Did I Hear Someone Say 'Payoff'?

Rep. Collin Peterson of the House Agriculture Committee wants to get his people paid from the climate bill, whether they deserve it or not. Like the coal industry, the agriculture industry would like their bribe, please, before they'll let us try saving the planet. Tom Philpott of Grist reports:

... Why would Monsanto and other agrichem firms be so interested in controlling how ag is treated by cap-and-trade? By generating payments to farmers who use their goods, these companies burnish their bottom lines and turn climate-change legislation into a revenue stream.

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.

... 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.” ...

During the discussions around 2007 Farm Bill hearings, there was an intense discussion among the House committee members, involving Peterson, where members strained to clarify that mentions of the word 'sustainable' in the legislation were in no way to be taken as synonymous with 'organic'. They were horrified by the very idea that the sustainability of doing exactly what they were currently doing might be questioned.

As Philpott notes, organic agriculture using cover crops and manure is the only method of agriculture that can be proven to increase carbon sequestration.

But Peterson doesn't want to hear about that. He wants the law to say that agriculture as practiced right now, with all its excess emissions and destruction of carbon-fixing soil biota, counts as an offset to existing industrial and transportation emissions. He's one of the many people who doesn't see the difference between 21st century organic farming and 19th century toil, steadfastly refusing to admit that the system of doing things that he loves is destroying the farms that he claims to champion.

Whether its global warming threatening crop productivity or large agribusinesses coming up with models that snatch all the profits from actual producers, agriculture's never been in so much trouble. Peterson wants to throw money at the problem without putting any effort or thought into rethinking how we got here so it doesn't happen again.

Shortsightedness FTW!