Can The Farmers and Cap-And-Trade Be Friends?
The Wash Post's Steven Pearlstein lays into the ways in which the ag industry boondoggled cap-and-trade:
Farmers demanded that they be allowed to earn some extra cash by reducing the carbon footprint on their farms and selling these "offsets" to the factories and power plants unlucky enough to be subject to the carbon-cap regime. They want to be paid extra if they change the feedstock to cut down on cow burps and farts. Or if they use the no-till method for planting seeds, which doesn't release the carbon trapped in the soil. Or if they put in devices to trap the methane released from animal poop.
And they demanded to be paid not just if they do these things in the future, but also if they did them last year or the year before. They demanded the payments even if they are already getting a check from the government to do the same things as part of some other conservation program. And perhaps most notably, they demanded that the job of supervising this offset program be shifted from the Environmental Protection Agency, whose focus would actually be ensuring that the reductions are real, to the Department of Agriculture, which sees its mission as preserving, protecting and defending American farm subsidies….
There was also an ethanol boondoggle to protect.
It seems those pesky scientists over at the EPA had done a preliminary analysis showing that if you considered the indirect effects of producing a lot of additional corn-based ethanol -- like the need to make up for the lost food production somewhere else -- then ethanol might not qualify as a carbon-reducing "renewable fuel" under the 2007 energy bill, potentially jeopardizing ethanol's guaranteed market of 15 billion gallons a year. To rectify this gross injustice, Elmer demanded—and won —a five-year moratorium on any final determination while a study is conducted on how the EPA was conducting its study.
Pearlstein notes that even with more sweeteners than a gallon of high-fructose corn syrup dumped into the mix, farm lobbyists were still urging a "no" vote on cap-and-trade because it would still cost farmers a plugged nickel or something. Pearlstein, like Paul Krugman (who declaimed congressmen voting "no" as guilty of planetary treason), is in favor of cap-and-trade. Which strikes me as weird coming from a guy who has just detailed what a load of sweetheart deals and compromises the legislation is larded up with. By every account, this bill is so filled with deals to buy off any possible disagreement that it is simply one more taxpayer-funded giveaway at a time when we can afford as little largess as possible.
Reason.tv called bullshit on ethanol in this memorable video:
