Spring Break
In Climate Legislation and Agriculture, We Reap What We Sow
Erin Sherman '11
Issue date: 9/30/09 Section: Opinion
ACESA includes an offset program that would grant saleable credits - essentially, additional carbon allowances - to businesses in uncapped sectors, especially agriculture and forestry, for undertaking GHG emission mitigation activities. On the positive side, agriculturalists and forest managers can generally mitigate more cheaply than industry and energy producers, so the program may be considered a cost control mechanism. It would certainly help buoy up the agriculture sector as energy prices rise; a recent USDA preliminary report on costs to agriculture under ACESA estimated that, if farmers and ranchers utilized the efficiency and offset options available to them, the bill would provide a net benefit to the sector.
On the not-so-positive side, offsets are already plagued by well-known problems. As reported by the Washington Post in January 2008, Capitol Hill itself has fallen victim to these pitfalls in its own private sector offset purchases: the "Green the Capitol" program included an offset purchase to the tune of $89,000 - a purchase, it was discovered later, that may have been an utter waste of taxpayer dollars. Offsets may be considered to actually represent averted emissions only if they are additional; in other words, the money paid for the offset must make a sequestration project economically viable that would not otherwise be undertaken. Otherwise, the consumer of offsets is subsidizing a practice - like no-till agriculture - that is already profitable. Not only does no-till fail the additionality test; it may not even sequester carbon, instead shifting the location of soil carbon into higher levels, where shallow depth soil studies have detected it.
ACESA excuses this problem of questionable additionality in a considerable number of cases - for all offset projects initiated after 2001. It also declares no-till or conservation tillage methods to be valid offset projects. These provisions, along with USDA control over agricultural and forestry offsets, a moratorium on indirect land use change emissions accounting regarding biofuels, and a long list of other pre-approved offset projects - each one of which presents its own list of scientific and economic questions - are included in House Agriculture Committee Chairman Peterson's massive amendment, Title V.
On the not-so-positive side, offsets are already plagued by well-known problems. As reported by the Washington Post in January 2008, Capitol Hill itself has fallen victim to these pitfalls in its own private sector offset purchases: the "Green the Capitol" program included an offset purchase to the tune of $89,000 - a purchase, it was discovered later, that may have been an utter waste of taxpayer dollars. Offsets may be considered to actually represent averted emissions only if they are additional; in other words, the money paid for the offset must make a sequestration project economically viable that would not otherwise be undertaken. Otherwise, the consumer of offsets is subsidizing a practice - like no-till agriculture - that is already profitable. Not only does no-till fail the additionality test; it may not even sequester carbon, instead shifting the location of soil carbon into higher levels, where shallow depth soil studies have detected it.
ACESA excuses this problem of questionable additionality in a considerable number of cases - for all offset projects initiated after 2001. It also declares no-till or conservation tillage methods to be valid offset projects. These provisions, along with USDA control over agricultural and forestry offsets, a moratorium on indirect land use change emissions accounting regarding biofuels, and a long list of other pre-approved offset projects - each one of which presents its own list of scientific and economic questions - are included in House Agriculture Committee Chairman Peterson's massive amendment, Title V.
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