Last week, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack gave a speech on the role of research at the USDA at the launch of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), the research arm of that agency formerly referred to as the Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service (CSREES).

Vilsack had this to say in his kick-off speech:

The opportunity to truly transform a field of science happens at best once a generation. Right now, I am convinced, is USDA's opportunity to work with the Congress, the other science agencies, and with our partners in industry, academia, and the nonprofit sector, to bring about transformative change.

It is hard to reject the idea that our country needs more research on agriculture -- specifically, more science-based knowledge from which to make political and regulatory decisions around food. But as his speech continued, Vilsack placed the focus on technology as our aegis. And while technology is not a bad thing, there are still many questions left unanswered that USDA could and should be focusing on -- questions that the agribusiness lobby quite possibly doesn't want answered, as the outcomes could force the public and our politicians to take a harder look at just what it means to build a truly sustainable food system.

NIFA will be headed by a controversial choice, Roger Beachy -- formerly of the Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, Mo., which receives funding from Monsanto, and was part of the lobbying effort to create NIFA in the mold of the National Science Foundation. Beachy joins a team that already includes Rajiv Shah, formerly of the Gates Foundation. The re-branding of CSREES worries sustainable food advocates who fear U.S. research priorities could shift with the private sector's coaxing further towards a more biotechnology-oriented focus in an attempt to end world hunger, even though more viable solutions to hunger -- a problem of distribution and not yield -- exist on the ground that are both cost-effective and ready to implement now in the developing world.

The government's job is to to give unbiased science center stage, so that we can assess and make informed decisions about agriculture moving forward -- decisions that are in our collective interest as a nation, not just in the interest of one sector of our economy. To begin, the USDA must extend 100 percent funding to formula grants at land grant universities again, thereby replacing the current practice of "matching funds" [PDF] -- requiring these institutions to find a matching donor for between 50 percent to 100 percent of the grant from outside of the government -- which usually ends up being a private industry source. And what might the industry be interested in funding? Shareholders hope they will support things that have the potential to increase the bottom line, instead of research that investigates the way our food system is affecting us, which could detract from it. This is how the industry has controlled the types of research being conducted since matching funds were instituted in 1999 (as an amendment to the National Agricultural Research, Extension, and Teaching Policy Act of 1977).

Vilsack also stated in his speech that in creating NIFA, "we will be rebuilding our competitive grants program from the ground up to generate real results for the American people." In thinking about how to better focus the government's efforts on agricultural research in order to truly benefit the American people, I thought I'd reach out to some key thinkers on agriculture, and find out what they would like the USDA's new research body, NIFA, should be focusing on. Here were their answers:

Biologically focused organic agriculture -- which uses neither chemical fertilizer, pesticides, nor GMO crops -- provides broad ecological services while it sequesters carbon to fight global warming. We need research that documents the greenhouse-gas mitigation aspects of organics, conducted at the whole-farm level to capture the cascading biodiversity benefits of organic systems. This work should be focused on the three most appropriate, farmer-identified organic techniques per bioregion in the 10 most agriculturally significant areas of the U.S. Tied to this multi-disciplinary, 10-year study should be data collection on soil water-holding ability, biological diversity, and productive capacity, in order to qualify and quantify the corollary benefits that come with increases in soil organic matter.
Tim LaSalle, CEO, Rodale Institute

Since I just spent more time than I care to think about sitting through hearings on the proposed Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement, I think I would say that USDA should be focusing its research more on scale appropriate food safety programs -- and exploring what we really know about risks posed by wildlife, the use of vegetated buffers, and other practices that some private food safety programs have targeted.  It seems like USDA could serve a useful role in finding ways for diversified, organic, and small farms to prove that their methods can coexist with food safety requirements.
Patty Lovera, assistant director, Food & Water Watch

We need to be studying how best to protect agriculture from the effects of climate changes, which is to say, how can we make farming more resilient? -- which is further to say, how can we successfully diversify our monocultures?
Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food and The Omnivore's Dilemma

There are both areas of research that USDA is neglecting as well as a lack of investment in research examining agricultural systems and practices that are critical to addressing the research challenges that Secretary Vilsack outlined in his speech at the NIFA event on Thursday.  On the former, areas of research that USDA is neglecting include long-term agroecosystem trials; the characteristics, barriers, and opportunities for the growth and development of local and regional food systems; public plant and animal breeding (all the non-biotech plant and animal research); organic agriculture; the sustainability of biofuel and bioenergy production; and rural development, just to name a few. While several of these have dedicated funding streams, they pale in comparison to other research programs and the overall research budget at USDA.

On the latter, the Administration on Thursday defined a surprisingly narrow approach to addressing the challenges to overcome with the help of agricultural research. Vilsack laid out significant challenges -- including ensuring global food security through productive and sustainable agricultural systems, mitigating and adapting to climate change, and improving public health and reducing childhood obesity -- and NIFA is structured into separate institutes around these challenges and others. But the tools that Vilsack, Research Undersecretary Shah, and NIFA Director Beachy identified as key to solving these problems were extremely limited to biotechnology, nanotechnology, and computer simulations. Without investing in the development of technologies and practices of sustainable and organic agricultural systems, USDA's research agenda will fall far short of meeting its objectives and will continue to support an agricultural system that contributes to -- rather than mitigating -- these challenges.
Ariane Lotti, who focuses on Agriculture Research Policy at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition

Organic and sustainable -- systems agriculture is still woefully underfunded and misunderstood. Likewise, research and education directed towards regional food-system integration is still only getting a trickle of support. Good programs and projects do exist within the agency, but they are still marginal in the scheme of things. These commitments and investments by the research agencies have to be much more significant if alternative systems themselves are going to be scaled upward and outward.

The essential problem of the conventional wisdom is that ecosystem health and community/regional food systems are considered to be lifestyle amenities, not core requirements for sustainability and survival.
Mark Lipson, policy program director at the Organic Farming Research Foundation

I would like to see more research on the reasons for the general decline in nutrient levels in conventional foods, including the decline in protein levels in conventional corn and soybeans.

I would like to see more research done on the factors triggering proliferation in a cow's GI tract of E. coli 0157, as well as one management practices like grazing known to reduce the risk of this bacterium reaching dangerous levels.

I would like to see research on how to design the most energy-efficient and soil-building cropping systems in the Midwest involving (1) a traditional corn-soybean rotation, (2) C-S-small grains rotations, (3) C-S-Small grains-Alfalfa-Alfalfa rotations. The goal would be producing maximum animal feed energy and food value for minimal fertilizer and pesticide input.  I would like to see the same work done with the goal of maximizing soil carbon sequestration.  Then, a comparison of the two sets of experimental results, and the management practices and strategies deemed most effective in achieving these two goals, would be both fascinating and valuable in crafting the farming systems of the future.
Charles Benbrook, PhD, chief scientist at The Organic Center

A few research priorities from my perspective: the conversion to perennial agriculture; replacement sources for nitrogen fertilizers; detailed continent-wide soils and climate mapping to determine priority areas for cultivated crops versus grazing areas; productive yet resilient breeds of animals beside the Cornish Cross, White Leghorn, Holstein, Hyper Lean Pig, and Angus and Hereford beef cattle -- with regional emphasis immediately; and a detailed carbon analysis of pasture-raised versus grain fed livestock.
Dan Imhoff, president of the Wild Farm Alliance and author of Food Fight: The Citizen's Guide to a Food and Farm Bill

The need for independent research at all levels has never been greater. We are living through the failures of much of the corporate dominated research agenda -- whether on biotechnology, expanded production or the repercussions of a free trade model -- when in fact having research that addresses the underlying causes of the food crisis would be truly beneficial here in the U.S. and around the world. Here in the U.S., our taxpayer funds should not be subsidizing more of the same; but building on the succesful on the ground models -- whether focussed on reasons for reserve policies, community food approaches or on the ground conservation and sustainable agricultural practices. The recent results of the IASTAAD report should be reviewed and implemented by our USDA -- not ignored.
Kathy Ozer, policy director, National Family Farm Coalition

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Having read and listened to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack's attempts at ground beef-related damage control in the wake of the recent food safety revelations, I'm left to wonder if the USDA simply needs to get out of the food safety business entirely.

Vilsack himself -- in a Minnesota NPR radio interview where he defended the USDA's dual role as a marketing service and a food safety regulator, its recent shift towards more aggressive testing, and its ability to inspect foreign meat importers -- all but admitted that the USDA has fundamentally failed in its mission. How so? The interviewer asked him one final question:

Q: Can you assure ... our listeners that ground beef is safe?

A: I can assure you that we are doing everything we possibly can to make sure that that product is safe through our testing, through our inspectors ... I will say also that there is still work to be done to continue to improve what we do and until we get the number of food-borne illnesses down to zero and the number of hospitalizations down to zero and the number of death down to zero, we’ll still have work to do.

Please note that he did not say "Yes, I can."

And if you look at the proposals Vilsack highlighted in yesterday's late evening statement, they're mostly focused on increased vigilance, testing, and tracking systems to find the hundreds of thousands of pounds of infected beef the industrial food system produces. Given the ability of the meat industry to use its influence, access, and power within the USDA to scale back any attempts to affect core issues like livestock farming methods, slaughterhouse line speed, and processors' procurement practices, it's hard to deny that its role as an industry cheerleader has left it hopelessly compromised.

Which is just how the meat industry likes it. It was only a few months ago that Big Meat used its allies on the House Ag Committee to beat back an attempt to include greater FDA oversight of meat, eggs, and poultry in the food safety legislation pending before Congress. The argument at the time was that the FDA didn't have the "expertise" to assess food safety practices regarding livestock -- but it was clearly all about the industry maintaining its firm grip on its regulator of choice, the USDA. With any luck, this argument will ring a bit hollow when the Senate takes up food safety legislation (assuming it ever does -- there is no Senate food safety bill at the moment).

But it's not just the meat industry that is using the USDA to shield itself from more rigorous FDA oversight. The current food safety disaster in ground beef is on the verge of being replayed over our vegetables. Elanor Starmer at the Ethicurean has a must-read three-part report (1, 2, 3) on hearings in California on a proposal by largescale industrial growers for a so-called "National Leafy Green Marketing Agreement." Ostensibly, the proposal is designed to cut down on the potential for E. coli contamination of leafy greens. But, in addition to documenting the proposals many flaws (including the fact that the NLGMA appears to ignore the true source of E. coli contamination of vegetables, i.e. industrial livestock farming practices), critics are asking what does a USDA Marketing Agreement -- something normally used to guarantee product qualities like taste, texture, color, or shape -- have anything to do with food safety?

The answer is simple and all too familiar.  As one industry rep explicitly admitted, it's all about avoiding FDA regulation over leafy greens -- and to short circuit the bills before Congress that would mandate it. The FDA won't, it seems, "put industry at the table" quite the way the USDA will.

And Starmer provides plenty of evidence of USDA cheerleading over this issue; the USDA representative leading the government's questioning was one of the strongest backers of the NLGMA at the hearing. So much for impartiality.

The fact is, Tom Vilsack is unable to face down Big Meat -- even if he wanted do, he's surrounded by an institution built to protect it. In effect, Big Ag was left in charge of food safety -- and it's been an unmitigated disaster. Who in Washington has the will or the power to change that?

Anyone? Anyone?

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What should we make of the USDA's "Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food" initiative, which the agency rolled out this week?

USDA via FlickrAfter hearing USDA official Ann Wright's remarks Tuesday in Chicago and reading through the press release, I'm both encouraged and skeptical.

Speaking to attendees at the Chefs Collaborative Summit -- an audience consisting mainly of chefs who normally think more about flavor and farmers than policy -- Wright was vague, brief, and didn't seem in tune with what was happening at the home office back in Washington. (For example, she didn't seem to have read the press release that the USDA had released that day.)

But she got across her message: the USDA is determined to put resources into the challenging task of rebuilding local and regional food systems. The audience cheered her enthusiastically.

First, let's be clear on what the USDA is up to here. It is not committing new money to local and regional food systems. As Wright confirmed in a brief conversation after her talk, "Know Your Farmer" is really about publicizing programs laid out in the 2008 Farm Bill--prodding local food activists and entrepreneurs to apply for already available funds.

Asked by reporters how much money is available, Wright replied that the programs in question amount to "several hundred million" dollars. But she stressed that this amount will probably not go enirely to local and regional food initiatives. Instead, the number encompasses the total value of USDA programs that are open to such initiatives, but are not exclusively for such initiatives.

Thus local and regional food systems, in dire need of infrastructure investment, will likely receive less than "several hundred million" dollars over the life of the current farm bill, which ends in 2013. By contrast, industrial-scale corn producers routinely grab between $4 billion and $9 billion in crop subsidies each year. Overall, payments to producers of "program crops" -- corn, soy, cotton, rice, etc. -- reach as high as $24 billion some years. "Know Your Farmer" won't change that huge imbalance. (For starters, $4.8 million will go to projects in 14 states, USDA announced today.)

So it's hardly a revolutionary program.

Even so, it's remarkable and to my knowledge unprecedented that the USDA is making a major effort to publicize these programs and ensure that at least some federal money flows into emerging alternative food systems.

USDA leadership can't change the structure of the Farm Bill, but the agency does decide how farm bill programs play out. And the Obama USDA seems determined to do what it can to use existing rural-developent programs in a progressive way.

Of course, USDA also remains capable of playing its time-tested role or promoter and protector of Big Ag. Consider that in the current fiscal year, the agency has spent $151 million in taxpayer cash on mass-produced meat to bolster the struggling pork industry. For perspective on such meat-industry bailouts, see this lucid and important post from Elanor Starmer on Ethicurean.

The way I see the Obama USDA, it's got its foot in two camps -- one on the old industrial ag side, the other in the emerging paradigm of ecologically and socially responsible food.

That dualism may disappoint sustainable food activists; but it should be remembered that under past administrations, the USDA marched with both feet to to the agribusiness drummer.

After Wright's talk, in a huddle of reporters, I got her to pretty much confirm rumors that I've been hearing for months: that Michelle Obama is pushing for food-system change from her perch in the East Wing. When I asked whether the First Lady is involved in food policy, Wright perked up, smiled, and said that the USDA is now in "regular contact" with the East Wing.

There are no doubt forces within the administration that favor the approach to agriculture championed by the late Norman Borlaug: big, top-down, tech-centered, and corporate-friendly solutions to the problem of feeding the nation and world. Let's hope that Michelle Obama and her crew keep standing up to them.

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The U.S. Department of Agriculture is so fired up about local food economies that it's coughing up $65 million for a new program called "Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food."

My first reaction: $65 million?!  That's all?!

At 3:45 central time a top USDA official is speaking at the event I'm at in Chicago. I plan to "live Tweet" that speech, so check my Twitter feed (@tomphilpott) or come back to this page.  The event I'm at, btw, is the Chefs Collaborative national summit.

In the meantime, here's Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack's recorded video remarks about the program.  The USDA press release is pasted underneath.

USDA Launches 'Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food' Initiative to Connect Consumers with Local Producers to Create New Economic Opportunities for Communities

WASHINGTON, September 15, 2009 - Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan today announced a new initiative - 'Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food' - to begin a national conversation to help develop local and regional food systems and spur economic opportunity. To launch the initiative, Secretary Vilsack recorded a video to invite Americans to join the discussion and share their ideas for ways to support local agriculture. The video, one of many means by which USDA will engage in this conversation, can be viewed at USDA's YouTube channel, www.youtube.com/usda . Producers and consumers can comment on the 'Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food' YouTube playlist, as well as submit videos or provide comments on this initiative by e-mailing KnowYourFarmer@usda.gov.

"An American people that is more engaged with their food supply will create new income opportunities for American agriculture," said Vilsack. "Reconnecting consumers and institutions with local producers will stimulate economies in rural communities, improve access to healthy, nutritious food for our families, and decrease the amount of resources to transport our food."

The 'Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food' initiative, chaired by Deputy Secretary Merrigan, is the focus of a task force with representatives from agencies across USDA who will help better align the Department's efforts to build stronger local and regional food systems. This week alone, USDA will announce approximately $65 million in funding for 'Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food' initiatives.

"Americans are more interested in food and agriculture than at any other time since most families left the farm," said Merrigan. "'Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food' seeks to focus that conversation on supporting local and regional food systems to strengthen American agriculture by promoting sustainable agricultural practices and spurring economic opportunity in rural communities."

In the months to come, cross-cutting efforts at USDA will seek to use existing USDA programs to break down structural barriers that have inhibited local food systems from thriving. Today, USDA announced a small initial group of moves that seek to connect local production and consumption and promote local-scale sustainable operations:

* USDA's Risk Management Agency announced $3.4 million in funding for collaborative outreach and assistance programs to socially disadvantaged and underserved farmers. These programs will support 'Know You Farmer' goals by helping producers adopt new and direct marketing practices. For example, nearly $10,000 in funding for the University of Minnesota will bring together experts on food safety and regulations for a discussion of marketing to institutions like K-12 schools, colleges, universities, hospitals and other health care facilities.

* USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service proposed regulations to implement a new voluntary cooperative program under which select state-inspected establishments will be eligible to ship meat and poultry products in interstate commerce. The new program was created in the 2008 Farm Bill and will provide new economic opportunities for small meat and poultry establishments, whose markets are currently limited.

* USDA's Rural Development announced $4.4 million in grants to help 23 local business cooperatives in 19 states. The member-driven and member-owned cooperative business model has been successful for rural enterprises, and bring rural communities closer to the process of moving from production-to-consumption as they work to improve their products and expand their appeal in the marketplace.

* USDA's Rural Development will also announce a Rural Business Opportunity Grant in the amount of $150,000 to the Northwest Food Processors Association. The grant will strengthen the relationship between local food processors and customers in parts of Idaho, Oregon and Washington, and will also help the group reduce energy consumption, a major cost for food processors.

As the 'Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food' initiative evolves, USDA will continue to build on the momentum and ideas from the 2008 Farm Bill and target its existing programs and develop new ones to pursue sustainable agriculture and support for local and regional food systems.

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When you discover a picture of Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack posing with Cookie Monster and broccoli, it’s caption contest time!  Submit captions below in comments. Funniest idea gets a priceless Virtual High Five.

Scroll down to see the new caption. Thanks for playing!

How many puppets do you see in this picture?

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The Obama administration will defend the Clinton roadless rule that has been ping-ponging in the courts for nearly a decade, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said in Seattle on Friday. If courts can’t resolve the forest-protection conflict, the administration will create its own roadless rule, he said.

Vilsack laid out a broad vision for the U.S. Forest Service, outlining for the first time his plan for the agency that manages national forests from within the Department of Agriculture. He promised strong conservation measures and an emphasis on restoring damaged forests, especially those left “overstocked and susceptible to catastrophic fire and disease” by a legacy of fire suppression.

He also spoke to the economic potential of forests in emerging carbon and bioenergy markets and their value as a water source as climate change brings increasingly severe droughts. He hinted at the value of new water markets for private land owners.

“The Forest Service must play a significant role in the development of new markets and ensuring their integrity,” he said, speaking near the old-growth forest at Seattle’s Seward Park. “Carbon and bioenergy aren’t the only new opportunity for landowners. Markets for water can also provide landowners with incentives to restore watersheds and manage forests for clean and abundant water supplies.”

Vilsack made an appeal, in a very Obama sort of way, to environmental leaders, asking them for help in moving past the “history of distrust” between conservationists, the Forest Service, and loggers. In short, he asked them to lay off the lawsuits against government plans.

“Certainly appeals and litigation have served as a useful backstop” against poor forest plans in the past, he said. “But given the scale of restoration that must occur, and the time in which we have to do it, a shared vision built on collaboration will help us move on from the timber wars of the past. Litigation and conflict should become less prevalent, because they will be less necessary.”

Patti Goldman, vice president for litigation at Earthjustice, said she was glad to see a clear departure from Bush administration land management.

“They’re moving into the future,” she said. “That’s a wise move.”

To be sure, the speech was more broad principles than specific plans; Vilsack said those would come in a new forest plan, a regulatory rule that won’t have to pass through Congress.

He also said the Forest Service must address the 80 percent of American forests that lie outside of national forests, under the control of states, tribal groups, businesses, and private landowners. 

“The threats facing our forests don’t recognize property boundaries,” he said. “So, in developing a shared vision around forests, we must also be willing to look across property boundaries. In other words, we must operate at a landscape scale by taking an ‘all-lands approach.’”

Vilsack didn’t mention specific measures, but Charlie Raines of the Sierra Club’s Cascade Chapter said ramping up funding for the Forest Legacy program would be an effective way to let forest owners make money off their land without developing it.

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Real 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.

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Photo: Dog CompanyThe climate and energy legislation that the House passed in June would increase revenues for farmers, according to a preliminary analysis released by the United States Department of Agriculture on Wednesday.

The study contradicts claims from some major agriculture groups that the bill would be economically catastrophic for farmers. Instead, the study predicts that farmers and foresters would benefit directly both from pollution-permit revenues allocated to the sector and from selling offsets to polluters.

The report estimates that from the allocation of pollution permits, farmers will bring in an additional $75 million to $100 million each year from 2012 to 2016. And the offsets market created by the bill has the potential to generate income of $1 billion for the farm sector each year between 2015 and 2020, and $15 billion to $20 billion annually from 2040 to 2050.

"In the short term, the economic benefits to agriculture from cap-and-trade legislation will likely outweigh the costs," USDA head Tom Vilsack told the Senate Agriculture Committee on Wednesday. "In the long term, the economic benefits from offsets markets easily trump increased input costs from cap-and-trade legislation." The benefits of climate legislation, he said, "can outpace, perhaps significantly outpace, the costs."

The study, which evaluates potential impacts on the ag sector in the short, medium, and long term, predicts higher costs for inputs and energy. But it also highlights the potential for significant income growth for farmers. And Vilsack said the estimates for economic growth are conservative, as the study, in its own words, "assumes no technological change, no alteration of inputs in agriculture, and no increase in demand for bioenergy as a result of higher energy prices."

"It's quite possible that farmers will actually do even better than we predict," Vilsack said at the Senate hearing. "Farmers are innovators. One of the reasons they have been successful is they have been adapters."

Vilsack went toe-to-toe with some ag-state members of the committee who repeated claims that the climate bill would be detrimental to U.S. farmers. After Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) suggested as much, Vilsack countered, "I guess I approach this from a slightly different viewpoint on the capacity of agriculture to innovate."

Vilsack also noted that farmers are well-positioned to become providers of cellulosic ethanol and other biofuels derived from plants and manure, and that such endeavors could create new jobs in rural communities. Those sorts of positive impacts are difficult to account for in an economic analysis, he said.

"This is a new world here," Vilsack told reporters after the Senate hearing. "And how in the past have farmers reacted to a new world? They have embraced it, they have utilized technology, and they have become the most productive farmers in the world. Why are we going to stop?"

Agricultural groups and farm-state legislators have been divided over the climate bill. The House bill includes significant concessions to the industry, granted at the behest of House Agriculture Committee Chair Collin Peterson. The American Farmland Trust, the National Association of Wheat Growers, and the National Farmers Union back the bill.

But some ag-state reps weren't won over by Peterson's efforts, and many major agricultural groups opposed final passage of the bill, including the American Farm Bureau Federation, American Farmers and Ranchers, the National Chicken Council, the National Corn Growers Association, the National Council of Farm Cooperatives, the National Pork Producers Council, and the National Turkey Federation.

The Ag Committee also heard testimony from John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, who outlined potential threats to agriculture should global warming continue unfettered, including increased drought and pestilence and decreased productivity. To prevent that, said Holdren, "every effort should be made" to prevent the global average temperature from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius.

Holdren also teed off on senators skeptical of cap-and-trade, the administration's favored approach to addressing climate change. After Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) suggested that they could put a cap on emissions but not create a trading market for carbon credits, Holdren bluntly pointed out that the entire point of a cap-and-trade plan is to allow businesses to "find the most economical way to achieve the emissions reductions."

Agriculture Committee Chair Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who in the past has expressed pessimism about the chances of passing a bill this year, affirmed at the hearing that his panel understands the need to act and will be willing participants in crafting legislation. President Obama, he noted, wants legislation in place before world leaders meet to hash out a new climate treaty in Copenhagen in December. "We will do our darnedest to try to meet that deadline," said Harkin.

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Prepared remarks submitted in advance to the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works

Statement of Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy, July 7, 2009

Chairman Boxer, Ranking Member Inhofe, and Members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify on moving America toward a clean energy economy.

We face many serious and immediate challenges. American families and businesses are struggling in a recession and an increasingly competitive global economy. We have become deeply dependent on a single energy source to power our cars, trucks and airplanes, and spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year to import nearly 60 percent of the oil we use.

We face an unprecedented threat to our very way of life from climate change.

To solve these challenges, the Administration and Congress need to work together to spur a revolution in clean energy technologies. The President and I applauded the historic action by the House to pass a clean energy bill, and we look forward to working with the Senate to pass comprehensive energy legislation.

I want to focus today on the threat of climate change. Overwhelming scientific evidence shows that carbon dioxide from human activity has increased the atmospheric level of CO2 by roughly 40 percent, a level one- third higher than any time in the last 800,000 years. There is also a consensus that CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions have caused our planet to change. Already, we have seen the loss of about half of the summer arctic polar ice cap since the 1950s, a dramatically accelerating rise in sea level, and the loss of over two thousand cubic miles of glacial ice, not on geological time scales but over a mere hundred years.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projected in 2007 that, if we continued on this course, there was a 50 percent chance of global average air temperature increasing by more than 7 degrees Fahrenheit in this century. A 2009 MIT study found a fifty percent chance of a 9 degree rise in this century and a 17 percent chance of a nearly 11 degree increase. 11 degrees may not sound like much, but, during the last ice age, when Canada and much of the United States were covered all year in a glacier, the world was only about 11 degrees colder. A world 11 degrees warmer will be very different as well. Is this the legacy we want to leave our children and grandchildren?

Denial of the climate change problem will not change our destiny; a comprehensive energy and climate bill that caps and then reduces carbon emissions will.

America has the opportunity to lead a new industrial revolution of creating sustainable, clean energy. We can sit on the sidelines and deny the scientific facts, or we can get in the game and play to win.

Statement of Lisa P. Jackson, Administrator, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Hearing on Energy and Climate Legislation, Committee on Environment and Public Works, U.S. Senate, July 7, 2009

Chairman Boxer, Ranking Minority Member Inhofe, and members of the Committee, thank you for inviting me to testify about new legislation to get America running on clean energy. Let me begin by commending you for starting Senate hearings on this, the second legislative day after the House of Representatives passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act. Immediately after that historic vote on June 26, President Obama called upon the Senate to demonstrate the same commitment we saw in the House to building a clean-energy foundation for a strong American economy. I am grateful that this Committee has wasted no time in answering that call.

The House bill reflects the principles the President believes are essential for our nation’s energy future: decreasing our dependency on foreign oil, creating millions of new jobs in emerging clean-energy technologies, and reducing the pollution that is a danger to our children. I know there are a variety of proposals pending in the Senate that have the same goals, and I am looking forward to working with all the Committee members as you move forward on this effort.

Clean energy is to this decade and the next what the Space Race was to the 1950s and ‘60s, and America is behind. Governments in Asia and Europe are ahead of the United States in making aggressive investments in clean-energy technology. American businesses need strong incentives and investments now in order for this nation to lead the 21st Century global economy. We are also coming late to the task of leading the world’s major greenhouse-gas emitters to reverse our collective emissions’ growth in time to avert catastrophic climactic changes that would severely harm America’s economy and national security within our children’s lifetimes. The necessary shared effort will not begin in earnest unless and until the United States leads the charge.

The advantage of the kind of legislation the President has called for is that it ramps up investment in developing new clean-energy technologies while giving companies an effective incentive to use those technologies to reduce greenhouse-gas pollution. It does so without raising taxes or increasing the deficit.

I do not mean to say that we can get something for nothing. But according to the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of the American Clean Energy and Security Act, the net cost to the average American household in 2020 would be less than 50 cents a day. For the wealthiest fifth of American households, the net cost would be less than 70 cents a day. The poorest fifth would actually see a net gain of more than ten cents a day. That is what your economists have reported to you.

People have pointed out that the per-household impact would not be uniform across the country – that the costs would be higher in a few states where people drive very long distances and rely almost exclusively on coal for electricity. Yet even if the cost borne by the average family in such a state were double the national average, it still would be just a dollar a day.

That figure does not account for the economic benefits of saving our children from living with increased drought, fire, pests, flooding, and disease. It does not account for the benefit of decreasing our dependency on foreign oil. Can anyone honestly say that the head of an American household would not spend a dollar a day to safeguard the wellbeing of his or her children, to reduce the amount of money that we send overseas for oil, to place American entrepreneurs back in the lead of the global marketplace, and to create new American jobs that pay well and cannot be outsourced?

Labor unions support this kind of legislation because they know it will indeed create millions of high-paying American jobs that cannot be exported. Manufacturing companies support it because they know it will provide needed investment in research and development while creating markets for the American clean-energy technologies born from that investment.

Electric utilities support it because they know it will expand our use of reliable, domestic sources of energy like wind, solar, geothermal – and, yes, safer nuclear power – and, yes, cleaner coal.

Consumer advocates support it because they know it will strengthen the long-term economic foundation for all Americans without imposing short-term economic hardship on any Americans.

And environmental groups support it because they know it is our best chance of preventing catastrophic harm to public health and our natural environment.

Of course, there are still interest groups out there opposing this effort. But I think the tide is turning against the defenders of the status quo, who want more of the same policies that made us dependent on foreign oil and that caused America to forfeit the lead in the burgeoning global competition to sell clean-energy technology. I think Americans want reform that harnesses the country’s can-do spirit. I think they want to fuel long-term economic recovery with a wise investment that sparks a clean-energy transformation in our economy and that protects our children and grandchildren.

That is what the President wants. That is what I want. I believe many Senators want the same thing. Please consider the Environmental Protection Agency a partner in this effort to get America running on clean energy. And, please, keep up the momentum.

Thank you. I look forward to answering your questions.

STATEMENT OF THOMAS VILSACK, SECRETARY OF AGRICULTURE, BEFORE THE SENATE ENVIORNMENT AND PUBLIC WORKS COMMITTEE, JULY 7, 2009

Madam Chairman and members of the Committee thank you for the opportunity to discuss the role of agriculture and forestry in addressing climate change and in building our Nation’s renewable energy capabilities. I am pleased to be joined today by Secretaries Chu and Salazar and Administrator Jackson. USDA, the Department of Energy, and the Environmental Protection Agency maintain a close partnership in our work on climate change and renewable energy.

Climate change is one of the great challenges facing the United States and the world. The science is clear that the planet is already warming. While climate change will affect us all, there are particular vulnerabilities and challenges for farmers, ranchers, and those who make a living off the land. I would like to commend the House for its extraordinary efforts in developing historic, comprehensive energy and climate legislation that creates the framework for U.S. leadership on climate change.

I, along with Secretary Chu, Administrator Jackson, and the Administration look forward to working with the Senate as you begin your deliberations. Our hope is that Congress enacts a bill that meets the President’s objectives of creating an efficient, cost-effective, and comprehensive approach that leverages the Nation’s capacity for innovation, creates jobs, reduces dependence on foreign oil, and protects our children from ills associated with pollution.

I believe it is crucial that we engage the participation of farmers, ranchers, and forest landowners. This issue is too important for agriculture and forestry to sit on the sidelines. A viable carbon offsets market – one that rewards farmers, ranchers, and forest landowners for stewardship activities – has the potential to play a very important role in helping America wean itself from foreign oil. It also represents a significant building block to revitalizing rural America. Landowners can also play an important role in providing low-carbon renewable energy.

The potential of our working lands to generate greenhouse gas reductions is significant. In fact today, our lands are a net sink of greenhouse gases. Based on the latest statistics from EPA’s Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks, forest and agricultural lands in the U.S. take up more greenhouse gases in the form of carbon dioxide than is released from all of our agricultural operations1. The situation is different in developing countries, where agriculture and deforestation play a much greaterole in emissions. In aggregate, land uses are responsible for over one-third of ggreenhouse gas emissions. It is difficult to see how greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere can be stabilized without policies that target emissions and carbon sequestration on agricultural and forestlands. As a result, it is vital that America demonstrate how the inclusion of agriculture and forests in our domestic approach to climate change can produce real and lasting benefits to both landowners and the climate.

Under climate change legislation the farm sector will experience both costs and benefits. Energy price increases can impact row crop production and other agricultural activities. For example, fertilizer and fuel costs account for 50 to 60 percent of variable costs of production for corn. Because of higher personal transportation expenditures, rural households are more likely than urban households to feel the pinch of increased gas prices.

But, I believe that there are significant opportunities for rural landowners in a cap and trade program that recognizes the contribution that farms, ranches, and forests can make in addressing climate change. Rural landowners can benefit from incentives in climate and energy legislation that reward production of renewable energy such as wind and bioenergy. A number of renewable energy technologies such as anaerobic digesters, geothermal, and wind power can reduce farmers’ reliance on fossil fuels. In cooperation with the Department of Energy, USDA will contribute to promoting these technologies and our outreach and extension networks will need to help make them available to farmers, ranchers, and land managers.

These technologies and promotion of a clean energy economy will also stimulate the creation of new jobs. As farmers, ranchers, and land managers look to install an anaerobic digester or build a wind farm – people will be needed to build the machines and install the systems. And, because many of these technologies will be utilized in rural areas – many of these jobs could be created in rural America. These farmers, ranchers, and forest owners can also benefit from legislation that creates markets for greenhouse gas offset credits.

To be effective in addressing climate change, the offsets market will need to accomplish two goals. First, the market will need to recognize the scale of the changes needed and the infrastructure that will be required to deliver information, manage data and resources, and maintain records and registries. Second, ensuring the environmental integrity of agricultural and forest offsets is critical to addressing climate change and maintaining public confidence in the carbon offset program.

To produce meaningful emissions reductions, an offsets program will likely require the participation of thousands of landowners. I believe USDA, working with EPA, the Department of Energy, the Department of Interior, and other relevant agencies can play a very important role in getting offsets to scale while ensuring the integrity of the offsets program. We look forward to partnering with our fellow agencies to work with the Senate in designing a credible offsets program.

Let me give you a few examples of the scale of activities that USDA provides nation-wide. Under the Conservation Reserve Program, USDA manages over 750,000 contracts with landowners who have taken environmentally sensitive land out of production for at least 10 years. USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) manages a network of over 1,300 registered technical service providers nationwide.

It is important that agriculture and forestry offsets have high standards of environmental integrity. Quantification and reporting systems need to be rigorous, verifiable, and transparent – and review and auditing systems will need to be in place. Uncertainties must be accounted for and reduced. Greenhouse gas benefits accrued through carbon sequestration will need to be monitored over time to ensure that the benefits are maintained and that reversals are accounted for if they occur. If these principles are followed, the resulting offsets should be real, additional, verifiable, and lasting.

USDA can support this effort through its scientific expertise, and technical capabilities, specific to greenhouse gases, carbon sequestration, and offsets. For example, in 2006, USDA released guidance to farm and forest landowners to allow them to estimate their greenhouse gas footprints. We are developing user-friendly tools that can help farmers and landowners make these calculations.

I would like to close by again thanking the Committee for taking up this important issue for agriculture, rural lands, and the environment. I believe that agriculture and forestry can play a vital role in addressing climate change and that, if done properly, there are significant opportunities for landowners to profit from doing right by the environment. USDA is ready to help make this happen.

Statement of Kenneth L. Salazar, Secretary, Department of the Interior, Hearing on Energy and Climate Legislation, Committee on Environment and Public Works, U.S. Senate, July 7, 2009

Chairman Boxer, Ranking Senator Inhofe and members of the Committee, thank you for your work on this important challenge facing our Nation.

I am here today to urge this committee to join with the Administration in seeking strong and effective legislation that will steer our nation toward a new energy economy that brings new jobs to our nation and improves our energy security . As the President has said, there is a choice before us: we can remain the world’s leading importer of oil, or we can become the world’s leading exporter of clean energy.

Interior is our nation’s largest landowner with jurisdiction over 20% of the land mass of the United States and 1.75 billion acres of the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS). As America’s largest water provider and land and wildlife manager, Interior is already faced with the impacts of climate change on land, water and wildlife. Interior will thus play a key role in how the U.S. Government addresses and adapt to these climate change issues. Interior’s 6,000 scientists and 14,000 land managers are already documenting these impacts and developing systems to respond to them on and across public lands.

Interior’s land base includes some of the most productive renewable energy resources: solar in the Southwest; wind in the Atlantic, on the Great Plains and in the West; and geothermal in the West. We are working to develop these assets to help power President Obama’s vision for a new energy economy. Interior’s vast land ownership also gives it an important role in siting the new transmission lines needed to bring stranded renewable energy assets to load centers.

As the Secretary of the Interior, I can see the economic opportunity presented by the new energy economy. Since coming into office, we have prioritized the development of renewable energy on our public lands and our offshore waters. American business is responding. Companies are investing in wind farms off the Atlantic seacoast, solar facilities in the Southwest, and geothermal energy projects throughout the west. These new energy sources produce no greenhouse gases and, once installed, they harness abundant, renewable energy that nature itself provides.

The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee recently reported out legislation that will help to promote the development of this renewable energy opportunity. But we will not fully unleash the potential of the clean energy economy unless this committee, and the Senate, put an upper limit on the emissions of heat-trapping gases that are damaging our environment. Doing so will level the playing field and demonstrate that our nation is serious about building a new, clean energy economy. It will trigger even more massive investment in new clean energy projects throughout our nation.

In addition to seeing the potential economic opportunity presented by addressing climate change, the Interior Department is in a unique position to see the negative impacts that climate change is having on our land, water and wildlife resources. Our land managers are confronting longer and hotter fire seasons, new incursions of invasive species, and the early impacts of sea rise; our wildlife managers are dealing with climate change-induced impacts on wildlife mating and migration habits and species interactions; and our water managers are factoring new precipitation patterns into their planning decisions, as snow packs diminish and more extreme wet and dry periods challenge long-standing water management practices.

The Interior Department is participating actively in the interagency process on adaptation policy being led by the White House, and I look forward to working with your committee as well as you consider adaptation strategies that address the impact that climate change is having on our resources. We have been developing a unified approach to adaptation challenges through the Department of the Interior, and we look forward to providing the committee with the benefit of the expertise that our land, wildlife and water managers can provide on this subject. Our Department’s developing experience with adaptive management strategies for resource management can provide a template for future efforts. For example, snowpack declines in the Northwest and Mountain-West have been accompanied by earlier annual peaks in river run-off as documented in stream gage monitoring and analyses across the lower 48 States and throughout Alaska. Land managers facing this reality are analyzing potentially substantial changes in management requirements for fish and wildlife and water resources. Interior managers are also learning to be strategic in rebuilding facilities that are lost to such natural disasters as Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The Fish and Wildlife Service has repaired or replaced dozens of facilities at refuges along the coast damaged by these storms. In the process of rebuilding facilities for people across the region to enjoy, the Service decided not to replace some facilities judged to be too vulnerable and has relocated others to more secure locations.

In all of these activities, the Department of the Interior is putting a premium on integrating our dual science and land management roles. Scientists in our United States Geological Survey (USGS), the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Park Service, for example, are working hand-in-glove with our land, wildlife and water managers who are responsible for the more than 500 million acres of public lands that we oversee. We are focused on ensuring that our USGS and other agency scientists are collecting and analyzing data that are providing relevant scientific information about natural resource conditions, issues, and problems to decision-makers in the Department, at all levels of government, and the general public. This is, and needs to be, an interactive process, as our land, wildlife and water managers work with our scientists and help focus the nature of their research and analysis on the reality of on-the-ground changes. This information – baseline scientific information, trends detection, modeling and forecasting, together with the effective dissemination of information and decision support tools – is key to understanding and addressing climate change and its effects.

Finally, I look forward to working with the committee as you address the opportunities for carbon reduction provided by the “biological sequestration” of carbon in our Federal lands. As you know, pursuant to section 712 of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (P.L. 110-140), the USGS has the responsibility, in consultation with the Secretary of Energy and others, to conduct national assessments of biologic carbon sequestration, ecosystem greenhouse gas fluxes, and potential effects of management practices and policies on ecosystem carbon sequestration and greenhouse gas emissions. The USGS is well underway with this work. Combined with the work of other agencies, it will help to enhance the scientific underpinning needed for a domestic offsets program that focuses on carbon reductions from land use practices.

I also would like to point out that the Interior Department has been engaged in a variety of projects that will teach us a great deal about biological sequestration, ranging from wetlands restoration projects in the mid-Atlantic and southeast, to afforestation projects in the lower Mississippi Valley, and habitat restoration projects in the west. The methodologies that USGS is developing at the direction of Congress, and the experience of our land managers in pursuing these projects as part of our broader ecosystem responsibilities, should be useful to the committee as you develop an offsets program that credits verifiable carbon reductions that are associated additional and with environmentally sound land management practices.

Madame Chairman, a problem as complex as climate change takes the coordinated efforts between all the branches of the government and all the governments of the world. The Department of the Interior stands ready with our shoulder to the wheel to contribute to this effort.

Thank you. I look forward to answering your questions.

Opponents of this effort claim the nation cannot afford to act at this time. I disagree, and so do the Environmental Protection Agency and the Congressional Budget Office. These organizations estimate that meeting the greenhouse gas targets in the House bill can be achieved at an annual cost between 22 to 48 cents per day per household in 2020. That’s about the price of a postage stamp per day.

History suggests that the actual costs could be even lower. The costs to save our ozone layer, to reduce smog with catalytic converters, and to scrub the sulfur dioxide from power plants were all far less than estimated. For example, according to the EPA, the SO2 reductions will be achieved for one-quarter of the estimated cost. The right clean energy incentives will start the great American research and innovation machine, and I am confident that American ingenuity will lead to better and cheaper climate solutions.

We can make significant near-term carbon reductions through energy efficiency. We use 40 percent of our energy in buildings. I firmly believe that, with today’s technologies, we can build new homes and buildings that use 40 percent less energy than today’s new buildings and therefore save money on energy bills. By developing a system integration approach, I believe we could eventually build buildings that use 80 percent less energy with investments that pay for themselves in less than 15 years through reduced energy bills. Similarly, we could retrofit existing buildings to achieve 50 percent energy savings with investments that will pay for themselves.

A comprehensive energy and climate bill will drive American innovation in fuel efficient automobiles and the development of advanced batteries for electric vehicles. It will offer incentives to re-start our nuclear power industry and encourage utilities to invest in carbon capture and sequestration. It will drive investments in wind and solar power and next generation biofuels from grasses and agricultural waste.

In addition to deploying the technologies we have today and can see on the horizon, we must pursue truly transformative solutions. Climate experts, such as the IPCC, tell us we must reduce our carbon emissions by 80 percent by mid-century to stabilize atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations at a level that may avoid the worst consequences of climate change. To achieve our long-term goals in a more cost-effective way, we will need a sustained commitment to research and development. Only R&D can deliver a new generation of clean technologies.

Let me close with a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King. His words seem so fitting for today’s climate crisis: “We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late.”

Now is the time to take comprehensive and sustained action. With the leadership of the President, the actions of this Congress, and the support and participation of the American people, I am confident that we will succeed.

Thank you. I would be glad to answer your questions at this time.

Statement of Governor Haley Barbour, State of Mississippi, Before the Committee on Environment and Public Works, United States Senate, July 7, 2009

Madam Chairman, Senator Inhofe and committee members: Thank you for inviting me to testify before you on the critical issues of energy policy and America’s future.

America’s future is so tied to out energy policy that this hearing could be held before the Senate Armed Services, Foreign Relations, Finance, Energy or Budget Committee and be equally important and relevant to their work.

Energy policy significantly impacts every aspect of American foreign and domestic policy. Energy is the lifeblood of our economy; our national security depends on it. When we consider energy policy, it must be in the broadest context.

As we all know, our country is in the worst economic crisis in decades. It is being felt at the kitchen table of every family, as unemployment is at the highest rate since 1983. Our government is vastly increasing our national debt to get our economy “back on track.” Even though everyone knows the national debt is increasing at an unsustainable rate, we are taking the risk because robust economic growth is the only way to solve our economic problems.

Yet, as we strive to get our economy back growing and more Americans back on the job, our government is considering an energy policy, as set up in the Waxman-Markey bill and the President’s budget, that would make it much harder for the economy to grow; a policy that is, in fact, anti-growth because it will necessarily and purposefully raise the costs of energy for families and businesses, especially manufacturing…for our economy as a whole.

The cap and trade tax, the $81 billion of tax increases on the oil and gas industry contained in the President’s budget and the Waxman-Markey renewable energy standard would all drive up costs and drive down economic growth. Don’t take my word for it. President Obama, then a candidate, said to the San Francisco Chronicle in January 2008, “Under my cap and trade plan, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”

And before becoming Energy Secretary, Steven Chu told the Wall Street Journal in September 2008, “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”

President Obama’s OMB Director, Peter Orszag, in April 2008 said, “Under a cap-and-trade program, firms would not ultimately bear most of the costs of the allowances but instead would pass them along to their customers in the form of higher prices. Such price increases would stem from the restriction on emissions and would occur regardless of whether the government sold emission allowances or gave them away. Indeed, the price increases would be essential to the success of a cap-and-trade program because they would be the most important mechanism through which businesses and households would be encouraged to make investment and behavioral changes that reduced CO2 emissions.”

Just last month in an interview with Forbes magazine, the CEO of American Electric Power (AEP), Mike Morris, said the cap and trade tax would cause his electricity rates to go up 30% to 50%.

The gigantic effect of energy policy on American life means Congress should work particularly hard to ensure Americans know the facts about the policies Congress is considering: To the contrary, the House of Representatives added more than 300 pages of its 1200 page energy bill just a few hours before it was brought to the floor and passed. This is just the opposite of what is needed.

Last month the Southern Growth Policies Board, a forty-year old regional economic development group for thirteen states, held its annual conference. The more than four hundred attendees were most concerned about the costs associated with the cap and trade tax, the renewable energy mandate and the $81 billion in tax increases on the oil and gas industry. They were concerned about the costs to families as well as the costs to the economy.

At this conference there was a great deal of support for conservation and energy efficiency-both indispensable measures in our energy future-and a lot of hope and confidence was expressed for renewables like wind, biofuels, solar and even some more exotic sources in the future.

Nevertheless, it was agreed that for a long time there will be a need for traditional fuels like oil, gas, coal and nuclear, which generates no greenhouse gas emissions. Clean coal technologies and projects were presented and praised. But the biggest and most discussed issue at this conference was the cost of energy policy proposals like the cap and trade tax, the renewable electricity standard and the tax increases proposed for the oil and gas industry.

There was no question about who would bear these costs: the consumer. The one who turns on the light switch, starts the washing machine, fuels up the car with gas or drives the truck delivering goods across town for across the country; that is who will pay.

Moreover, these increased energy costs will hit small businesses hard and will particularly hurt energy-intensive industries like manufacturing or computer processing. Some manufacturers even predicted these energy policies would cause electricity rate increases that would make their U.S. manufacturing facilities uncompetitive compared to facilities in China, India, Brazil or Russia.

Dan DiMicco, the CEO of Nucor Steel, America’s largest steel manufacturer, said the cap and trade tax would mean his company would close U.S. plants, shifting production to China. Making a ton of steel in China results in five-times grater emissions of greenhouse gases than to produce that same ton of steel in the U.S.

It is hard to believe that at a time when growing our economy is our number one priority, Congress is considering a bill that would reduce economic growth. When families are suffering because of a serious recession, Congress is considering a bill to drive up the cost of electricity that cools those families’ homes and the gasoline that runs their cars. As U.S. manufacturing faces stiff foreign competition, Congress is considering a bill that would make our manufacturers less competitive.

The concerns I’ve cited are serious, even if the cap and trade tax works as planned. But many Americans worry it will be an Enron-style financial scheme where Wall Street manipulators make giant profits while ratepayers, motorists and Main Street businesses pay greatly increased costs.

Environmentalists rightly worry about the assumed large scale use of international offsets, saying they are not verifiable. Others say the foreign offsets are claimed by CBO to reduce the price of allowances by 70%, but that’s highly questionable.

A particularly scary feature of the cap and trade tax regime is that anyone can purchase emissions permits. There is nothing to stop a large government like China from investing heavily in CO2 emission permits instead of U.S. Treasuries. The effect, of course, would be that U.S.-located industries could not buy those permits or that they would have to pay much higher prices for the permits, thereby making our businesses even more uncompetitive with foreign (read: Chinese) manufacturers. Market manipulation by speculators is bad enough; driving up demand and prices by foreign competitors is anathema.

The right energy policy for our country is more American energy, using all sources of American energy…all of the above. We have abundant, affordable, reliable American energy. Let’s use it rather than having a policy that makes energy more expensive.

I’d be glad to discuss more American energy during questions or to try to answer any other questions.

Related Links:

Inhofe to Boxer: “We Won, You Lost, Now Get a Life!”

Merkley wants Senate jobs bill to help finance building efficiency retrofits

Reflecting on the lameness of my profession

"The President has been very, very clear about this. He wants the biofuel industry to take hold in this country. He wants us to break our addiction to foreign oil. The only way we can do that is by producing our own fuel and the biofuels industry is the way we are going to do that.

"Corn-based ethanol will continue to be part of the solution but by no means the only way to produce ethanol.

"We are working very hard to make sure that we maintain the infrastructure of the ethanol industry in the United States ... There will likely be some companies that will succeed and some companies that won't, but it won't be because we haven't been giving them an opportunity to succeed."

-- USDA Secretary Tom Vlsack, in an interview with Reuters

Related Links:

Corn-based meat and ethanol: burning the planet to a crisp

Fixing the bioenergy accounting loophole

Is anyone in charge of food safety?

Food Inc. director Robert KennerRobert Kenner never set out to make a terrifying film when he started Food, Inc. But along the way, he found the food industry to be stunningly secretive--and what it's hiding to be downright scary. The film shines a bright light on the handful of corporations that, behind a cloak of glitzy marketing campaigns, do the dirty work of putting cheap food on our plates. As Variety put it, the film "does for the supermarket what Jaws did for the beach." Not long after the film opened nationwide, I caught up with Kenner by phone from his Los Angeles home.

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Kinge: As I watched your depicton of conventional farmers in the film, the word I kept thinking of was "sharecropper." For example, individual farmers no longer legally own their own seeds; they must purchase them from biotech giants like Monsanto, and essentially they remain in debt.

Kenner: You know, I don't even talk about in the film whether GMOs are good for us or bad for us. But what I find so amazing is Monsanto saying we can't feed the world without [their genetically modified seeds], but then they'll do everything possible to stop you from knowing they're in your food.... [and] if your seeds are so good, why do you have to put seed cleaners out of business? Why can't we have a free market? Why do these farmers have to be sued? Shouldn't your product speak for itself? And it's the power of this corporation to sort of attempt to both patent and dominate this industry that I find of concern. What we tried to do in this film was to create a dialogue about how we eat. And these corporations that didn't want to talk to me in the film, many of them, like Monsanto, go to great lengths to get their message out, but I feel their response is a misleading response. But I'm heartened that there are a number of other companies who have said, "we recognize the great success of this film and we think there should be a conversation."...Troy Roush is sort of an industry farmer, who uses Monsanto products and will defend them on certain levels, though he's also been sued by them, and from his point of view for no cause whatsoever, and it cost him almost half a million dollars to defend himself. Troy was saying that he thinks 95% of farmers in America would like the film and agree with it, but they just need to see it.

There seem to be a lot of similarities between the historic cloaking of information by the tobacco industry and the cloaking of information by the agribusiness industry today.

You know what it is? It's that the world has been transformed without us knowing about it and these companies don't want you to thinking about this food. They want that Orwellian myth that it comes from a small farm with a white picket fence and a red barn when in reality our food comes from giant factories. It's become industrialized, but it's not only the chicken and the cow, it's the tomato and the lettuce. We're basically eating food with far fewer nutrients, and it's not healthy. But it's more than that. We're also being denied the right to know what's in it, so it's connecting the dots to the system. And ultimately, I'm optimistic, and when we learned about tobacco ... a few very powerful corporations that had great connections to government and they were financing studies about how their product was not bad for you, and then when we finally found out that this was a total falsehood. And I think when we start to find out about this food is doing to us, we're going to change how the food industry works as well...If we live in a free society and we want to make choices, choice has to be made based on information, and what lengths they'll go to stop you from having that information...So we don't know if there's cloned meat, we don't know if there's GMOs, we don't know if there's rBST. I'm not even saying whether [genetic modification] is good or bad. I'm just saying, if it is good, why wouldn't you want to advertise it?

With the new federal regulation of tobacco, there is expected to be a lot more transparency around the tobacco industry, but the federal government has always regulated agriculture and yet, as evidenced in your film, there has been little transparency thus far around how food is produced. Do you expect that to change under Obama?

Well, one thing [happening] is that it looks like this year the FDA will pass regulation that will [remove] food that sits on the shelf that makes us sick - that has E Coli 0157:H7. So unfortunately a lot of these acts still are in favor of large business. On one hand they'll help protect us, on the other hand they keep regulating in favor of large corporations. So I would just say to consumers, whenever possible, get to farmer's markets, support local farmers, I would also say eat organic. Even if we change just one meal a day, we're going to start to improve the system. We're going to vote three times a day with breakfast lunch and dinner but we also have to vote with out votes. Unfortunately right now we're subsidizing food that makes us sick, and if we can create enough of a movement, I think we can change the farm bill to the food bill.

You screened the film for Tom Vilsack, the secretary of the US Department of Agriculture. He's been a supporter of genetically modified foods. How did he respond?

Well, he's a governor from the biggest corn state in the country and he basically was a Democrat from a Republican state. But ya' know I can only quote Michael Pollan in this, saying that Vilsack turned out to be much more open to hearing and listening. So I do think he's sincere, but I also think, as he says that if this movement keeps growing, he will have to listen, if it doesn't nothing's going to change. Certain things will change because you can't have healthcare reform in this country without changing the food system, so they are going to be forced to change things, whether they like it or not. But hopefully as a food movement, we can help force it to change faster.

In the film you show that several FDA officials have strong ties to agribusiness giants, calling it a sort of "revolving door" between government and corporate agriculture.

Well, to begin with, we're not opposed to people going from industry to government. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing for people who know an industry to go into government to help regulate it. The problem is when they start to rule on things that they have done in industry and then they go back to industry with big raises. There seems to be a certain level of conflict. And it's a pattern that's taken over Washington. I think these things die hard and all I would say is I think we have to start supporting and doing everything we can for small farmers. It's much easier to try to put in legislation for safe foods, but basically it's designed for big corporations, and sometimes it makes it harder for the small farmers, and I think it's going to better for us and our communities and our health if we can support the smaller farmers. And that's not going to be the first instinct in Washington because that's not the way it works. But I think it's that we as consumers have to start to flex our muscles...to help level the playing field so that we support food that's good for us.

A good portion of the film focuses on the dichotomy of cheap food versus expensive healthcare: subsidized crops make certain foods dirt-cheap at the check-out counter or fast food window but wreak havoc on human health and put families into debt.

[That subsidized corn and soy not only goes into hundreds of food products, but it also acts as cheap feed for livestock]. So basically you now bring this artificially inexpensive corn to these feedlots. And when [a small farmer] grows corn on their own property and is not getting a government subsidy you can't then feed his food to these animals and be in competition to these mega-corporations. So we're subsidizing food that ultimately turns into sugar in our bodies, and all of a sudden, we're getting massive amounts of sugar, because of the corn and soy, and that sugar is making us fat.

The film very briefly touches on herbicide and pesticide chemical runoff finding its way into waterways and also mentions that increased cattle grazing has led to deforestation in, for example, the Amazon. But it leaves it at that. Was it a conscious choice to keep the environmental impacts brief?

We could have gone on about the environment. Ultimately, food accounts for a little over 20-25% of our carbon footprint. Like health reform, you can't have environmental reform without changing the system and what I realized in making this film - perhaps it's obvious but for me it really hit me - is that this is an unsustainable system. It's a brand new system. We've had agricultural for ten thousand years. This system is about 40, 50 years old. And it's not working for two giant reasons. It's based on gasoline, which is a diminishing [resource] and as it starts to run out and as its prices start to get up to those historic highs, we're going to have very expensive food. It takes so much gasoline to grow and transport this food. Also, there is so much pollution involved with this system; we're depleting, poisoning the soil, the riverways, the oceans. So there are many things we don't hit on entirely in the film, but basically what the film is about is connecting the dots to show you that this industrial system is not working.

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The assault on rural America continues unabated. For the past six months dairy farmers across the country have suffered a historic drop in milk prices while operating costs remain high. Since December 2008, the price that farmers are paid for the milk they produce has plunged over 50 percent, the largest single drop since the Great Depression.

While organic dairy farmers have faced a decrease in overall sales due to the recent world financial meltdown and tight budgets on the home front as a result, the current drop in milk prices is impacting mainly conventional and small to mid-size family dairy farmers -- the worst crisis most dairy farmers have faced in their entire careers.

Without immediate action from President Obama, USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack and members of Congress, this current crisis could be the launching point for the final liquidation of the independent family farmer.

Plunge in Milk Prices + High Costs of Production = Final Liquidation

According to the USDA, the average cost of production for milk is $24.08 per hundredweight (cwt or 100 pounds), while the price dairy farmers were paid for their milk in April sunk to $10.78 cwt.

This means that dairy farmers are earning less than half of what it costs to produce their milk. Imagine having your salary cut in half and still trying to cover the same monthly bills. Even worse, feed and fuel prices are starting to go up in the past few months.

For farmers, most of whom work too long of hours and are paid too little money, this is the perfect formula for a final liquidation of one of the last remaining independent segments of ag production. For years, small and medium-sized farms have relied on their dairy cows to stay relatively free from domination by factory farms and corporate agribusiness. But no longer.

The Past Revisits the Future – 1998 and Eight-Cent Hogs

What we are witnessing today with dairy farmers has happened before and is part of a historic trend that must not be allowed to continue. As Chris Petersen, President of Iowa Farmers Union and an Iowa family hog farmer, said recently, “First they consolidated the turkeys and chickens, then the hogs and now they’re coming after dairy.”

Petersen spoke at a rally for dairy farmers held on May 30th in Manchester, Iowa, where some 150 family dairy farmers from across the country gathered at a small town livestock exchange, some traveling from as far away as New York and Pennsylvania, in an effort to draw attention to the ongoing crisis.

As a hog farmer who survived the 1980’s farm crisis, Peterson is painfully familiar with the impacts that industrialized agriculture and consolidation have had on family farmers and rural America.

For many Iowans, the current crisis in dairy is eerily reminiscent of 1998, when prices hog farmers were paid for hogs dropped to 8 cents a pound, virtually wiping out an entire generation of hog farmers during a single market downturn.

In 1997, the year before the crash, there were over 122,000 hog farmers across the U.S. Today less than 65,000 remain. In Iowa, the nation’s leading hog producer, there were over 18,000 hog farmers in 1997, while less than 8,300 exist today, with most animals in this sector now raised in confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) or factory farms.

For those who missed the consolidation of livestock in the 1950’s and 1960’s when it happened to the chicken growers, and then the 1980’s and 1990’s when they came for the hogs, this year will be the final sell-off of the family dairy farmer. The final sector reliant on livestock will at last be captured.

In addition, the industry trend towards animal confinement that has taken off in the past decade in dairy will increase significantly if these small and mid-sized farmers are allowed to fail.

Increasing consolidation in the dairy industry has also played a factor in the current crisis, creating an uncompetitive market for dairy farmers. Just one cooperative, Dairy Farmers of America (DFA) controls 40% of milk produced in the U.S., severely limiting competitive pricing for farmers. But not only does DFA have undue market power, they also have a history of market manipulation and were fined $12 million last year manipulating the milk prices in the commodities market.

U.S. Faces Catastrophic Loss of Dairy Farmers in 2009

Leading farm advocacy groups such as Farm Aid and the National Family Farm Coalition are estimating the potential loss of 20,000 family dairy farmers as a result of the current milk crisis. If action isn’t taken soon in Washington DC, America could lose up to 30% of U.S. dairy farmers -- possibly more -- as they strain under the monthly cost of debts, which are piling up each month.

Meanwhile, banks have already started cutting off farmer’s access to loans across the country and have increasingly begun seizing herds when farmers can’t make payments.

In a phone call received last week, one farmer told how a neighboring dairy farmer in eastern Iowa had lost his farm. The 550 head family dairy farm was seized last month, forcing a father and his two sons off the farm. Only five years ago, the father had expanded their operation so he could eventually turn the farm over to his sons. Now that dream is gone. To make matters worse, the bank seized the last trailer full of cows on a Friday and the youngest son got married the following day, a wedding that turned from a celebration into a tragedy.

The same farmer who related this story said that he had received a call from his banker who was coming to visit his farm the next day, with no reason given. The farmer said he was current on his payments, but wasn’t sure if his credit would be cut off like it had to several dairy farmers he knew across Iowa.

Stories like this are becoming increasingly common in rural America, especially in dairy country – states like California, New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont and Wisconsin.

The loss of so many family dairy farms could launch the next Great Depression for rural America’s economies. As farmers are forced off the land once again, as they were in the 1980s, the businesses and communities that rely on them stand to lose their tax and customer base.

Crashing the Farmer’s Price for Free Trade

While cyclical problems of supply and demand and have caused numerous market collapses in the past, a closer look at the dairy crisis exposes deeper fundamental problems in the dairy sector.

Currently the chattering political class in Washington DC keep repeating the line that the current crisis is due to “overproduction,” but an inspection of dairy imports and exports tells a different story

A recent post from John Bunting, a New York dairy farmer who writes for Milkweed and runs his own blog, tallied the imports of milk protein concentrates or MPCs and found a record increase in imports in the first quarter of 2009. Between January and March of this year imports of MPCs, not including casein and other dairy products, increased a whopping 24.59% according to the USDA Foreign Agricultural Services.

MPCs are broken-down proteins and fats created by milk being processed at high temperatures and contain tasty things like bacteria and somatic cells. More problematic are the fact that MPCs are considered a glue additive and while not actually approved as a food additive by the FDA, Bunting calls them “technically an illegal ingredient,” can be found in such things as baby formulas, sports drinks, yogurt, pizza and ice cream.

If that doesn’t sound too bad then remember that these foreign milk-like substances are coming from China, India and a host of other countries that don’t have very stringent food safety regulations. Think milk from China, melamine in baby formula, etc – not a good strategy for food safety.

Another interesting trend pointed out by Bunting is the loss of dairy exports by the U.S. during the first quarter 2009, totally over $638 million over the same quarter in 2008. On top of this, Leslie Hatfield reports over at the Huffington Post that according to the National Milk Producers Federation dairy imports into the U.S. “have risen from $80 million to almost $3 billion in the last 10 years.”

So if we have record imports of milk products that compete against our own farmers on their sales in the U.S. and then they have a net loss approaching a billion dollars in trade that takes away from further potential sales, plus a massive increase in imports over the past 10 years, then what we really don’t have is a “surplus” of milk – but a serious trade deficit when it comes to milk products that is pushing American’s dairy farmers to the brink this year.

Additionally, for the month of March, Bunting reports that dairy exports fell by 32.9%. Even with Vilsack’s recent implementation of the new dairy export program, it’s hard to imagine making up that $638 million in time to save the thousands of dairy farmers that will be forced to shut down their barns by the end of this year.

Loss of Family Dairy Farms = Death of Rural America’s Economies

It’s estimated that dairy farmers are currently losing up to $200 per cow, per month. Since dairy processing and dairy farms have one of the largest economic multipliers of any segment in agriculture, with each cow generating $17,000 per year in economic development in the form of jobs, goods and services created, the loss of a single 85 head dairy farm will drain a local economy of nearly $1.5 million in economic activity.

For the eastern Iowa county that lost a 550 head dairy farm last month, that’s $9.4 million flushed out of the local economy forever.

Unfortunately, the number of dairy farms being forced out of business is just beginning. In the next few months, as more banks cut off additional loans to farmers, these numbers are going to climb to record levels for the dairy industry.

A recent conversation with a dairy industry worker revealed the loss of 10 additional dairies across Iowa in the last 6 weeks – totaling another 3,060 dairy cows or $52 million erased from small town local economies across the state.

And while $52 million is chump change for Wall Street banks, which are churning through government bailout cash faster than a five-legged mule, losing a third of U.S. dairy farms this year will be catastrophic for our rural communities.

For people who are having a hard time understanding how bad this will be: This could be rural America’s last stand for independent family farm agriculture. Increasingly, family farmers, rural Americans and farm advocates are pleading with President Obama, Secretary Vilsack and Iowa’s Senator Tom Harkin to do something about it before it’s too late.

Every day, every delay, costs America another farmer. And our farmers are not a renewable resource that can be grown and planted in a single season.

If up to 30 percent of dairy farmers are forced to go into foreclosure, the U.S. could see over 3.1 million of the nation’s 9.3 dairy cows sold off and potentially liquidated. A quick calculation shows the current dairy crisis, if allowed to continue, will blow a $52.7 billion hole in rural America’s economy – most likely more, as the ripple effect will send a shockwave through small towns and businesses across the country.

Rural America is Too Big to Fail

While Senators and Congressmen lined up in Washington during the past year to offer Wall Street a sweetheart deal for making a mess of the U.S. and global economy -- erasing a lifetime of earnings for tens of millions of investors because of years of excessive greed -- and then reluctantly bailed out Detroit for the sins of auto execs, politicians have done relatively little to help dairy farmers who are facing the crisis of a century.

Sure, Secretary Vilsack has made several small attempts to jumpstart the system, with a few stopgap measures, including $150 million in Milk Income Loss Contract (MILC) payments -- which provided farmers who previously signed up for the program a meager $1.51 per cwt subsidy; the USDA’s March purchase of 200 million pounds of surplus nonfat dry milk for use in domestic feeding programs; and a recent use of the Dairy Export Incentive Program (DEIP) to subsidize 92,000 tons of dairy products destined for overseas. However, these steps have done almost nothing to stem the tide.

Unfortunately, none of these actions have translated into higher milk prices. Most U.S. dairy farmers see these attempts as worse than the usual band-aids farmers have been thrown in the past because it allows politicians to pretend they’ve actually solved the crisis when really it’s getting worse every day.

Conversations with dozens of dairy farmers from across the country reveal that the government MILC checks are barely able to cover costs of electricity, let alone feed bills, which have grown by up to 10 percent in the past four weeks.

“We’re not asking for a bailout, we’re just ask for a fair price,” says Jerry Harvey, a third generation Iowa dairy farmer who milks 70 cows in Promise City, Iowa.

And as many farmers across the country are now saying, if Washington thinks there are banks too big to fail, wait until Americans have to rely on food from foreign countries, which have much looser food safety regulations, to feed their families.

All these farmers are asking for is a fair price for the food they produce for American consumers, it’s time some folks in Washington start putting their heads together for a sustainable solution. The cost of failure for America’s dairy farmer is not something the U.S. can afford.

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Track the debate and take action >>>

UPDATED: 16 Sep 2009

President Barack Obama's key advisers on energy and climate issues include a former top aide to Al Gore, a Nobel Prize winner, a governor, and a gaggle of former members of Congress. Here's a rundown:

Carol Browner
Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change

Browner serves as a special adviser to the White House on climate and energy, a new role Obama created to work on an issue he has defined as one of his top concerns. Browner has been keeping a low profile in Washington, offering very few on-the-record interviews and not receiving as much of the limelight as other administration players, though it's clear her role in coordinating policy within the administration is major. She's at the table during economic discussions, and was the key negotiator hashing out a new deal on automobile emissions.

Browner served as Florida's secretary of the environment from 1991 to 1993, and was a top aide to Al Gore when he was in the Senate. She served as EPA administrator during the entire Clinton administration, and later served as a principal in The Albright Group LLC, a global strategy firm lead by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, as well as Albright Capital Management.

Photo: epa.govLisa Jackson
Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency | epa.gov

During her first months on the job, Lisa Jackson has made significant headway on several climate issues that the Bush administration EPA refused to take up. Within days of taking office, Jackson announced that the agency was beginning the process of reevaluating whether California and other states should be able to set their own higher standards for automobile emissions; the administration has now adopted those standards nationwide. She also moved the agency forward on regulating planet-warming emissions by declaring that they do, in fact, pose a threat to public health and welfare.

Jackson has been adamant that the EPA will move forward on regulating emissions under the Clean Air Act if Congress doesn't pass a climate bill this year, telling reporters, "The race is clearly on." But she has also maintained that the administration would prefer new legislation, and has encouraged Congress to deliver it.

Jackson came to the Obama administration from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, which she lead from February 2006 to November 2008. Enviros in the state gave her mixed reviews, though national green leaders cheered her appointment to the post.

Watch a video interview with Jackson by Grist's Amanda Little.

Steven Chu
Secretary of Energy | energy.gov

Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate physicist who came to the administration from a post at the head of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has made some ambitious moves in his first months in office. Greens swooned when he called coal his "worst nightmare," but he hasn't been quite as much of a rabble-rouser in office.

Among his biggest accomplishments so far have been streamlining the loan guarantee process at DOE and initiating new partnerships with other departments to improve energy efficiency. He also scored a win in securing funding for the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E).

Photo: BikePortland.orgRay LaHood
Secretary of Transportation | dot.gov

Ray LaHood was a Republican congressman from Illinois up until his retirement in 2008, making his pick a surprising one. He has not been a particularly visible member of the administration in its first months, though his department has made some major headway on key environmental issues.

The Department of Transportation scored $8 billion in funding for Amtrak in the stimulus package, as well as $15 billion in the budget to create a "world-class passenger rail system" across the country. Everyone's favorite climate curmudgeon, George Will, has basically written LaHood off as a communist for supporting mass transit.

DOT also played a central role in reaching a new deal on automobile emissions, one of the first major actions the administration has taken to curb global warming. And LaHood appeared before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in support of the Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill in April.

Photo: Mike DisharoonKen Salazar
Secretary of Interior | interior.gov

The former Colorado senator got mixed reviews from enviros when he was nominated, and he's still getting them. He got cheers for withdrawing oil-shale leases on tens of thousands of acres in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. He also got a gold star for scrapping the Bush administration's offshore leasing plan. But he has not written off offshore drilling entirely and is reportedly at work on a new offshore-drilling plan.

Salazar got a thumbs-down from enviros for upholding the Bush administration's policy on polar bears. The bears will continue to be considered a threatened species, since climate change is melting their Arctic habitat, but they won't get the protections from oil and gas exploration that a declaration as "endangered" would give them.

Photo: change.govNancy Sutley
Chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality | CEQ site

Nancy Sutley came to the Obama administration from the Los Angeles mayor's office. She has promised to be the "voice for the environment" within the White House, and said she "will play an important role in coordinating the efforts of the federal government" on environmental policy, but her work is largely behind the scenes.

She has pledged that Obama and his administration are willing to stake their political capital on passing a climate bill.

Watch a video interview with Sutley by Grist's Amanda Little.

Tom Vilsack
Secretary of Agriculture | usda.gov

Obama's decision to appoint the former Iowa governor to head the Agriculture Department was blasted by some in the green movement who believe Vilsack is beholden to the industrial agriculture interests that are deeply rooted in his home state. So far, however, the ag secretary has avoided significant controversy, though USDA is working to influence how climate legislation governs farmers and the ethanol industry.

Vilsack has said he believes farm and forestry operations should earn carbon credits under a national climate program (a view in synch with Big Ag), with his department providing the necessary oversight. Then there's the question of how EPA will measure biofuels' impact on offsetting carbon dioxide emissions -- a complicated issue that promises to leave either farmers or EPA scientists angry in the end.

Photo: dol.govHilda Solis
Secretary of Labor | dol.gov

Hilda Solis, Obama's green-jobs-loving labor secretary, has been a low-key figure thus far, though she has spoken publicly about the administration's desire to create millions of jobs in the renewable-energy and energy-efficiency sectors. Before joining the administration, she represented California's 32nd Distract in the House and was a key player in getting the Green Jobs Act passed in 2007.

The Labor Department recently announced that it is partnering with the Department of Housing and Urban Development to spend funds from the economic recovery act to train and employ residents of public housing in green jobs.

Get involved in the fight against climate change via Grist's Climate Citizens project.

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Swine flu continues Maroon lagoon: Take a dip in a hog-waste cesspool? spreading across the globe, killing people--even (gasp) Americans. (Eleven have died in New York City alone.)

Ho-hum. As I predicted a few weeks ago, the flu scare has skulked off the front pages and into the realms of historical amnesia, that vast American netherworld. Apparently, it will take mass quarantines, high death rates, and riots at hospitals to keep Americans thinking about the very real threat of flu pandemic for more than a week or two.

Meanwhile, no one with authority seems to be investigating obvious possible links with industrial-scale hog farming. As I reported a while back, the only scientists swarming around La Gloria, Mexico--where the flu evidently broke out in the shadow of massive Smithfield hog operations--are from the biotech industry, not the World Health Organization. And they're training their testtubes on backyard hog farms, not Smithfield's huge confinement facilities!

Here in the U.S., USDA chief Tom Vilsack has been much more zealous about protecting the pork industry than investigating its potential for incubating deadly pandemics. In a Congressional heating last month, he cravenly defended the safety of industrial meat production--even though U.S. regulatory agencies have no mechanism in place to test the U.S. herd for H1N1.

Few outside of a few bloggers seems outraged by this state of affairs here in the U.S. Over in Europe, things are different. The Swiss group Avaaz.org has launched a petition demanding that the WHO and the UN's FAO take action to investigate links between industrial hog operations and swine flu. Their demand is simple and direct--and it's a sign of our deregulated times that it has to be made in the first place:

We call on you to investigate and develop regulations for factory farming in accordance with public health safety standards. Food production must be regulated to ensure global health security.

In just six days, Avaaz.org claims, more than 200,000 people signed the petition. How can we can that many U.S. citizens to express even that minimal level of concern about the public-health menace of factory animal farms?

Hat tip to Eddie of Obama Foodorama.

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The Obama administration announced on Thursday that it is delaying a decision on policy that guides the construction of new roads and other development in areas of national forests for one year. An interim directive will guide land use in roadless areas in the meantime.

Delayed gratification for roadless advocates. The new directive, issued by Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, will require his approval for any U.S. Forest Service projects on public lands that have been declared off-limits for development under the Roadless Area Conservation Rule. The administration will hold off on long-term decisions on the policy until 2010.

The so-called "Roadless Rule," which the Clinton administration put in place during its final days in office in 2000, prohibited new roads on 58.5 million acres of national forest land. This essentially meant all logging, mining, and other commercial activity were also off-limits. But on his first day in office, George Bush temporarily froze work on implementing the rule; he repeatedly attempted to throw it out over the course of the next 8 years and undermined it by exempting large areas of land from its protections. The rule has been caught up in legal wrangling ever since.

"This interim directive will provide consistency and clarity that will help protect our national forests until a long-term roadless policy reflecting President Obama's commitment is developed," said Vilsack in a statement announcing the temporary directive.

Vilsack will still be able to approve projects if he and the Forest Service determine them to be necessary. And if the administration does not reach a long-term decision on the rule within the next year, the temporary directive can be extended for another year. Today's announcement also doesn't include public lands in Idaho, which has instated its own version of the rule.

On the campaign trail, Obama promised to uphold the law, so today's news comes as a first step in fulfilling that promise, though most enviros would like to see the rule reinstated entirely.

"Secretary Vilsack's directive is a critical interim measure to ensure that we safeguard the diverse values of our national forests as the Obama administration considers more permanent protections," said Sierra Club Public Lands Protection Program director Athan Manuel in a statement.

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USDA chief Tom Vilsack is once again on the verge of stepping in it regarding his pick for food safety czar, i.e. the head of the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service. Some may recall that back in March the Obama administration nearly appointed Dr. Michael Osterholm to the post only to back off when his views on meat irradation (aka "Zap the Crap") proved too hot to handle. Ironically, Osterholm -- who has ties to the meat industry, biotech heavyweight Monsanto and defense contractor 3M -- is also a legitimate expert on pandemic preparedness, a skill which might've come in handy recently. Ah, well.

Now, swelling rumor has it that Dr. Mike Doyle is the leading candidate for the post. Obamafoodorama first reported the rumor late last week and it has solidified in recent days. Doyle meanwhile is proving at least as controversial as Osterholm and is just as closely allied with the meat industry. Via Ob Fo:

Doyle is currently Director of the Center For Food Safety at the University of Georgia, and a professor in the department of food safety and technology. His work at the land-grant university has been heavily funded by major meat industry concerns, and Doyle has won big acclaim for his industry-friendly policy wonking, in particular from the American Meat Institute, a huge pro-meat/low-government intervention lobbying force on The Hill. He's also received big funding and support from the National Chicken Council, another industry lobbying group. He's also recived a lot of funding from USDA's own Agriculture Research Service. How invested is Doyle in the economics of food safety? He actually holds patents on a number of microbiological solutions for disease outbreaks.

That last bit means that he could personally profit from decisions he might make as head of FSIS. But I'm sure he'll recuse himself from any decisions regarding use of his patented methods for disease management. I'm sorry, did I say something funny?

Doyle is being championed (again according to Ob Fo) by GOP Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia. Note to Vilsack: Dude, the GOP LOST THE FRAKKING ELECTION!!! Since when do they get to pick top administration officials? And to hear that Vilsack is listening to Saxby Chambliss of all people, one of the idiots more conservative members of a party already far outside the mainstream, boggles the mind. And apparently, if the administration judges Doyle's conflicts of interest to be manageable, he will in fact get the nod.

Doyle is also associated with the Animal Agriculture Alliance as well as the American Council on Science and Health (this report [PDF], lists him as on the ACSH science advisory board) -- both industry-funded astroturf organizations whose shared mission is to undermine any research that questions the safety of industrial products or practices. To get a sense of where the Animal Ag Alliance is coming from, you simply have to read its full-throated defense of the use of sub-therapeutic doses of antibiotics in livestock from this attack on the recent Pew report documenting the dangers of livestock factory farms. In fact, Doyle recently spoke at an AAA "summit" where he discussed his research claiming that sub-therapeutic antibiotic use is crucial to "safe" livestock practices. I wonder what Congress, which is considering legislation to outlaw the practice, will make of this.

The only good news regarding Doyle is that his naming hasn't been officially announced. We can only hope that Vilsack and Obama come to their senses before it's too late.

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You're testing my patienceDon't associate U.S. pork with the swine flu outbreak -- you can't catch it through pork. Plus, no pigs on U.S. CAFOs are infected with it.

That's message the industry and the USDA are straining  to get across, anyway. Except ... you can catch swine flu from pork, according to the World Health Organization. Here is the Reuters:

Meat from pigs infected with the new H1N1 virus shouldn't be used for human consumption, the World Health Organisation cautioned on Wednesday, adding it was drawing up guidelines to protect workers handling pigs.

...

The WHO ... said it was possible for flu viruses to survive the freezing process and be present in thawed meat, as well as in blood.

"Meat from sick pigs or pigs found dead should not be processed or used for human consumption under any circumstances," Jorgen Schlundt, director of WHO's Department of Food Safety, Zoonoses and Foodborne Diseases.

Yikes. And that bit about how the U.S. hog herd is free of H1N1? Here is The Wall Street Journal: 

While Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack says there is "no evidence" of the new swine flu in U.S. pigs, the federal government doesn't aggressively search for it on farms.

Mr. Vilsack's statement is designed to bolster the Obama administration's argument that U.S. consumers and trading partners haven't any reason to shy away from eating U.S. pork. But the observation isn't based on any extensive sampling program of the sort that is used by the federal government to alert it to other animal disease, such as mad-cow disease and bird flu.

Indeed, only in recent months has the Agriculture Department begun organizing a federal pilot program for screening pigs for flu. And that move came at the prodding of officials at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. CDC officials have been worried that pigs might serve as a "mixing vessel" for a flu virus capable of sweeping through the human population. The pilot program has yet to begin to collect samples. [Emphasis added.]

The article continues: "[V]eterinary experts say it's impossible to know whether U.S. pigs are free of the new virus, which was detected over the weekend in a Canadian hog herd. Farmers aren't required to report flu outbreaks in their pigs to authorities, and the collection of the 500 samples [assembled nationwide from livestock vets] wasn't designed to detect a low level of a new virus in U.S. swine, of which there are about 65 million head."

Hat tip to the fantastic Eddie Gehman Kohan of Obama Foodorama.

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Why the USDA has no business overseeing conditions on factory farms, and more

Time for the mainstream media to face the factory farm-swine flu link

I know some are still reeling from the recent Obama administration announcement on biofuels and its implication that it remains a bit too much in thrall to the concerns of Big Ag. And Tom Vilsack's continued pimping for Monsanto and other biotech companies seems both unsustainable and uninformed. But a slew of positive decisions have come down from the USDA in recent days that merit attention and suggest that business is very much not as usual at ag's end of the Mall.

First up was USDA Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan's announcement of $50 million in funding from the USDA's Environmental Quality Incentives Program for organic farming. This is a double victory since it not only offers significant support for existing organic farms, as well as for farms transitioning to organic, but it represents a small step toward reform of EQIP, a conservation program that has, to this point been [mis]used by the USDA and Big Ag, as a subsidy regime for industrial pollution from livestock factory farms. It's a further sign of what Food Democracy Now's Dave Murphy calls the Obama administration's "progressive stance on EQIP and issues of air and water quality."

Murphy also observes that Obama's commitment dates back to the early days of the Presidential campaign: "When Obama came through Iowa during the caucus he saw firsthand the damage that the hog confinement industry has had on Iowa's environment, rural communities, and family farmers and he vowed early on that he would help end these abuses."

The President seems to be making a good start--though it's worth noting that there are several more EQIP decisions pending, including whether to allow factory farms to continue to receive pollution mitigation payments. Should the USDA end that practice, Obama will have gone a long way to fulfilling his promises. And EQIP would finally be in a position to live up to its potential.

Next comes news (via Atlantic_Food) that the US has tabled (and likely ended) its trade war with Europe over exporting beef doused with growth hormone. The EU has refused to accept rBST beef and, as a result, the US (with the ever-popular WTO behind it) slapped on a set of tarrifs, including the infamous 300% tax on Roquefort cheese. And wouldn't you know it but, according to the WSJ, we blinked:

The European Commission and the U.S. announced a provisional agreement in a lengthy dispute over the European Union's ban on hormone-treated beef.

The deal ends for now the threat of retaliatory duties from the U.S. on EU products ranging from Roquefort cheese from France to Spanish hams and Italian mineral water. And it more than triples the amount of beef from cattle untreated by hormones that the U.S. can export to the EU.

While the US goverment still maintains that rBST beef is safe, the US Trade Representative's office (which negotiated the settlement) admitted that "it was too early to say if the administration would seek to revive the dispute later." Meanwhile, the US just gave a big leg up to farmers who raise beef without the help of growth hormones and an incentive for those that do use hormones to stop. It's a classic legal settlement -- the "guilty" partner admits no wrong-doing, but a quick scan of the terms makes it pretty clear who won.

Then we've got the USDA's announcement of (and inclusion of funding in the budget for) a settlement to the long-standing discrimination case knows as the "Pigford Claims." Obamafoodorama has been doing a bang-up job of following this disgraceful saga involving open discrimination against black farmers by USDA programs and officials. ObFo broke the news of the settlement this morning:

Later today, when the President announces his 2010 budget, which slashes spending in 121 programs and about $17 billion, there'll be one crucial area where spending will increase. Working with his closest advisers, President Obama is attempting to redress the longstanding civil rights grievances of black American farmers, by proposing a $1.25 billion deal to settle their discrimination case against USDA, which has come to be called 'The Pigford Claims.'

The funding could benefit as many as 80,000 black farmers, who experienced decades of unconscionable behaviour from USDA employees, in the form of denied services and discriminatory lending practices. The President inherited the longstanding problems, and after taking office, both he and Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack pledged to help. Pigford has been an emotional battle spanning multiple administrations and Ag secretary tenures, and the budget announcement is due to years of work by a bipartisan group of farmers, lawyers, and non-profit Ag and justice groups, led by Dr. John W. Boyd, Jr., president of the National Black Farmers Association (NBFA).

Sen Chuck Grassley and Sen. Kay Hagan have introduced legislation that would write the settlement into law. If passed it would represent a just ending to a great, and little-known, injustice.

And, not to re-open "the Great Swine Flu / CAFO Debate of Aught-Nine," but the USDA announced a recent livestock-related hire that had sustainable ag folks cheering (again). Chief Tom Vilsack has chosen Dudley Butler to head the Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration. As the Ethicurean explains, Butler has a long history as an advocate for family farms, even winning a significant legal settlement for a small farmer against one of the big meat companies (companies which now control a vast majority of the US market) -- and his job offers the chance to makes major changes to policy. Indeed, Vilsack is on record as supporting enforcement the Packers and Stockyards Act, a law designed to limit consolidation and monopolist practices in the meat industry and which, to date, is observed entirely in the breach.

And finally, wrapping up a busy week, we've got this just in: the USDA has proposed a revision to the organic dairy rules that would require a significant amount of grass-feeding (i.e. pasturing) for dairy cattle as a pre-condition for organic certification. As the AP reports, this would effectively shut down the controversial "organic" factory farms run by Big Organic companies Horizon Organic and Aurora Organic. It would also bring the USDA organic label that much closer to the organic ideal (at least for milk). And in case you're concerned that the final rule won't survive industry pressure, the AP noted that, "In an earlier public comment round, only 28 of more than 80,500 comments were against tightening the rules." So there.

All in all, it certainly appears that Obama and Vilsack are starting to turn the battleship. There are enormous battles yet to be fought, for sure. But can't we enjoy the small victories along the way?

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GMOs: false promise?km6xoTom Philpott's post on USDA chief Tom Vilsack's comments regarding biotech deserves a bit more attention. Vilsack was speaking at the first ever meeting of the Group of Eight agricultural ministers. I guess we have to consider it progress that the top ag officials from the eight largest industrialized nations finally decided it was worth getting together despite the fact that there's no consensus on what to do about food.

It doesn't help that when Tom Vilsack leaves the country -- the meeting was held in Italy -- he goes from being "Farmer Tom" to "Salesman Tom." His prime responsibility (indeed a fundamental mission of the USDA) is to further the interests of US agriculture. Right now that means two things -- pushing US food and technology exports. It's almost a reflex -- there's no indication of any meaningful thought behind his position. Rather, if you take another of Vilsack's statements in the FT article Philpott linked to -- "[t]his is not just about food security, this is about national security, it is about environmental security" -- at face value, it's entirely at odds with a reliance on GM seeds.  After all, GM seeds are controlled by a handful of companies -- Monsanto, Syngenta and Dow (although Monsanto really is the most dominant player) -- and are wedded to the Three Evil Sisters -- synthetic pesticides, synthetic fertilizers and diesel fuel, which has nothing to do with "environmental security."

But while I'm not willing to overlook Vilsack's presentation of the false choice of GM seeds as key to food security, I would hope that he's serious about bringing what he referred to as "agricultural science" front and center. Because if he does, he'll see that perhaps, at last, the research tide has turned against GM seeds. Most notably the Union of Concerned Scientists just released an analysis of 20 years' worth of scientific research designed to determine the extent to which GM seeds have improved overall crop yields. The answer? Only one GM crop -- Monsanto's RoundUp Ready corn -- has shown ANY yield increase.  And it has managed a mere 3-4% total increase over 13 years.  That's it, folks. No huge jumps in productivity. No magic seeds. Why is this? According to the UCS:

One likely reason is that new yield genes often have much more complex genetic interactions with the plant genetic material than the few currently successful transgenes, and therefore cause more genetic side-effects that often lead to undesirable agricultural properties.

In other words, the heribcide resistant genes (which represent the only true GM success stories) don't cause much in the way of adverse genetic side-effects that might interfere with plant growth. But the genes involved with yield do. So while the industry's ability to manipulate individual genes has increased over time, their ability to control the side effects of their manipulation has not. And there is no indication that this will change. Monsanto, however, will forever sing the siren song of the magic yield-doubling -- or even tripling -- seed to anyone fool enough to listen. But they simply can't deliver.

The UCS report also addresses the question of the whether GM (aka GE) seeds will produce greater benefits in the developing world where yields are generally lower to being with. The signs point to no:

The record so far suggests that GE is unlikely to play a major role in increasing yields in developing countries—especially those with limited public infrastructure—in the foreseeable future. Overall, GE has not had a major impact on yields in developing countries. As with developed countries, there are only a few GE crops, with herbicide-tolerant soybeans being most widely grown (in South America), followed by Bt cotton, primarily in India and China. There are small amounts of Bt maize (corn) in South Africa and a few other countries.

Even Monsanto's own research demonstrates the limits of GM techniques. According to a study they funded, RoundUp Ready crops still require significant investment, careful pest management and applications of multiple kinds of pesticides. Say what? The dark side is supposed to be the quick and easy path. Now it turns out that the stuff doesn't even do what it's supposed to do. That's one seriously naked emperor.

Unlike the US, the UN understands all this, which is why they released a report declaring that organic techniques are ideal for answering the developing world's agricultural needs. In fact, adopting the basic organic techniques of composting, mulching, and crop rotation could double or even quadruple current yields in Africa. Take that, Monsanto!

Of course, organic practices aren't patented.  There are no license fees or expensive supplies. No flying in compost from Iowa or manure from North Carolina. Just education and investment in "human capital." How awfully boring and unsexy. But until US international ag policy focuses on results in the field rather than on the balance sheets of US biotech conglomerates, we'll have to listen to otherwise smart guys like Tom Vilsack parroting their party line.

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USDA chief Tom Vilsack has been in Italy at the G8 meeting, talking ag policy with reporters. As the global hunger crisis lingers and climate-change and population fears fester, Vilsack is using the opportunity to push agri-biotech as the solution to the globe's food needs. Here is the Financial Times:

Mr Vilsack said the challenge to boost output to feed the world’s population – expected to reach 9bn by 2050 from today’s 6.5bn – was compounded by climate change. For that reason, he called on the G8 to back the use of science in agriculture, including genetically modified organisms, to boost productivity.

A few days earlier, Vilsack weighed in on a key debate in global food policy: the need for organized government grain reserves. In 2008, grain and rice prices spiked, driven up largely by biofuel mandates in the US and Europe. The spikes rippled through the global south, propelling tens of millions of people into hunger and worsening condition for hundreds of millions of the already-hungry.

One lesson to be learned is this: the global food system is extremely vulnerable to price shocks. When grain supplies fall short for any reason, tens of millions go hungry. One response might be to build some robustness, some resiliency, into the system. For most of agricultural history, societies have kept grain stores, to be released during shortages to soften shocks. Starting about 20 years ago, the U.S. government and  institutions like the IMF and World Bank decided that government grain reserves interfered with the magic of the market and began selling them off and discouraging developing nations from keeping them. It's a little bit like dismantling levees, on the theory that they interfere with the magic of water flow.

Last year, the spike in grain prices exposed the folly of this policy. Yet Vilsack clings to it.  Here is Reuters:

United States Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack cautioned on Saturday against the idea of creating global grain reserves, saying it might not be the ideal tool to ensure food price stability.

Instead, the secretary insisted, technology holds the key:

Vilsack said the U.S. experience with such schemes had shown it was better to focus on technical advances in irrigation, seed varieties, machinery and farming methods.

Is that really the lesson we want our ag secretary to be drawing from the last 50 years of U.S. food history?

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