The American Farm Bureau is continuing to lie to farmers about the threat of Clean Air Act regulation of greenhouse gases.  Brad Johnson has the story in this Wonk Room repost.

The Bureau, the largest lobbying group for American agriculture, denies the threat of global warming of farming, instead fearmongering for years about a mythical “cow tax.” Speaking to members of the Kansas Farm Bureau yesterday, AFB lobbyist Rick Krause claimed the Environmental Protection Agency “will require all farms with more than 25 dairy cows and more than 50 head of beef cattle or 200 head of hogs to get a Clean Air Permit”:

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Dorfman on HuffPost: “Let’s Stop Debating Global Warming, Instead Convince People To Solve It”

I understand why anti-science disinformers like Marc Morano kick climate science messaging when it’s down.  But why Josh Dorfman?

The Host of “The Lazy Environmentalist” writes on Huffpost how he got truck drivers and other car enthusiasts excited by the “fast speeds, raw power, and American self-reliance” of electric cars running on American electricity.  Cool.  I’m all for it.  Been pushing electric drive vehicles myself for quite some time.  Heck, been pushing the American self-reliance pitch a long, long time (see my 1996 Atlantic Monthly article, “MidEast Oil Forever”).

But then he feels obliged to join the circular firing squad:

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The bipartisan effort of Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC), John Kerry (D-MA), and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) to craft comprehensive clean energy legislation that caps global warming pollution has brought some positive words from Big Oil and their political allies.  Brad Johnson explains why in this Wonk Room repost.

In particular, the senators are considering a proposal by ConocoPhillips, BP America and ExxonMobil to exclude petroleum producers and refiners from a carbon market and instead levy a carbon fee. “Once you have oil people saying, ‘We can live with this, this was our idea,’ then hopefully everybody else begins to look at this thing anew,” Graham told reporters. “That’s the hope.” However, the American Petroleum Institute’s Jack Gerard explained that the “support” from the oil industry for a carbon fee on petroleum will come in the form of “signs at the gas pump letting people know they’re paying more because of U.S. efforts to deal with climate change”:

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Rick Krause

The American Farm Bureau is continuing to lie to farmers about the threat of Clean Air Act regulation of greenhouse gases. The Bureau, the largest lobbying group for American agriculture, denies the threat of global warming of farming, instead fearmongering for years about a mythical “cow tax.” Speaking to members of the Kansas Farm Bureau yesterday, AFB lobbyist Rick Krause claimed the Environmental Protection Agency “will require all farms with more than 25 dairy cows and more than 50 head of beef cattle or 200 head of hogs to get a Clean Air Permit”:

Cap and trade legislation appears to be a dead duck in this year’s Congress, but those tempted to celebrate too early need to be aware of the potential consequences of EPA regulation of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, American Farm Bureau specialist Rick Krause said Monday. Speaking to members of the Kansas Farm Bureau attending this week’s annual County Presidents Tour in Washington, D.C., Krause said EPA regulation will require all farms with more than 25 dairy cows and more than 50 head of beef cattle or 200 head of hogs to get a Clean Air Permit. In addition, it could require permits for the construction of any new outbuildings or remodeling of existing structures, he said. “Right now, the best hope is that Congress will pass legislation to nullify this,” he said.

Krause is quite simply lying.

His “cow tax” lie is based on a figure from the Bush-era US Department of Agriculture, which noted that a 100-ton-per-year threshold of greenhouse gas pollution would cover “even very small agricultural operations” — “dairy facilities with over 25 cows, beef cattle operations of over 50 cattle, swine operations with over 200 hogs, and farms with over 500 acres of corn may need to get a Title V permit.”

The Environmental Protection Agency has no intentions of implementing a 100-ton-per-year threshold. Instead, it has proposed implementing a 25,000-ton threshold, and EPA Administration Jackson has announced that the initial threshold will instead be at least 75,000 tons, and only for power plants until 2013. So even for industrial farms with 6,250 dairy cows, 12,500 beef cattle, 50,000 hogs, or 125,000 acres of corn, the EPA has no plans for enforcement of the Clean Air Act any time soon.

Industrial agriculture is a major source of greenhouse gas pollution, primarily from fertilizers and soil use, cattle flatulence, and manure ponds, generating 6.2% percent of United States emissions in 2008. The US Department of Agriculture has found that by changing practices farmers could instead make American agriculture a net sink for global warming pollution, letting plants soak up carbon dioxide.

Congress has already passed legislation to prevent the enforcement of the Clean Air Act for any livestock production, even from mega-ranches like Smithfield’s 800,000 head feedlot in Colorado. In the 2010 budget resolution passed last year, Congress forbids the issuance of permits for emissions “resulting from biological processes associated with livestock production”:

PROHIBITION ON USE OF FUNDS
SEC. 424. Notwithstanding any other provision of law, none of the funds made available in this Act or any other Act may be used to promulgate or implement any regulation requiring the issuance of permits under title V of the Clean Air Act (42 U.S.C. 7661 et seq.) for carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, water vapor, or methane emissions resulting from biological processes associated with livestock production.

Furthermore, both the House and Senate versions of climate legislation forbid the EPA from issuing permits for agricultural emissions, instead rewarding farmers with the opportunity to make billions of dollars through voluntary reductions.

The response to the [email] vandals is to bury them with the data and experience of a century of scholarly research and analysis. The information that is important in making the decisions as to how to manage our world is unequivocal and must be advanced, not as questions at the edge of scientific knowledge where scientist like to dwell, but as the facts that they are, facts as immutable as the law of gravity. The climatic disruption is not a theory open to a belief system any more than the solar system is a theory, or gravity, or the oceanic tides, or evolution.  This approach is uncompromising, partisan in the sense of selected for the purpose. It is not a lecture to undergraduates; nor is it ecology 101. It is a clear statement of what is required for government to do its job in protecting the public welfare. The scientific community has a firm responsibility in this realm now. This is not the time to wring our hands over the challenges to hyper-scientific objectivity, the purity of scholars, and to tie ourselves in knots with apologies for alleged errors of trifling import.

That’s the opening paragraph of a statement Dr. George M. Woodwell emailed me yesterday.  Woodwell, founder, Director Emeritus and Senior Scientist at the The Woods Hole Research Center, was responding to some “private e-mails obtained by [the uber conservative newspaper] The Washington Times,” including one of his that has been misrepresented.

Since Woodwell has blogged here before, I asked him to clarify his original use of the word “partisan,” since I was pretty sure he was not using it in its Washingon, DC political sense, as some have implied.  He wasn’t.  In addition to his statement, he sent me a remarkable piece of 1988 Senate testimony he gave (reprinted below), which makes clear he has been at the forefront of warning the public about the dangers of human caused global warming.

His statement continues:

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Governments estimated to spend $500 billion a year to subsidize fossil fuels

The world might be spending as much as $500 billion annually to subsidize fossil fuels, researchers working at the direction of President Obama and other leaders have found.

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Murkowski walks back her ANWR demand

What I think Obama needs to be doing now is hard lobbying one-on-one with key swing senators.  That way he can focus on a targeted pitch for each one and have a frank discussion.  He needs to start moving people one-by-one from the “fence sitter” to the “probably yes” category.  Instead, he (and Energy Secretary Chu, Interior’s Salazar, and Ag’s Tom Vilsack), is meeting with a whole bunch of them at once, as The Hill Reports:

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Calculating the Credit Subsidy Fee on a Loan Guarantee for a New Nuclear Reactor

A few weeks ago, Obama tripled the budget for the nuclear loan guarantee program,  though there hasn’t been a single promising application in two years.   CAP Policy Analyst Richard W. Caperton explains what that risky move means for American taxpayers in this repost.

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Colorado isn’t waiting for Washington to move aggressively on clean energy, as CAP Senior Fellow Tom Kenworthy explains here.

On March 5, the state Senate approved a measure to increase Colorado’s renewable energy standard (RES) to 30% by 2020, and on March 8th, the House finalized the bill, sending it to Gov. Bill Ritter for his signature.

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