Down On the Farm...

Ricardo Bayon on June 22, 2009 3 Comments

Getting climate change legislation in the US was always going to be hard. First it has to go through the House of Representatives, then the Senate, then the White House, and every step of the way all those people who might be affected both positively or negatively (and there are many) were always going to have their say. In fact, it is something of a minor miracle that things are moving as fast as it would appear. There is even talk of something coming out of the House before the July 4 break.

But as my colleague, Allison Shapiro points out below, one of the key issues to come out over the course of the last two weeks has been the question of how agriculture does or does not play in any carbon legislation.

There are both good and bad reason for this. The good reasons have to do with the fact that what we do on the land matters. Globally, agriculture, land use and forestry account for around 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions. To put that number in context, that is more than all forms of transportation globally. In other words, if you don't deal with this issue, you can't deal with climate change.

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Meanwhile, if you move to the US, in this country agriculture accounts for more than 10% of US greenhouse gas emissions. Again, that is a huge number. In addition, land-use, forestry and agriculture are not only sources of emissions, they also have the potential to serve as "carbon sinks", sequestering carbon from the atmosphere. In other words, they play an important role on both on the credit and debit sides of the climate change balance sheet. So it is only natural that agriculture should play a part in any US discussions taking place around climate change.

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But as we know, science doesn't craft legislation, politics does. And politics isn't the art of doing the right scientific thing, it is --to quote German Chancellor and strategist Otto von Bismarck-- the art of the possible. Or, more to the point is Ambrose Bierce's definition of politics: "a strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles". So if we want to get a sense of where climate legislation is going in the US, we have to understand not just where the principles lie, but where the interests are hidden.

In this case, a very powerful set of interests are to be found down on the farm. As Washington insiders well know, getting climate legislation passed in the US will depend largely on the votes of two sets of constituencies: the farming midwest and the industrial "rust belt" of the US. The rest of the Senators and Congresspeople are likely to vote along pretty predictable party lines.

This tells us a few things: First, that agriculture (despite the fact that it accounts for over 10% of US emissions) will not likely be legally curtailed as the country struggles to address climate change. This isn't even an option anywhere in the legislation. It is a given. Secondly, since agriculture and forestry will not fall under the cap, whereas most of the rest (i.e. 85%) of US emissions WILL be capped, it seems likely that the lion's share of offsets in any US cap-and-trade system will come --you guessed it-- from forestry and agricultural projects in the US. So even though the Waxman-Markey draft bill was deliberately silent on where offsets will come from (leaving the majority of these decisions up to the system administrator, i.e. the EPA), the truth is that because of the way the cap is structured, we sort of know where offsets are going to be found. This is not going to be like the European Union's Emissions Trading Scheme or the UN's Clean Development Mechanism, where emissions can and have come from energy efficiency projects in developing countries.

The problem, however, with this scenario is that, until now, few of the large existing carbon markets have allowed agricultural offsets into their system. And where these offsets have been allowed (i.e. the Chicago Climate Exchange), they have at times been criticized by the environmental community. The grounds for these criticism are really two: first, that the science isn't all there and that we don't really know how many credits to give for any given project, and secondly, that the credits aren't "additional" (in other words, that they would have happened anyway, without the carbon payments).

In reality, however, these criticisms are both right and wrong. They are wrong in that there is actually much more science on the role of land use (i.e. forestry and agriculture) in GHG emissions than critics let on. Great work has been done over the last 10 years on this at numerous universities (especially the US land-grant universities) and we can actually get a pretty good handle on how many credits to give many (if not most) of the possible projects out there. And they are wrong on the issue of additionality too. This can (and has) been tackled convincingly by many of the carbon trading systems that exist.

Where they are right, on the other hand, is that we don't yet have adequate or credible standards for what constitutes a sound carbon offset project in the agriculture and land-use sector. We have good standards for forestry projects, but the the standards that exist on agriculture aren't yet up to the equivalent snuff. This is really where the crux of this issue lies. We need solid standards.

Again, the Waxman-Markey bill was deliberately silent on standards, leaving that up to the Administrator. Now, as could have been expected, agriculture has become the latest political football as the US House of Representatives debates the bill (see articles on this). Unfortunately, the attention has turned to two issues that --quite frankly-- are relatively minor and should be able to be dealt with pretty summarily. First, there is the question of the role of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) on climate legislation. This should be easy: The USDA has the links to farmers on the ground, has the technical capacity on measuring and monitoring soil carbon, and includes the Forest Service. Of course they need to play a role working with the EPA on any offset system in the US. Question isn't "if", it is how and where to best use USDA's strengths.

The second issue that has come to the fore is even more bizarre. On the surface it appears to be about whether agriculture should play a role in a cap-and-trade system (which, in my view, and as was stated above, is a no-brainer), but in reality seems to be devolving into a question of whether the standards for their participation are lax or not, and whether they are written into the bill now or left up to the administrator. In my view, this question of standards is central, but it can not (and should not) be decided upon by a committee of politicians. It needs to be defined by a multi-stakeholder process that involves scientists, farmers, environmental groups and others, and it should be among the first things that a joint EPA-USDA offset administrator does. Just as importantly, the standards shouldn't be lax, they should be as strong and credible as it is possible to be. If the standards are lax it will work against everyone's long-term interests. Because if the standards are lax, it will be easier to get credits for actions that have little or not environmental benefit, which means there will be too many credits, which means credits will be cheap, while at the same time the system will not achieve its goals of addressing climate change. I can't think of a better way to kill a program than that.

At EKO we are part of a coalition --the Coalition on Agricultural Greenhouse Gasses, or C-AGG-- that was designed precisely to look at this question. It is made up of scientists, non-profits, farmers, carbon traders and others, and is currently working on a series of principles to better define what constitutes a solid, credible carbon measurement and crediting methodology for agriculture. Once these principles (and methodologies based on these principles) are written, the hope is that we can find a solid and credible way to deal with the large part of the climate change problem that comes from agriculture and other land uses. Stay tuned for developments.

Now we can only hope that the parochial doesn't doesn't end up slowing the necessary, and that we get climate change legislation as soon as possible. Because --and here I apologize for one last quote-- as the famous economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, put it: "Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable." Because (interest groups notwithstanding), what is unpalatable to some, may be the only thing standing between a livable future and something quite a bit more disastrous....