug itself into a hole. We're dammed if we do and dammed if we don't. In the long run it seems the basic fact is that greed and self interest would destroy us, if God doesn't do it first. As for big agribusiness (i,e, Cargil and their ink) I know from our family's own dealing with them that if they get a chance to control our food supply, they will and maybe governments with it. Remember the basic principle behind building (and controlling) civilizations is food.

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