Climate Change Bill

[Josh Russell]

I am kind of surprised that no one has posted anything about this bill that is sitting in the senate. Is cap and trade going to be beneficial to the American public? If you read secretary Vilsack's reports farmers will be making more money but their will be less farmers to go around and the cost of living for everyone will go up. I was just wondering what everyone else thought about this bill.

[Gillian Rutherford]

Hi Josh,

Not sure if this fits in here, but I would like to add to the whole 'climate change' topic....

I don't know too much about this Bill, but I am from Alberta Canada, and I do know that the passing of this bill will have some effect on our Alberta Oil Sands (or Tar Sands). But, I'd rather not open up that can or worms.

Right now I am working with Alberta Agriculture and something that has sparked my interest is this push for Solar Energy or Clean Energy. In Ontario Canada they are building some of the largest Solar Farms- for example The West Carleton project will see 300,000 solar panels in stalled on 200 acres.

There has been some concern that these "Solar Farms" will use prime agriculture land for what some are calling industrial application. I read that in Europe, one farmer was selling off his pigs and getting funding for these solar panels because the issue of drought was becoming too much. He says the switch from pigs to power allowed him to keep the 150 year old farm up and running but just not as a pig farm.

Do people have any opinion on this?

Are farmers down in the States being approached by these Green Energy companies to use their land for Solar Power projects?

Is there a fear there that prime agricultural land will be lost to Energy projects?

[Kevin W. Sweeney]

You're right about the prime land being used for these projects. I live only 30 minutes from the West Carleton Project and can hardly believe what changes have taken place on this property! The corn and soy crops on this farm were some of the best in the area and now it's nothing but metal and glass. I agree with looking for energy aternatives but these projects should be put on marginal land not prime land

[Josh Russell]

Well if this bill passes the only way a farmer or rancher is going to be able to survive is by having carbon offsets. The only limited explanation to this is that some land will have to be planted in trees or other "clean" or "green" energies like windmills or solar panels will have to be placed on the farmers/ranchers land. The only example I have found to how this would work is from Vilsack and he gives no reasoning to why he uses the numbers he uses or to what ratio a farmer will have to have for offsets to farmland or acreage to number of animals to be able to survive. No where does he discuss how this will affect animal agriculture. He claims that cap and trading will open another market for farmers to sell their unused carbon credits on thus making enough money to supplement their income from the higher input costs that this bill will cause.

For me their are way to many unanswered questions about how this bill is going to work or who is going to monitor or regulate the "offsets" or if the offsets that a farmer might have to sell will even cover the costs of the higher inputs. Vilsack acknowledges that this bill will eliminate some of the farmers and that production of everything will decrease but says that this will cause the prices to be higher thus benefiting the surviving farms.

[Glen Groth]

The planet is warming, this much we know. Whether or not we can do anything about it is another story. The whole idea behind farmers making money off of cap and trade is is that these carbon credits will be worth a fortune. But what if they don't become valuable? What if they become valuable and the market crashes? What if energy companies and other businsses find ways to decrease their carbon output, will they no longer need to buy the credits from farmers? What about the farmers that can't adopt the "carbon sequestering" practices? Too many unanswered questions for me to support this. I think it is nothing but a way for the environmental extremists to get their hands on my farm.

[Harrison Krey]

The planet is not warmig. There is not any proof other than the Al Gore Video. Look back at accounts it goes in 75 to 80 year cycles. Cap and Trade is the second biggest bs next to obomacare. If it passes everyone that irrigates kiss that good buy we wont be able to afford it.

[Hilltowner Rick]

It is quite surprising that this topic even has to be discussed here. The cap-and-trade nonsense evolved from Global Warming, which simply does not exist. The politicians who are the proponents of these initiatives have cherry-picked the ‘proof’ needed to support their claims to establish a new regimen of taxation and assembled a ‘consensus’ of so-called scientists to support their specious claims.

The Europeans have fallen for the Global Warming scam and hope to use the income from the cap-and-trade program to support their failing economies. Make no mistake about it, this is a tariff that will pass their responsibility on to the airlines. When the rest of the world counters with their own carbon credit programs, the European countries will further support their national airlines, placing the US carriers in deeper financial distress, since we have yet tot nationalized our airlines.

The whole farce is built on two lies - 1) that CO2 is a problem 2) that CO2 emissions from man’s efforts are causing a change in the world’s climate.

CO2 is a greenhouse gas that absorbs some of the energy (heat) that is part of light as it passes through the atmosphere. A hypothesis or theory was developed from the information that the levels of CO2 were increasing and that the temperature had increased as the industrial age released more of the gas into the atmosphere.

Records of CO2 concentrations go back eons in ice and deep ocean sediments and show that CO2 levels have far exceeded those projected for our future during past ice ages and during periods of higher temperatures while the levels were also drastically lower at times when the temperature was much higher than now or during some ice ages. That indicates that temperatures and CO2 levels are not related.

The info to sell this charade has used 'evidence' that covered decades or centuries, but climate change takes place over periods of hundred thousands to millions of years. The statistics do show temperature rising during the 20th century, but since the millennium, the temp has leveled out and actually dropped while the CO2 continues to rise. That temperature rise was just a blip in geological terms and not connected to the CO2 levels.

There is a lecture by an Aussie professor (Bob Carter) at the following URL which examines Global Warming from a geological perspective. It is clearly obvious that there is no scientific proof that mankind has any influence on climate change and without climate change, there is no reason for cap and trade except for the politicians to fleece the people.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOLkze-9GcI&feature=PlayList&...

[Adam Gaska]

First off, I'll say I think cap and trade is a joke. It's just another way poor people will get the short end of the stick and rich people can do whatever they want as long as they can pay for it. I'd prefer a straight carbon tax with programs (money) available things whether it's tree planting, keeping perennial cover, soil conservation, etc.

As for deniers of climate change, that's just crazy. I'm not really sure how one could think that we could release the sequestered constituents of an atmosphere that this planet has not experienced for millenia without having an impact. Especially cinsidering it was an atmosphere humans could not live in.

I actually think it's activities related to carbon releases that are the cause rather then just the carbon itself. Basically I think we a desertifying the Earth more and more. Loke at the Arabia Peninsula today and it is a wind swept sand dune. Look at it at the time of Gilgamesh and it was a lush area carpeted with cedars, pines, oaks, and grasslands. The soil was so fertile paleolithic farmers were getting yields of wheat and braley that would make today's American farmer envious. What happened? They chopped down all the trees and their soil washed into the ocean. We are doing the same here in this country in most farming areas and much of the world.

Even promising things like no-till may not be as promising as once hoped. While no-till cuts down on erosion, some research is starting to show that it is sequestering carbon in high levels at shallow depths but not at deeper depths which makes sense. Cor, beans, and wheat don't have as deep of roots as perennial grasses, legumes, and forbes and so the organic matter at the lower depths starts to oxidize without being replenished.

Even if our best efforts to combate climate change were useless, the measures themselves aren't bad. I'm not sure how you can see having greenbelts, planting trees, having more grassland, conserving petroleum resources, etc, as a negative thing.

[Michael Lewis]

I too am pretty skeptical of the cap and trade legislation. Until there are more tangible facts published about the consequences of it, I don't see how one can be for/against it.

On the other hand climate change is real and I think it is pretty irresponsible to think otherwise. Just because the climate change is better for your area, which it has been in the Midwest, doesn't make it ok to bury your head in the sand. Go take a look at old/current pictures of all the different mountain ranges and glaciers of the world and that will be enough evidence right there. Greenland is a prime example. If you don't get shook up after seeing the rivers of ice/water that are now running through that country then I don't know what will. Yeah there are ways to view carbon levels in ice. And they do have graphs going back thousands of years. We are off the charts and continue to rise...What is it now like 99% of all the scientists out there agree that it is happening? Compared to the early 70s when no one wanted to agree? Sounds like the evidence over the past 30 years has convinced quite of a few of them to change their mind.

[Adam Gaska]

They can farm in Greenland now. They haven't been able to do that since the Middle Ages. You can read an article about it, http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,434356,00.html.

[Jared Smith]

Why should we be putting all the pressure on american industries when other parts of the world don't care. Our industries will move out of the US (if they haven't already) leaving no jobs here. Our standard of living will go way way down. We may have climate change, but I don't think there is anything that we as a society will do about it. We have to believe that God will take care of us if we do the right things. Making the poor, worse off is not this. Lowering the standard of living for everyone is not this.

Liberals seem to think they can make everyone equal. The only way this happens is if they make everyone poor, and the cap and tax bill will do this..quickly. We have too many "zero liablity voters" in our country that contribute nothing but get a vote to tell the tax payers how to spend the tax payer's money.

Every notice how liberals will solve problems with other peoples money but not their own?

[Adam Gaska]

That'd be easy to fix. Don't allow imports unless they are made to the same standard that American companies have to follow. I think there is more then enough stuff to go around on the planet for all of us, non-Americans included, to live quite an abundant lifestyle. I don't think living off Super Size Meals and going into debt to buy shit you don't need qualifies as an abundant life. Having meaningful work and healthy families is not a lowered standard of living. I think the Big Guy up there is letting us depend on each other for this one. We probably shouldn't disappoint Him.

This, and many other, problems transcend liberals, conservatives, Red State, Blue State, nonsense. We're all Americans, we are all citizens of the world and we need to deal with our sh*t.

[Dutch Dirt Farmer]

It seams that the farmer is to blame on ever thing on here. they come up with one study and all the hippies want to believe what the article said. then they blame the farmer for everything when they had nothing to do with it but it is a easy blame to push it on.