Legislation to address global climate change squeezed through the U.S. House in June, but action in the Senate has been postponed, and farm interests remain divided on the issue.
The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee held a hearing in early July, but no bill has yet been introduced in the Upper Chamber. After the hearing, Chairman Barbara Boxer (D-CA) said she won't be able to meet her self-imposed deadline of passing a bill out of committee by early August, and delayed further discussion until after Congress returns from summer recess after Labor Day. Boxer insisted the Senate will still be able to pass the bill before the end of the calendar year, but wouldn't guarantee it will be reconciled with the House version and delivered to President Obama before he meets with other world leaders at a global warming summit this December in Copenhagen.
The House bill passed 219-212 with a big assist from Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson (D-MN), who brokered a deal with the lead sponsors that would create a role for agriculture in the bill’s “cap-and-trade” program. The legislation calls for a 17 percent reduction from a 2005 baseline of emissions thought to contribute to global warming by 2020; further out, the targets are 42 percent by 2030 and 83 percent by 2050. Industries that want to maintain higher emission levels would have to buy credits from others whose operations remove carbon from the atmosphere; under Peterson’s amendment, the U.S. Department of Agriculture would oversee a program that would grant those credits to farmers, ranchers and forestland owners whose conservation improvements since 2001 produce carbon savings. The compromise also prevents EPA from using “indirect land use” to disqualify U.S. biofuels processors from use mandates; the agency has ruled U.S. biofuel incentives encourage increased crop production, and reduce carbon savings, here and in foreign countries.
Conservative Democrats joined most House Republicans in voting against the bill. Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) noted she was among ten Democrats who sent a letter to Majority Leader Harry Reid last year saying they couldn’t support the cap-and-trade bill that was being proposed, and said she still questions whether that’s the right approach. She told reporters, “The most important thing is to recognize the economic environment we’re taking this initiative up in.”
Lincoln said the House bill would subject 85 percent of the economy to increased costs, and “asking 85 percent of the economic engines out there in our economy to take some kind of an economic hit in these times is really a difficult thing to do, particularly if we want to see these industries, if not growing and creating jobs, at least keeping the jobs and stabilizing themselves.”
Many legislators fear cap-and-trade could produce unintended consequences from large developing nations like China.
Jeff Windett, executive vice president of the Missouri Cattlemen’s Association, said he does not see a single redeeming factor in the House bill. “I think they’ve overestimated the amount of contribution to greenhouse gas emissions that agriculture is responsible for,” Windett told Ozarks Farm & Neighbor, “and it hasn’t been clearly defined as to what the costs are going to be to livestock producers.” Nor, he said, did the House define how the credits in the offset program would be structured, allocated, or used.
Windett said lawmakers are in too much of a hurry to take action; at 1,500 pages, he said, he doesn’t see how any House members who voted for the bill could have read it all. And, Windett added, his group’s members don’t even buy into the need for a global warming bill. He said, “There’s conflicting stories that show that maybe the Earth is cooling, and going through a cooling cycle right now.”
Representative John Boozman, U.S. Congressman for the 3rd District of Arkansas, said in an opinion piece in June 25, 2009, “Arkansas unemployment is at seven percent, up 1.3 percent from six months ago and unemployment nationwide is near 10 percent. Numbers released by the Heritage Foundation show this legislation will have a big impact on Arkansas jobs. More than 3,600 jobs will be lost in 2012, the first year of implementation of cap-and-trade and consumer spending is expected to decrease by more than $435 million the same year in the Third District alone.”
