Anyway, the House and the Senate already voted to authorize the USDA to develop a carbon offsets program, including a registry -- signed into law last year -- it's called the 2008 Farm Bill (Sec. 1245). Waxman only agreed to include this type of program in his cap-and-trade system as a mechanism to provide compliance offsets from agriculture and forestry. Lisa Jackson (EPA) already publicly ceded this part of the offsets program to the USDA last week (I think she's trying to keep her new job; wish her luck).

By the way, by design, an offsets program is not a regulatory program but an incentives program.  To be sure, if it is to provide compliance offsets then there has to be a high bar for eligibility, quantification and issuance of credits, but the goal of offsets programs is to incentivize emission reductions in difficult to regulate sectors, not to regulate them.  EPA, as a regulatory agency, may not be the best choice if we're honestly trying to reduce GHG emissions in these sectors as quickly and practically as possible, especially in ag, where it has almost no boots on the ground and barely speaks the language.  EPA is better suited to regulate the large emitters.  And despite the high hopes of some, the EPA is probably not the best vehicle for ruling the earth.

Hooray for climate legislation and Hooray for Waxman!  It will only get better as we can all finally get to work on reducing global warming.

I'm not so sure about the maturity of EPA's life cycle analysis capabilities, however.  A great hueristic tool, LCA, but EPA's recent oopsy in the ethanol debate was largely the result of a borrowed Berkeley approach and I've heard that even the EPA economists would be hard pressed to call it anything more than a work in progress. EPA's LCA Waste and Recycling Model (WARM) developed in what used to be called the Solid Waste Division has gotten nothing but rotten tomatoes from the Climate Change office, and is also literally a work in progress (again).  In fact, the biggest cart-tip Lisa Jackson has experienced so far, in which she apparently lost a few political apples, was due to a political decision to rush ethanol LCA into the rulemaking process - probably well before it was ready.

I think there is already some good experience accumulated both nationally and internationally for applying LCA, when appropriate, to offset program leakage evaluations.  Most of it, however, has been outside of the EPA (remember that in the 'dark days' until the Obama admin they lacked both funding and political will to spend much time on this - it's hard to get good at something you're not allowed to do).

Right--mankind is responsible for fantastic amounts of GHG emissions--somehow I don't see planting a tree as any kind of solution here... (when the tree dies it rots in the sun and releases much of the carbon back...)

A close examination here undoubtedly will uncover a money trail...!!!