...Peterson feels the bill will do too much damage to agriculture because it is not treating the industry as part of the climate solution.
He is referring to the fact that any program to manage carbon offsets will be overseen by the EPA. He feels USDA is better equipped to manage any offsets.
"We're not going to agree to any offset system that is run by EPA, we're just not going to do it. We know more about sequestering carbon than EPA does. We have soil scientists, we have NRCS, we have somebody in every county. We've offered to them a process where we set up all the verification and at the end of the day we sign off on these credits at EPA and they are the ones that allocate them." ...
The final version of the House bill gives the US Department of Agriculture the authority to verify agricultural carbon offsets, just as Peterson wanted, ignoring the science that pins global greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuel consumption on agriculture. Consider energy use:
... Twenty percent of the fossil fuel used in the United States goes toward food production. The U.S. food system includes agricultural production, the processes involved in growing and harvesting food crops and livestock, as well as the post-agricultural processes of transporting, packaging, and storing food.
... The amount of energy used in agricultural production may account for only 20 percent of the total energy spent by the overall food system, but it is still staggeringly high. Industrial farms use fossil fuels to power inefficient fuel systems and spread large amounts of fertilizers and pesticides--approximately 5.5 gallons of fossil fuels per farm acre.7 The Environmental Protection Agency reported that U.S. agricultural production in 2005 emitted about 625 teragrams of carbon diox-de equivalent.8 That is about as much carbon dioxide as 141 million cars release each year.9 Farm emissions more than double when their electricity usage is included. ...
The Enforcers Matter
Thing is, the USDA's chartered purpose is to promote agriculture in America. In practice, their purpose has become to shovel as much money as possible, as quickly as possible, into the bank accounts of town-sized factory farms, large food processors, meat packers, seed companies and farm chemical manufacturers.
The USDA is not, to my knowledge, quite as corrupt as the Dept. of the Interior programs charged with collecting oil and gas royalties, of which the New York Times reported that ...
[an] investigation also concluded that several of the officials "frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana, and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives."
The investigation separately found that the program's manager mixed official and personal business, and took money from a technical services firm in exchange for urging oil companies to hire the firm. In sometimes lurid detail, the report accuses him of having intimate relations with two subordinates, one of whom regularly sold him cocaine. ...
Indeed, the judge in the class action suit brought against the DoI for failure to collect royalties on Tribal lands, found the agency kept its books so shoddily that he couldn't even determine how much the plaintiffs were owed. Which is to illustrate the point that the culture and perceived mandate of an agency affects the enforcement of the law as much as Congress' willingness to pass a law in the first place.
Yet as a 2004 report by Senator Harkin's (D-IA) office pointed out, the USDA has stood idly by as agricultural sectors have consolidated to the point where large companies can control prices and market information (pdf), to the detriment of both consumers and on-farm producers. While the four-firm concentration measures of oligopoly market power are higher now than when the USDA's Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration was first chartered, they have failed to take action:
... In the last few years there has been growing concern that USDA's Grain Inspection and Packers and Stockyard Administration (GIPSA) has not actively pursued complaints of anti-competitive actions in the livestock industry. In fiscal year 2003, GIPSA initiated or continued 1,744 investigations for violations of the Packers and Stockyards Act. Of these, only 31 complaints were investigated that pertain to practices that were suspected of being anti-competitive in nature. Only 8 of these investigations were ultimately finished or closed. USDA (GIPSA) has not taken administrative action against any of the alleged anti-competitive practices in the 31 complaints from 2003.
This level of enforcement action by USDA in 2003 is similar to other recent years. In addition, there is serious question whether USDA reports characterize the handling of all producer complaints (which could be simply a telephone call from a producer) as actual investigations, thus overstating the number of investigations acted upon by USDA. ...
The USDA inherited from the Bush adiministration has no interest in doing anything that might restrain the profits of large agricultural interests, who end up reaping almost all the reward from the agricultural subsidies paid out to 'help farmers.'
Helping Our Struggling Farm Chemical Companies
While Peterson insists that agriculture is part of the solution, as is, the fact is that it's only potentially part of the solution. Moreover, government subsidies have been set up in such a way as to ensure that the most environmentally unfriendly practices get an unfair competitive advantage, an advantage that an agricultural offset market run by the USDA will only expand.
Tom Philpott examines one practice likely to get such a boost, chemical no-till, of which he writes in Grist:
... A case in point is a farming practice called "no-till." In no-till systems, farmers plant directly into fields without plowing. One of the main reasons farmers plow is to control weeds. In a practice that has become known among critics as "chemical no-till," farmers idle the the plow and rely on chemical herbicides for weed control. Monsanto's "Roundup Ready" seeds-genetically modified to withstand lashings of Monsanto's herbicide glyphosate-have greatly facilitated chemical no-till in the Midwest: farmers can spray their fields with Roundup as needed, without affecting the crops. According to the Center for Food Safety [PDF], glyphosate use jumped 15-fold between between 1994 (when GMOs were first released) and 2005, generating a windfall in Roundup sales for Monsanto. Monsanto now clears more than $1 billion per year in profits from Roundup alone.
... As a source of carbon sequestration, chemical no-till is a highly questionable practice. In a 2006 peer-reviewed paper [PDF] called "Tillage and soil carbon sequestration-what do we really know?," a group of soil scientists led by John M. Baker of the USDA's Agricultural Research Service took a hard look at conventional no-till. They report: "Long-term, continuous gas exchange measurements have also been unable to detect C gain due to reduced tillage." Translation: No-till doesn't seem to sequester carbon. Their conclusion: "Though there are other good reasons to use conservation tillage, evidence that it promotes C sequestration is not compelling." The report compelled climate expert and frequent Grist contributor Joe Romm to declare that no-till farming "does not save carbon and is not a carbon offset."
Another peer-reviewed study, this one published in the British journal Soil Use and Management in 2006, suggests that conventional no-till leads to increased emissions of nitrous oxide-a greenhouse gas some 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. "In many soils, the increase in carbon sequestration by adopting no-till systems may be largely negated by associated increases in N2O emission," the authors write. "The promotion of carbon credits for the no-till system before we have better quantification of its net greenhouse gas balance is naive." ...
Will anyone besides the Monsanto Corporation benefit from a subsidy of chemical no-till? Not really. Though that isn't in the USDA's current mandate to care about.
Helping Our Struggling Factory Feedlots
Getting back to agriculture's significant emissions, we get to industrial livestock production, whose greenhouse gas production the EPA won't even be allowed to monitor under the bill:
... It should also be mentioned that enteric fermentation-gases produced from livestock-is the number one source of methane emissions in the U.S. Combined, manure and enteric fermentation produce about as many GHG emissions as the entire commercial sector's burning of fossil fuel in the United States. The EPA did not require that enteric fermentation be considered a reporting category in their proposed rule.
The way in which CAFOs pool their manure together is a large part of the problem here. When stored in pits and lagoons as is typical on factory farms, the manure breaks down anaerobically, in the absence of oxygen, which exacerbates methane emissions. The EPA has acknowledged that when manures are distributed on pastures as would be typical in a grass-fed animal system, methane production is limited. Thus, there are proven ways to reduce methane emissions in manure management. ...
As noted in a Center for Food Safety policy letter on factory livestock farming (pdf) a "2006 report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) found that the animal agriculture sector contributes 18 percent of GHG emissions." That's worldwide and much of it is due to concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) that generate vast lakes of manure.
What does the USDA do about that hazard? As mandated by Congress, with significant impetus from the House Agriculture Committee, they've been subsidizing it, furthering both the practice itself and concentration in the livestock industry. Shreema Mehta writes in the now-defunct NewStandard News:
... CAFOs use EQIP funding to build manure lagoons lined with clay or concrete, said Dianna Power, a resource conservationist with the USDA. The lagoons allow farmers to store excess manure so they do not overspread it on crop fields and risk leakage into rivers and streams. To control the leakage of animal feed into the soil, farmers must also sometimes build filters for the stored piles of feed, which can reach twenty feet high.
In 2006, the government gave confined feeding operations more than $152 million in EQIP funding.
As previously reported by The NewStandard, researchers with the Environmental Integrity Project, a research and advocacy group, have documented over 320 manure spills from livestock-feeding operations in Iowa alone between 1992 and 2002. The resulting pollution killed an estimated 2.6 million fish. ...
As one policy expert quoted in the article explains, the EQIP (Environmental Quality Incentives Program) funding might cover up to 75 percent of the waste containment costs for large livestock operations, a routine cost of doing business that smaller ranching concerns have to cover out of their regular operating revenues.
When the 2008 Farm Bill passed, those subsidies were continued (pdf). Compare the cap of $80,000 over 6 years for the support of organic agricultural practices with the $300,000 per 6 year cap for environmental mitigation projects, or the $450,000 per 6 year cap for anaerobic methane biodigesters.
If $450,000 over 6 years sounds like an amount of money that you would only need to spend on methane digestion if you ran an enormous factory feedlot that had as many as 500,000 pigs on a single 'farm', you'd be right.
And are manure management and anaerobic digesters going to qualify for even more subsidies under ACES? You bet your bippy.
Is This Worse Than No Bill At All?
These sidesteps of EPA authority ensure that any agricultural offsets purchased under the carbon credits market are going to be highly suspect.
USDA is an industry captive agency whose only obvious interest is in functioning as a welfare agency for the likes of Cargill and Monsanto, and their analysis is going to be suspect. EPA's analyses would be, at least for a while, more likely to be objective.
The likelihood that these provisions come out in the Senate or conference is probably minimal, considering how narrow a margin the bill passed by in the House.
So would it be better not to have a bill at all? Maybe.
The EPA could be mandated to continue their rulemaking process and set up the greenhouse gas emissions controls they've already begun. They could evaluate agricultural practices based on how much carbon they actually do sequester, and those credits would probably be more trusted commodities.
On the bad side, a regulatory system set up by the EPA could suffer an immediate and crippling blow the minute a Republican got into office, or as soon as the agriculture industry figured out how to staff the EPA with their former employees, as has been done at the USDA. Also, we'd be sending Obama to the international Copenhagen climate conference empty-handed, with nothing to prove to other nations regarding the US government's firm commitment to curb our outrageous emissions.
Out of all those arguments, I think the international goodwill angle is the most persuasive, though we could have gotten to a good-faith agreement in other ways. And I don't think that this will look serious to other nations when two of our most polluting industrial sectors, coal and industrial agriculture, are delighted by it.
Perhaps they're right, the rest of the world just wants to see something, some small gesture, coming out of our retrograde, denialist, short-sighted Congress. Though I have to think that any other country who was truly impressed by this bill can't be serious about climate change in their own right.
ACES is a bribe to polluters to continue doing what they're good at, so long as they promise to accept lots of money to attempt to fix the problem. It sets up a regulatory framework that could in theory be fixed and strengthened in the future, but that's a vaporware hope, no better than longing for carbon capture & sequestration technology to magically cleanse coal.
I can't speak for the other nations this is supposed to impress, but I'd have been happier with a bill that had limited itself to R&D tax credits for renewable energy research, federal loan guarantees for clean energy equipment manufacturing and the laudable efficiency incentives that did make it in. That could have taken the big step of leveling the playing field between fossil fuels and clean energy, this just seems to retrench existing bad actors who'll be more empowered to botch future efforts to correct our climate problem. I worry that for all the progress that's been made, this bill feeds monsters that will come back to bite at the very worst times.
But wait, what's that you say? My pony plan wasn't on the table? Yeah, I know. And the reason that a good bill wasn't on the table is about the same reason that the implementation of this one is going to suck.
Our government is extremely corrupt and it tries really hard to avoid working on behalf of the ordinary voter or the public interest. |
