Sinks Or Swim

Building Farm State Support For Climate Legislation

There is an odd irony in the fact that most of the impetus for climate change legislation is coming from office bound urban elites while those who have the most experience of its effects are in rural areas and work outdoors. Who is that? Farmers for one; I was a farmer for 25 years, and I worked outdoors year round in the mountains of southern Vermont. To me climate change is a reality.

And I'm not the only one. A Bloomberg report this past Thursday focused on Nebraska farmer Rex Woolen, who has no doubts about it, and who sold an estimated 470 tons of carbon credits (most farm credits are "aggregated,"  or packaged together to make units large enough for markets). For example the North Dakota Farmers Union packaged the carbon credits of 3,900 of its members and got about $9 million in payments to be split among them.

There is a great quote attributed to Woollen about his fellow farmers' first take on the idea: "They called me a tree hugger. Then I showed them my first check."

Oh, how well I know this feeling! When I left farming I went to work for the Rodale Institute, where I help develop a farm economic modeling package that used USDA economic data to compare the returns of conventional and organic farming. The whole of the project was to get cash numbers in the hands of farmers who were considering a transtion. Otherwise, they would have a hard time convincing lenders and land owners to back the shift.

This is not unlike the shift to ethanol (don't get me started!) and the ethanol point is made, predictably, in this Bloomberg piece by Farm Bureau president Bob Stallman. But the fact is that we need to find other ways to compensate farmers than have been tried in the past, and all the evidence points to a conclusion that agriculture can have a positive or a negative effect on carbon emissions.

The two hangups? Quantifying the carbon balance for different practices, and determining a price that is profitable for the farmer. Fortunately it looks like the House Agriculture Committee is thinking seriously about this (finally) both in terms of funding the necessary research (a bunch is already under way, but we need more) and soliciting broad opinion about market positioning.

And there is the political reality consider. If you want farm state legislators to support climate change laws, then you need to not only make a case for why it should be done, but how it will benefit their consituents is a dollars and sense fashion. I'm all for it.

Round and Round, Going Nowhere

It's the weekend and I have been cleaning out files (I need to make room in my cramped office for new ones, right?). One hanging folder I came across was marked "Climate Change" and the materials in it were mostly from the late 1990's though there were a few from the late 80's, too. I may list them (for fun) in another post, but here I want to hightlight one nicely produced letter size 16 page pamphlet from July of '97 put out by a group called Environmental Media Services (now replaced by Science Communication Network).

It is called "Understanding the Economics of Global Climate Change," and from the laid in letter from the Executive Director and the beginning of the introduction it is clear that it is a counter-piece to the PR of the (then) well know energy industry group called the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), a fog-wash group I used to follow that tried to muddy the policy waters of Washington and forestall any kind of meaningful action on GHG reductions (GHGs largely produced by their member companies).

What strikes me about the pamphlet is this: we may have marginally more data about the changes in the global climate (most registered locally...a common and misguided critique that I have dealt with elsewhere) but the core arguments have not advanced an iota. I will be out front about the fact that I believe this is due to the lack of vision on the part of elected officials that has made them susceptible to the direct lobbying pressure of interest groups like GCC, and the indirect pressure of constituents who have been propagandized by GCC and their allies. They succeeded just enough during the corporate democrat Clinton years, and dominated during the grease-the-skids-to-hell Bush years, and so we have gone, really, nowhere (except farther into the abyss) to the extent that most of this 16 page booklet could have been written yesterday.

Ah, like the Buddhist Wheel of Life, we go round-and-round, learning nothing.

Reading through this tract was like revisiting the last thirty years of my education (or was that life....or what is the....oh, yeah<G>)

"Often treated like a hard science, economics is in fact a far more subjective discipline."

"...conventional economic methods are poorly equipped to process issues like those posed by climate change, where effects are long-lasting, widely dispersed and irreversible." (By far the best explanation of why this happens is in the British book Timescapes of Modernity by Barbara Adam, which I bought at Blackwell's some years ago and can recommend highly.)

"...in the case of climate change, there happens to be a consistent structural bias against taking steps to solve the problem."

That structural bias has two main parts, valuing of natural sources and sinks at zero, and the use of Net Present Value to discount future benefits of current investments while costing the investment in them at present value. This is nothing new. We have known this a long time -- I personally have known this since hearing it in my college courses at UMass Amherst in the late 70's, which means it was common academic / policy knowledge long before -- and yet we are still stalled at the stop light, one foot on the brake of prudence (we'd like to think, but more likely inhibition, or caution, or cowardice) while the other foot is full down on the throttle of consumption, and the Monster Truck of our path to (environmental) Hell is burning rubber and making a helluva scream that the crowd loves in its Colliseum fervor. Duce! Duce! Thumbs down!

Earth Hour

Don't forget: tomorrow is the 28th, and everybody is going to be turning off their lights for an hour between 8:30 and 9:30 PM local time. Supposedly that is going to include Coke and Mickey-D's signs worldwide. Here's a link: http://www.earthhour.org/home/

Silver Bullet Turns To Iron

A BBC report yesterday noted that a controversial German-Indian experiment in the Southern hemisphere ocean found that a scaled up algae seeding project on 330 sq km did not lead to the increased carbon sequestration that the researchers had expected from earlier, smaller experiments.

The idea was relatively straightforward, though the implications of full scale deployment of the strategy alarmed some critics. Here is how it was to work: seeding iron filings into the ocean would stimulate phytoplankton (algae), which would extract CO2 from the atmosphere, then die and settle to the ocean bottom, where that carbon would become tied up in sediments and remain sequestered for long periods, reducing the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Based on those earlier experiments, at least one commerical company is planning much larger -- up to 40,000 sq km -- experiments using funds from the global carbon offsets market. As one critic cited in the BBC article (from Greenpeace) noted: "if we're going to be pursing this as a climate mitigation strategy, then we're looking at a state of the world where we rely on manipulating the ocean on a truly huge scale." Manipulation is about dumping and treating, whereas finessing is about fine tuning existing systems for optimality. These are, at the heart, two very different approaches.

Now, recognition of the need to actually remove historical CO2 from the atmosphere was one of the reasons that prompted me to start this blog, and doing so via plants seems to me the best, most natural way to do so. But this "seeding" strikes me as too much of a silver (iron?) bullet approach. It doesn't really recognize the complexity of interaction in natural systems, and long term, recognition, acceptance and finessing of those systems (to which we belong) is the only answer that is going to stick -- and it is going to involve lifestyle and consumption changes, too --- du-uh!

What really gets me about this kind of idea is the silver bullet mentality, the Oh-Mi-God, just buy the right lottery tickey, Hail Mary approach.

So what actually happened? They spread six tons of iron filings. There was a burst of algal growth. The algae were eaten by copepods (I'll spare you the recitation of the food chain but it is -- not surprisingly -- as complex and interesting as that in the soil), which were eaten by amphipods, etc, etc, and so the desired "desposition" didn't happen.

Oh, well.

BTW, there are a lot of "whatever-e-pods" in the ocean food chain, species after species of mini-crustaceans -- some with barely a shell to deserve the term -- that are the heart of that food chain, the base of that food pyramid (of which, again, we are at the top...don't forget that) and these many diverse species have a real dependence on the pH of the ocean, which is changing as it absorbs more CO2 directly (chemically) and is becoming more acidic. I will try to come back to this post to link to some of that stuff in a day or so....

Here's a link to BBC report: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7959570.stm

Going Dutch In Bangladesh?

No I think they'll stick with Bengali, at least for now. The New York Times ran a piece yesterday about redirecting the flow of sediment down the Ganges Delta in a low tech way to raise the elevation of especially flood prone areas. The idea is that doing so could ameliorate some of the effects of sea level rise from climate change. A comparison to the Netherlands -- first world high tech versus third world low tech -- is especially interesting as the reporter quotes the Dutch Ambassador. Also noted: that it is a village himself who discovered the process, which uses natural flows themselves to increase the protection of his land -- and raise agicultural yields and income.

And just as the Dutch have employed very high tech, very expensive methods to hold back the North Sea, there are plenty of solutions out there for Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) that take the same kind of approach. Meanwhile there are farmers and foresters all over the world in a position to do the same thing in a much more low tech way; the big question is how to quantify, coordinate, and increase the efficiency of their efforts, many of which represent the "technology" of millenia.

The farmer, Abdul Lateef apparently discovered his trick by accident, a process I am familiar with from my own days as a farmer. Much in the same way that European farmers discovered the crop Belgian endive by mistake back in the early 1800's, I discovered how to grow radicchio in the Northeast US by mistake. And how -- according to evolutionary theory -- do plants and animals adapt to their environment? Natural selection of any number of "mistakes." Accidental discovery and improvement.

Given my other blogs (Big MACC and Hand to Mouth) I would be very curious to know the scale of this farmer's paddies, and what his methods are, because in many parts of the rice growing regions shrimp are no longer the traditional part of the cropping scheme they once were (along with pulses and vegetables on the dikes) due to the use of pesticides in the paddy water.

In the end it is felt that this might be able to make a three foot difference. But predictions for sea level rise -- even in South Asia -- is way more than that, and then the monsoon cycle (unless, I suppose, that changed) adds onto that. That doesn't mean ideas (and actions) like this don't matter -- they do -- but only that we need to keep in mind that there is more to do, on a while range of fronts, if we are successfully deal with the climate implications of our past profligacy.

The Sky is Falling! The Sky...No Wait...The Sea Is Rising

There were (at least) a couple of articles this week building on the studies that show the northeast USA is going to be particularly hard hit by sea level changes over the next 50-100 years.

One, off the AP feed last Monday, covers the particular vulnerability of New York City because of its low elevation and the massive and intricate underground infrastructure that would, in many scenarios, be flooded. No earthquakes to worry about, just millions of acre feet of brackish water spilling into the guts of the world's finance capital, shorting out the power which keeps the city that never sleeps awake. I came across it first on the MSNBC site.

The other, from the Washington Post a few days later, is about shoreline erosion on the Delmarva Peninsula. It would be an interesting excerise -- I assume it has been done, and I suppose I should just find it for our mutual enlightenment -- to map just what is going to be under water, and when. I know Florida is in trouble, and I assume the Outer Banks and a lot of Delmarva and New Jersey are likely to look considerably different as the next millenium rolls around. The farther north you go in the east, the more high land there seems to be, right at the coast; same out on the Left Coast...there is plenty to be lost, but still plenty that's going to stay dry, even in the worst scenarios.

Anyway, if I do find that graphic, I'll at least throw up a link.

New Climate Science Guide Available

A group of government agencies recently collaborated to produce a new guide to climate issues with the stated goal of improving the choices both professionals and laypeople make. You can download a copy at www.climatescience.gov (we'll be taking a look at it ourselves, and will be sure to post again if we see something that deserves notice).

EPA RFP RE: Carbon Sequestration & Pasture Management

Yesterday the EPA published an RFP (Request for Proposals) for a quanitative study of soil carbon sequestration changes resulting from improved pasture management. The agency anticipates awarding one grant of up to $150,000 based on proposals received by April 20, 2009.

As the request notes, there are about 700 million acres of grasslands in the US, and from what has been seen in studies of turf land (only about 50 million acres) the potential for sink improvement is tremendous. This study will add one more increasingly quantitative piece to the annual inventory of sources and sinks which is critical to guiding our choices of the most effective ways to sequester not only newly created GHGs, but the historical burden already in the atmosphere.

The award is open to most non-individual entities, and does not require a cost-share or matching. For more information about this program, see the PDF at http://www.epa.gov/air/grants/09-07.pdf .