The Farm Bill is likely to pass in coming months and it is arguably the most important climate bill Congress will address this session. To talk about the climate impacts of agriculture & the opportunities in the Farm Bill, I talked to Peter Lehner of Earthjustice.
I listened to this twice to make sure I didn't miss it, and went back to listen to April's Biofuels podcast as well. Either I'm holding onto an archaic Farm Bill belief or I've got a nominee for the "underhyped issues" list. Please someone update my priors:
My understanding was that a big part (in overall climate impact if not dollars) of the farm bill is the subsidy for ethanol, this is talked about as a thing that exists in the biofuels conversation from April but not mentioned was where it lives in our appropriations and policy world. This conversation about the farm bill concentrated on food grown for food and not all the other stuff that sits inside a longstanding appropriation like the Farm Bill. That's probably a deliberate choice since between Peter and Dan they understand this area and the collection of all the other stuff that's wrong with the world is a big big enough topic to overshadow the Food implications of Farm Bill policy (nominally the point of this conversation). I did expect some mention of this issue, if it is the big deal I think it is. This missing mention makes the food focus of the conversation here land like evasion of big issues - we'll talk about food issues because we can make a change here that many people will think is common sense and unambiguously good while that intractable problem with the rest of the farm bill we'll just pretend there isn't anything we can do about. Like justifying anything you wanted in the 90s with an utterance of "for the children, " the food focus moves attention away from deeper problems with the farm bill. It provides reasons to get to yes, despite anything else that might be lurking in the bill. Sometimes the best policy is the policy we agree not to make; sometimes preserving that small glimmer of good in a wider ill is to be avoided.
Why do I think the ethanol subsidy a big deal? It drives land use in a particularly inefficient way (food for fuel) throughout the US, but also drives land use change in other countries (e.g. Brazil), and tariff evasion around the world (splash and dash in US ports to send non-compliant origin fossil fuels to Europe as an engineered product). Land use change from plantation farming for fuels comes from an entrenched and foolish US policy that undermines our own food and energy security - in the guise of a Farm Bill. This is, as I understand it, a big motivator for deforestation in the tropics - that sugar cane and palm oil isn't being grown for food and we're the ones waving that biofuels flag and using the Farm Bill to fund it. And while the relatively small subsidy in the US doesn't motivate as much land conversion, it carries further overseas both directly and through financial cleverness in being able to pick and choose how your product is classified/regulated/taxed in international markets.
If I've got that all wrong, I'd love to improve my understanding here.
Great pod. Recent studies show seaweed added to feed can reduce methane in cattle by 90%. Your guest hinted at the benefits of additives but this seems more promising.
Love to hear a pod on carbon sequester though seaweed farming.
David if you're going to delve into this. I would suggest you talk with the National Audubon Society and their successes with animal grazing and restoring wildlife.
Great pod. The talk about lagoons of animal waste made me think you ought to do a pod about Vanguard Renewables. They build digesters on farms to convert animal and food waste into renewable natural gas and electricity. https://www.vanguardrenewables.com
Volatilization of pesticides (including herbicides) and movement of pesticides into field tiles and ag drainage ditches gets little attention and very little monitoring. In the Midwest we are seeing damage to trees and other plants (lethal and not immediately lethal) and incredible loose of insect diversity - both terrestrial and aquatic insects. Perhaps not a very direct cause of climate change, but very likely a "follow-on" issue through loss of biodiversity in the soil, water, and air.
Another disappointing anti-beef tirade on this podcast.
Contrary to the overall impression left by this podcast, 99% of what a US beef cow consumes over its life is not edible by humans. Globally, that figure is 92%. 86% of what all livestock eat is not human edible. These stats are from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization research:
This is not to say that improvements can not be made. Mandating that CAFO manure lagoons be abolished and the manure instead be incorporated into soil would be helpful. Optimizing grassland grazing could sequester many more times carbon than a mature forest per acre.
THANK YOU for covering this topic, and especially for the clear explanation of the need to account for climate emissions and lost future natural sequestration capacity due to land use conversion. I also came from the energy side of climate mitigation, and ran across land use impacts when trying to grasp the climate emissions of biofuels. WA state agencies don’t have this on their radar (I’ve tried over the years to bring it up, unsuccessfully). Now I’m retired, and continue to see state agencies ignore lost natural carbon sequestration capacity in forestry, agriculture, and land use planning in general. Biodiversity loss due to land use is also critical and generally not recognized as an existential problem. THANKS for breaking across the siloed categories of energy and agriculture, and the shallow thinking that is making us do such dumb stuff! I will be sharing this episode.
As a retired MD now raising grass-fed livestock, a climate activist and in recent years a keen student of methane, I read with great interest the CH4 comments on the Farm Bill podcast. Some I agreed completely with, some not.
Dave, methane deserves its own episode of Volts, though it may seem far afield from electrification.
Future management of human-influenced methane emissions has enormous and unique potential to turn a corner on rising surface temps, because, as Roger says, methane is a “flow gas.” IF AND ONLY IF total human-influenced annual CH4 emissions were to end their rising trend, the conventional “equivalence” of CH4 to CO2 on a stated time horizon like a GWP100 would be recognized as without meaning. In a thought experiment, if these emissions were to level off, about ten years later humans would see CH4 no longer adding annually to radiative forcing, though it would still be contributing to it. If these emissions lessened over time, thought experimenters would see radiative forcing (and related heating-up) decline, even if hundreds of megatons of CH4 emissions would be seem equivalent by GWP20 or 100 (I prefer 20) to many Gt CO2.
Roger mentions GWP* (GWP star) as a novel metric proposed by an international group. GWP* is not related, however, to any “CO2 component” of CH4. It can’t be applied to one source of methane and not another in the same earth system. GWP* is a BRILLIANT TEACHING DEVICE that shows humankind how much leverage we theoretically have with CH4 on rising temps, while we have almost none on CO2’s effect until emissions are truly nil.
GWP* will speak truth, BUT ONLY ON THE ABOVE CONDITION, that CH4 emissions are unchanged or falling year to year. It is a hypothetical. GWP* is as meaningless in a system of rising CH4 emissions as would be GWP in a world of declining releases. In the tweeted citation the key word is “constant.”
Planned and unplanned CH4 emissions from the fossil fuel industry cannot be brought to zero. IMO the least harmful way to level off human-influenced methane releases is to stop increasing the world’s annual withdrawal of natural gas as we increase renewables, conservation, storage and innovative transmission.
To those who also won't listen to podcasts on monopolistic techbro web services, and want to download the MP3, note that if you open the "RSS feed" link as a text file, it contains the URL to the MP3 file, then you can download.
Thank you for doing this podcast David. This is such a fascinating area. The earth will not make it without healthy farming as part of the solution. People who don’t feel they can do anything to help climate change can make simple dietary changes that can make a difference (no meat for 2 meals a week.) SPCA had a program of meatless Mondays but I haven’t seen anything about that recently.
Excellent podcast! This is such an important topic, one disregarded most of the time. Thank you for stepping up to the job of informing countrymen about the Farm Bill.
And this figure is a bit of an overestimate, considering that livestock methane emissions are a biogas and should not be measured the same way as fossil methane.
I listened to this twice to make sure I didn't miss it, and went back to listen to April's Biofuels podcast as well. Either I'm holding onto an archaic Farm Bill belief or I've got a nominee for the "underhyped issues" list. Please someone update my priors:
My understanding was that a big part (in overall climate impact if not dollars) of the farm bill is the subsidy for ethanol, this is talked about as a thing that exists in the biofuels conversation from April but not mentioned was where it lives in our appropriations and policy world. This conversation about the farm bill concentrated on food grown for food and not all the other stuff that sits inside a longstanding appropriation like the Farm Bill. That's probably a deliberate choice since between Peter and Dan they understand this area and the collection of all the other stuff that's wrong with the world is a big big enough topic to overshadow the Food implications of Farm Bill policy (nominally the point of this conversation). I did expect some mention of this issue, if it is the big deal I think it is. This missing mention makes the food focus of the conversation here land like evasion of big issues - we'll talk about food issues because we can make a change here that many people will think is common sense and unambiguously good while that intractable problem with the rest of the farm bill we'll just pretend there isn't anything we can do about. Like justifying anything you wanted in the 90s with an utterance of "for the children, " the food focus moves attention away from deeper problems with the farm bill. It provides reasons to get to yes, despite anything else that might be lurking in the bill. Sometimes the best policy is the policy we agree not to make; sometimes preserving that small glimmer of good in a wider ill is to be avoided.
Why do I think the ethanol subsidy a big deal? It drives land use in a particularly inefficient way (food for fuel) throughout the US, but also drives land use change in other countries (e.g. Brazil), and tariff evasion around the world (splash and dash in US ports to send non-compliant origin fossil fuels to Europe as an engineered product). Land use change from plantation farming for fuels comes from an entrenched and foolish US policy that undermines our own food and energy security - in the guise of a Farm Bill. This is, as I understand it, a big motivator for deforestation in the tropics - that sugar cane and palm oil isn't being grown for food and we're the ones waving that biofuels flag and using the Farm Bill to fund it. And while the relatively small subsidy in the US doesn't motivate as much land conversion, it carries further overseas both directly and through financial cleverness in being able to pick and choose how your product is classified/regulated/taxed in international markets.
If I've got that all wrong, I'd love to improve my understanding here.
Great pod. Recent studies show seaweed added to feed can reduce methane in cattle by 90%. Your guest hinted at the benefits of additives but this seems more promising.
Love to hear a pod on carbon sequester though seaweed farming.
Thanks for all your work.
Steve
David if you're going to delve into this. I would suggest you talk with the National Audubon Society and their successes with animal grazing and restoring wildlife.
Great pod. The talk about lagoons of animal waste made me think you ought to do a pod about Vanguard Renewables. They build digesters on farms to convert animal and food waste into renewable natural gas and electricity. https://www.vanguardrenewables.com
Volatilization of pesticides (including herbicides) and movement of pesticides into field tiles and ag drainage ditches gets little attention and very little monitoring. In the Midwest we are seeing damage to trees and other plants (lethal and not immediately lethal) and incredible loose of insect diversity - both terrestrial and aquatic insects. Perhaps not a very direct cause of climate change, but very likely a "follow-on" issue through loss of biodiversity in the soil, water, and air.
Loved this! And, for the record, no anti-beef tirade ever disappoints.
Another disappointing anti-beef tirade on this podcast.
Contrary to the overall impression left by this podcast, 99% of what a US beef cow consumes over its life is not edible by humans. Globally, that figure is 92%. 86% of what all livestock eat is not human edible. These stats are from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization research:
https://www.cgiar.org/news-events/news/fao-sets-the-record-straight-86-of-livestock-feed-is-inedible-by-humans
The total GHG emissions of US beef cattle is less than 2% of US total GHG emissions according to the EPA:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/96198796@N05/33335275208/in/album-72157714202939482/
This is not to say that improvements can not be made. Mandating that CAFO manure lagoons be abolished and the manure instead be incorporated into soil would be helpful. Optimizing grassland grazing could sequester many more times carbon than a mature forest per acre.
THANK YOU for covering this topic, and especially for the clear explanation of the need to account for climate emissions and lost future natural sequestration capacity due to land use conversion. I also came from the energy side of climate mitigation, and ran across land use impacts when trying to grasp the climate emissions of biofuels. WA state agencies don’t have this on their radar (I’ve tried over the years to bring it up, unsuccessfully). Now I’m retired, and continue to see state agencies ignore lost natural carbon sequestration capacity in forestry, agriculture, and land use planning in general. Biodiversity loss due to land use is also critical and generally not recognized as an existential problem. THANKS for breaking across the siloed categories of energy and agriculture, and the shallow thinking that is making us do such dumb stuff! I will be sharing this episode.
We desperately need to reduce greenhouse gases ASAP.
As a retired MD now raising grass-fed livestock, a climate activist and in recent years a keen student of methane, I read with great interest the CH4 comments on the Farm Bill podcast. Some I agreed completely with, some not.
Dave, methane deserves its own episode of Volts, though it may seem far afield from electrification.
Future management of human-influenced methane emissions has enormous and unique potential to turn a corner on rising surface temps, because, as Roger says, methane is a “flow gas.” IF AND ONLY IF total human-influenced annual CH4 emissions were to end their rising trend, the conventional “equivalence” of CH4 to CO2 on a stated time horizon like a GWP100 would be recognized as without meaning. In a thought experiment, if these emissions were to level off, about ten years later humans would see CH4 no longer adding annually to radiative forcing, though it would still be contributing to it. If these emissions lessened over time, thought experimenters would see radiative forcing (and related heating-up) decline, even if hundreds of megatons of CH4 emissions would be seem equivalent by GWP20 or 100 (I prefer 20) to many Gt CO2.
Roger mentions GWP* (GWP star) as a novel metric proposed by an international group. GWP* is not related, however, to any “CO2 component” of CH4. It can’t be applied to one source of methane and not another in the same earth system. GWP* is a BRILLIANT TEACHING DEVICE that shows humankind how much leverage we theoretically have with CH4 on rising temps, while we have almost none on CO2’s effect until emissions are truly nil.
GWP* will speak truth, BUT ONLY ON THE ABOVE CONDITION, that CH4 emissions are unchanged or falling year to year. It is a hypothetical. GWP* is as meaningless in a system of rising CH4 emissions as would be GWP in a world of declining releases. In the tweeted citation the key word is “constant.”
Planned and unplanned CH4 emissions from the fossil fuel industry cannot be brought to zero. IMO the least harmful way to level off human-influenced methane releases is to stop increasing the world’s annual withdrawal of natural gas as we increase renewables, conservation, storage and innovative transmission.
Cheers
To those who also won't listen to podcasts on monopolistic techbro web services, and want to download the MP3, note that if you open the "RSS feed" link as a text file, it contains the URL to the MP3 file, then you can download.
https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/139291578/2a581218098734c490607fb001e3ed59.mp3
Fortunate, since I'd have to stop subscribing if I couldn't download an MP3.
Thank you for doing this podcast David. This is such a fascinating area. The earth will not make it without healthy farming as part of the solution. People who don’t feel they can do anything to help climate change can make simple dietary changes that can make a difference (no meat for 2 meals a week.) SPCA had a program of meatless Mondays but I haven’t seen anything about that recently.
Excellent podcast! This is such an important topic, one disregarded most of the time. Thank you for stepping up to the job of informing countrymen about the Farm Bill.
The EPA tells us that agriculture is only 10% of US annual GHG emissions. See:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/96198796@N05/47210689941/in/album-72157705569308771/
And this figure is a bit of an overestimate, considering that livestock methane emissions are a biogas and should not be measured the same way as fossil methane.
How does the speaker come up with 30%?