American Farm Bureau takes hard-line stance against climate legislation, EPA
At the opening of the four-day American Farm Bureau Federation convention in Seattle, Washington over the weekend, AFBF president Bob Stallman pushed for a tough stance against climate legislation currently being debated in Congress. Stallman called called for American farmers and ranchers to “aggressively respond to extremists” and “misguided, activist-driven regulation,” adding that “the days of their elitist power grabs are over.”
And when the AFBF’s first policy session began on Tuesday, delegates took that message to heart, approving a special resolution against both cap-and-trade legislation and the regulation of carbon by the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA’s recent endangerment finding sets the stage for the agency to regulate all greenhouse gas emissions under its existing power.
“As Congress returns to the issue of cap-and-trade this year, the message of Farm Bureau will continue to be: ‘Don’t Cap Our Future’ agricultural productivity and food security,” said AFBF President Bob Stallman in a written statement. “We will now send that message even more strongly.”
The resolution passed by the Farm Bureau states that cap-and-trade legislation would raise farmers’ and ranchers’ production costs, and the potential benefits of agricultural offsets are far outweighed by the costs to producers. Due to these and other concerns, the delegates voted to strongly opposed “cap and trade proposals before Congress” and to support “any legislative action that would suspend EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.”
“Congress should focus on renewable energy that is better for the environment and our domestic energy security,” said Stallman, “but it should not tie the hands of U.S. producers, whose productivity, historically, has provided the world’s food safety net. We should not shrink U.S. agriculture at the very time when many are concerned about how to feed a growing global population.”
The group is skeptical about climate legislation currently being batted around Congress, despite the fact that a recent study showed the agricultural industry would have more to gain than to lose if the House version of the climate bill were passed.
The American Farm Bureau was formally created in 1919 and has about 2,800 county farm organizations which in turn elect representatives to state farm bureaus.
Tim Hurst is the founding editor at ecopolitology. You can follow him on twitter @ecopolitologist
Photo: mike 138 via flickr/Creative Commons
About Timothy B. Hurst
Carbon dioxide should not be allowed to exit the chimneys of industry and utilities anymore, a plan for total capture of all carbon dioxide should be implemented. This captured carbon dioxide should be put into cylinders and snd shipped to the Midwest to stimulate the growth of crops such as corn and soybeans. This would produce an economic benefit by turning carbon dioxide from a waste product into an economic stimulus.
There is information about this process in the following article and website:
The Direct Effects of Increased Carbon Dioxide on Plant Growth
http://www.applet-magic.com/CO2plants.htm
I think that the farm community's opposition to climate change is unfortunate. I would rather have seen then argue for some protection on the potential cost increase in fertilizer as a "green payment" alternative to subsidies tied to logical practices such as "variable rate fertilization," the use of legume cover crops and no-till. A great many farmers don't believe they can do "continuous no-till" and thus that they wouldn't be able to get "carbon offset" income under cap-and-trade. I think that for many farmers, the bad experience they had trying no-till (particularly with corn) is now out-dated by advances in equipment, genetics and seed treatment. Still, it seems likely that there will not be any meaningful climate change legislation, but more because of our hyper-partisan system than because of what Farmers think
Great post and links!