News from a Changing Planet -- # 47--Farm Bill Business
Thinking about the Farm Bill and talking about beef with a real live cattleman.
There comes a time in every woman’s life when she spends a few days reading about the Farm Bill, “the most important climate bill this Congress will pass,” according to some, (except that this Congress might not pass one). That time has come for me.
The Farm Bill is a big government spending bill, one that combines agriculture subsidies and crop insurance with nutrition assistance (SNAP), which helps feed millions of hungry Americans each year. It’s supposed to be renegotiated and passed every 5 years, but in 2013, it came two years late, and then last year, the 2023 bill was extended to this year in the budgetary mess last fall, with the possibility that it won’t get passed until 2025.
The Farm Bill is a climate bill because it’s a food/agriculture bill, and our food system, depending on how you count or where you get your estimates, accounts for an enormous amount of the national greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. According to the EPA, agriculture is responsible for about 11 percent of emissions; according to Earthjustice, an environmental litigation non-profit organization, it’s actually about 30 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions, larger than transportation. And agriculture — particularly animal agriculture — has environmental impacts that stretch far beyond planet-warming emissions: air quality, water quality, biodiversity, etc.
Given that my Farm Bill time had come, I was listening to/reading this interview between David Roberts at Volts and Peter Lehner, the head of Earthjustice’s sustainable food and farming program, about why the Farm Bill matters so much for climate change.
“Even if we do clean up our energy system and our industrial system to a no-carbon situation where we hope to of course, that's where we're putting so much effort into, we will still almost certainly face catastrophic climate change because of the contribution of agriculture alone,” Lehner said. “If we do everything else perfectly and we don't change our agriculture system and don't address agriculture's contribution to climate change, we are blowing past 1.5 degrees [Celsius], blowing past two degrees,” he said.
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