Is the Copenhagan Climate Conference at the Mercy of US Industrial Agriculture?

Photo by ItzaFineDay

On Tuesday at the Copenhagan Climate Summit, an official announcement from the World Meteorological Organization announced that the year 2009 will be recorded as one of the top ten warmest years on record since the advent of instrumental climate records in 1850.  UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon proclaimed that the Copenhagan conference “can and must be a turning point in the world’s efforts to prevent runaway climate change.”  With such a definitive context for world to address solutions to climate change, the conference is still likely to be dominated by resistance from the economic interests of the world’s most powerful nations.  For the United States, one of the most influential of these interests is agriculture.

“Can rural America hold the world to ransom?” was a question recently posed by a BBC ethics columnist regarding the climate change bill now in debate in the Senate, noting that Congressmen from states with mainly rural populations are generally the least willing to support climate-change legislation.

On average, rural Americans are more reliant on fossil fuels than people living in urban areas due to their use of motorized farm equipment, and fertilizers and pesticides derived from oil.  For many farmers, it is impossible to imagine staying in business without access to cheap fossil fuels.  A study by Michael Cragg and Matthew Kahn found that poor, conservative areas emit more carbon dioxide per person than rich, liberal regions, and consequently representatives from these poor areas are much less likely to support legislation to curb carbon usage.

This reliance on fossil fuel in rural areas became apparent when the American Clean Energy and Security Act was introduced in the House of Representatives.  The act included a cap-and-trade global warming reduction plan designed to reduce economy-wide greenhouse gas emissions 17 percent by 2020. Although the bill was eventually passed, opposition from Representatives from rural areas forced the bill’s supporters to make various concessions which ultimately weakened the effectiveness of the bill.

Approval of the bill in the Senate will be even more difficult, given that Senators from rural states, representing a mere 11% of the population, can block any bill.  Many of these states with the lowest population density are heavily dependent on coal.  For instance, while California gets only 1% of its energy from coal, West Virginia gets 98%.  This explains why both Democratic senators from West Virginia have said that they will not vote for the climate change bill.

The Obama administration maintains that the cap-and-trade program will not harm farmers and will actually help them in the long run.  Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack wrote the following in a column for the Des Moines Register:

I believe that there are significant opportunities for rural landowners in a cap-and-trade program that recognizes the contribution that farms, ranches and forests can make in addressing climate change. Rural landowners can benefit from incentives in climate and energy legislation that reward production of renewable energy, such as wind and bioenergy.

The National Farmers Union supports a national, mandatory carbon emission cap and trade system to reduce nonfarm greenhouse gas emissions.  They support the House’s climate-change bill, however they oppose the bill currently in the Senate because they say it does not meet their conditions that U.S. Department of Agriculture be “granted control and administration of the agriculture offset program; that early actors are recognized; that no artificial cap is placed on domestic offsets; that carbon sequestration rates are based upon science; and that producers are permitted to stack environmental benefit credits.”

The world recognizes the United States as necessary leader in adopting the next generation of environmental policies, but when the leaders travel abroad they will naturally be hesitant to propose real change if their constituents at home cannot agree to their own measures of change.  The US’s reliance upon heavily industrialized food production appears to have great sway over policies at home, and in Copenhagen, it could mean the difference in creating substantial policies that could rescue the world from the climate crisis.