A weekly reckoning with life in a warming world—and the fight to save it |
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FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES |
Let’s talk about farming. Specifically, let’s talk about the agricultural lobby, whose job is basically to keep you confused about what farming is.
Last Thursday, The New Republic published a piece about the American Farm Bureau Federation, currently the largest agricultural lobbying group and third-largest insurance company in the country. In the past few years, the Farm Bureau, which once called for the Environmental Protection Agency to be abolished and has sued it multiple times, has started portraying itself as a climate advocate. Specifically, Charlie Mitchell noted, it’s joined environmental groups to propose a set of “climate policy recommendations” that include paying farmers for the carbon their crops take out of the air and sequester in the soil.
In reality, Charlie wrote, the data behind soil sequestration is mixed, and “soil carbon” has become a troubling tool of large corporations looking to make net-zero pledges without actually cutting their emissions. It sounds terrific, but without serious regulation and accountability measures it’s worse than useless, providing cover for companies to avoid transitioning off fossil fuels. And the agricultural lobby, meanwhile, is eager to avoid any kind of regulations that might disrupt the way American agriculture is currently run, which is in fact tremendously environmentally damaging, with methane and carbon dioxide emissions that have grown, not shrunk, in the past few decades. American agriculture is not, as a 2019 U.S. Farmers and Ranchers lobby video suggested as part of the broader farm lobby climate pivot, a bunch of family farmers selflessly fighting an epic battle to save the planet while regulators try to put them out of business. |
“While small-scale farmers (especially those of color) undoubtedly have it tough,” Charlie wrote, “American agriculture—increasingly consolidated and overwhelmingly white at the managerial level—is virtually exempt from fair labor standards, clean air or water regulations, and property taxes. The government shells out tens of billions per to keep the richest farmers in business.” Meanwhile, “farming’s most pollutive elements (factory farms) are expanding.”
You might be thinking, at this point, that TNR is awfully hard on farmers. But Inside Climate News also published a piece on American agriculture on Thursday, showing just how much money organizations like the Farm Bureau have dedicated to keeping the public and politicians either unaware or apathetic about American agriculture’s environmental problems. Reporter Georgina Gustin summed up some of the highlights of a new study from New York University:
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| Industry lobby groups—the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the National Pork Producers Council, the North American Meat Institute, the National Chicken Council, the International Dairy Foods Association and the American Farm Bureau Federation, along with its state members—spent nearly $200 million, much of it lobbying against climate and environmental regulations, from 2000 to 2019, the authors found. |
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These organizations helped sink the 2009 cap-and-trade bill and have funded and disseminated research “downplaying the emissions from livestock production.” Their total lobbying figures are surprisingly close to those of the energy industry: |
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| The authors calculated that U.S. agribusiness, which includes meat and dairy companies and also other agricultural companies, spent $750 million on national political candidates from 2000 to 2020. The U.S. energy sector, by comparison, spent $1 billion. The same agribusinesses spent $2.5 billion on lobbying from 2000 [to] 2019, compared to $6.2 billion by energy and natural resource companies. |
The wildly unsustainable and rampantly cruel business models pervading American agriculture are something of a favorite topic here at Apocalypse Soon. And, frustratingly, the extent to which American agriculture is contributing to cascading ecological crises has yet to penetrate the public consciousness, let alone public policy. So expect to read more about this in the months to come.
—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor
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Residents of Piney Point, Florida, have been told it’s safe to return home after a leak in a giant reservoir full of wastewater from a phosphate mine. Let’s call this … mixed news. Giant open ponds of wastewater are a terrible idea, particularly as climate change increases the risk of overflow and leakage during or after storms. Florida, in particular, has a huge problem with water contamination, as Nick Martin wrote in March. |
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Greenland’s glaciers are melting quickly and sliding into the ocean, thanks to the way meltwater forms rivers that then accelerate the process. |
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Simply adding bike lanes seems to increase cycling levels up to 48 percent, according to a new study covered by The New York Times last week. |
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| Elsewhere in the Ecosystem |
| Over at The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert ties together Biden’s infrastructure plan—bafflingly packaged by the president as a way to “outcompete the Chinese”—with Japan’s cherry blossoms. The trees, which were adopted as a national symbol “to shrug off the influence of its more powerful neighbor,” are blooming earlier and earlier due to climate change—and already were “prematurely fading” when Biden announced his plan last week. It’s a lyrical essay with a political point: |
| Last week, as the details of Biden’s plan were revealed, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, tweeted that the President’s plan needed “to be way bigger.” Another possibility is that spending money isn’t enough. When it comes to cutting carbon, the stick may be just as important as the carrot—perhaps more so. Putting up wind turbines doesn’t, in itself, accomplish much for the climate: emissions fall only when fossil-fuel plants are shuttered. |
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