Indigenous Environmental Services

At the Commodity Classic in Anaheim, California, Friday, a Washington expert who works with farmers on carbon policies tried to shatter some myths about cap and trade legislation still being considered in Congress.

Laura Sands of the Clark Group, LLC, acknowledged the widespread fear of potential costs for farmers from a cap and trade law that would put limits on carbon emissions from major industries.

“I think all of our groups are very leery of what’s coming down the pike,” said Sands, who is the coordinator for the Agricultural Carbon Market Working Group.

Yet neither Washington nor the marketplace are going to drop efforts to control greenhouse gas emissions, she said.

Wal-Mart has already done lifecycle analysis of the milk and cotton t-shirts its sells, looking at carbon emissions from the farms that grow grain for dairy cows and cotton, through dairy farms and manufacturing, then packaging and transportation to the shelf. It turns out that in the dairy industry, the biggest carbon footprint comes from milking cows, followed by feed grain production, not from packaging and shipping, she said.

In about 4 or 5 years, Wa-Mart customers will be able to choose products based on the store’s sustainability rating.

“If you’re selling wheat and you’re selling milk, you’re going to have a sustainability index for your product,” she said.

Even though Washington seems paralyzed, Sands doesn’t expect climate change legislation to die there.

“Nobody really believes this is a one administration issue,” she said. In the past, Republicans had supported climate change legislation. The Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act introduced in 2007 had nine Republican sponsors in the Senate, she said. Republicans concerned about national security see cap and trade legislation as one way of gaining more energy independence for the U.S.

Nor is it very likely that the EPA won’t regulate greenhouse gases if Congress fails to pass legislation, she said. It was ordered to do so by a Supreme Court ruling.

Sands also encouraged her listeners to be skeptical of some economic projections of how cap and trade would affect agriculture.

The assumption that a bill passed by the House last year would lead mainly to trees being planted on cropland isnt accurate, she said.

That analysis by the EPA was done on a version of the House’s Waxman-Markey bill before House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson got an amendment approved to add carbon trading on farmland. Before that change in the bill, the only offset allowed on farmland was tree planting.

Sands said that most economic analysis of cap and trade bills assumes that there would be just one type of carbon offset allowed, such as no-till. There are at least a dozen ways to manage carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, she said, including precision agriculture which can reduce farm inputs.

Depending on how the legislation is written, agriculture could gain billions of dollars in new income, she said. But some bills would cap carbon emissions without any offsets being paid to agriculture. The best one may be legislation being drafted by South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham and Massachusetts Democrat, John Kerry, if it includes agricultural credits in another bill introduced by Senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan.

She encouraged farmers to stay involved in how cap and trade legislation is written. Whether you believe climate change is manmade or not is irrelevant, she said.

“Leaving the playing field lets others determine your fate, and that’s not a very good outcome for us,” she said.