The cap-and-trade bill that passed the House and is still pending in the Senate will increase food prices by 4.5 percent by 2050 by encouraging landowners to re-forest 59 million acres of farmland by that time. Now the Secretary of Agriculture doesn't want to admit that and is asking his staff to cook the numbers.
The Washington Times reports that Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack is on record as expressing concern that the Forest Service's Forest and Agriculture Sector Optimization Model (FASOM) overestimates the economic incentives under the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill to plant trees rather than crops. Vilsack alleges that the model's inputs are systematically biased in favor of re-forestation, this after his Department apparently has received a number of complaints from farmers and ranchers that the new law, if passed, will cause them to lose their leases as landowners unilaterally embrace re-forestation. The Times article quotes him as ordering his chief economist to work with economists at the Environmental Protection Agency to "undertake a review of the assumptions in the FASOM model, to update the model and to develop options on how best to avoid unintended consequences for agriculture that might result from climate change legislation."
At issue are the "carbon offsets" at the heart of the cap-and-trade bill. Any landowner having forests or crops on his land would receive free carbon offsets to account for the carbon dioxide (CO2) that the plants grown on his land would absorb in the course of their growth. He then could sell those offsets to commercial and industrial operators who are responsible for most CO2 emissions.
Acre for acre, forests absorb far more CO2 than crops do. So any landowner would realize immediate profitability by revoking existing leases held by farmers and ranchers, and re-leasing his land to foresters.
Vilsack's complaint is that the model gives too little weight to the carbon offsets that farming can still earn through "low-carbon farming" practices that presumably involve using less motor fuel for plowing, irrigation, harvesting, and the like. Vilsack mentioned other economic incentives, but neither he nor the Times article specified them.
The American Farm Bureau Federation clearly understands the issue. Their spokeswoman, Allison Sprecht, was quoted as saying that other studies have confirmed the current analysis, and make the best intuitive sense.
That's one of the realities of cap-and-trade legislation. The biggest bang for your buck for carbon credits is planting trees.
Given the above, and in light of the Climategate scandal, many things about this story remain unclear. One is whether Vilsack is telling the truth about the systematic bias in the FASOM model. If the model is as biased as Vilsack says, then he ought to have addressed the concern before the American Farm Bureau Federation did, and certainly ought never have waited six months after the cap-and-trade measure passed the House. Equally likely, the model is on-target and he's worried, not so much about what he calls "unintended consequences," but about farmers and ranchers learning the truth and organizing to protect their livelihoods. And so Vilsack might be doing exactly what Phil Jones, Michael E. Mann, and their colleagues did: play "tricks" with the data to hide another kind of decline--in the nation's food supply.
Another thing is whether those consequences are truly unintended--or deliberately planned. "Who controls the food controls the people," says an often-quoted proverb. And the controlling obsession of this White House and administration is well-documented. The cap-and-trade bill already proposes to control industrial output and individual options for transportation. That it now proposes to restrict the food supply would be entirely in keeping with its restriction on other endeavors of man.
Previous articles:
- Hadley CRU hacked with release of hundreds of docs and emails
- Who leaked the Hadley CRU files and why
- The real Hadley Centre might not be so innocent
- The Hockey Stick was never accurate--and CRU knew it
- CRU raw data loss not an accident
- Republicans in Congress question AGW consensus
- USA might have its own CRU
- CRU data loss account in dispute
- Copenhagen conference begins today
- Network analyst proves that CRU archive was leaked
- Daily Mail does first comprehensive investigation of Climategate
- Antarctic weather station data found flawed
- CRU server apparently off-line
- Russians accuse Hadley Centre of falsifying Russian temperatures
- Hadley Centre releases data--but questions remain
- Media manipulation for all to see
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Comments
Who cares about the food of the poor people today when their costal homes could, at least theoretically, be covered with water in 50 years? Lol... yeah that makes A LOT of sense. haha
An increase of 4.5% over 40 years... that is NOTHING. There is nothing to hide. Although it is always great to keep an eye on things, writing this article is just another smoke screen/desparate attempt to find something to complain about.
4.5% by 2050! Almost everything will go up 4.5% or more 40 years from now. Is this an argument for or against cap and trade?
LOL, I got a feeling food prices will rise double that amount by Summer! Everything else keeps going up!
JS
www.invisibility-tools.pl.tc
You mean food might eventually reflect its true cost?
4.5% over 40 years? I'm wary of cap-and-trade legislation, but the hyperbole in this article is pretty laughable.
Did you bother to look into how much food costs will increase if huge expanses of farm land are turned into deserts due to global temperature increases?
Here is a hint: it's a lot more than 4.5%.
You're either too blinded by your ideology to see what's going on around you, or you're intellectually dishonest.
Stop siding against science. Those that do will always lose in the end...and in this case, you'll take the rest of us with you.
...and any sense of journalism that I might have perceived from you surely vanished with the following, "And the controlling obsession of this White House and administration is well-documented."
...just another bozo with a blog.
So, 4.5% mean that my loaf of bread will cost me $4.17 instead of 3.99. I don't know if I can survive that. I guess this is how you don't attract new users to your website.
If you don't have any decent arguments, then don't write anything at all. Those deadlines can influence you obviously really badly.
The tax increase will be much larger than described in this article. The USA 2010 Budget contains and estimate of over 600 Billion in new tax revenue as a result of Cap and Trade. This will be a very big tax increase that will affect much more than food. It is also the main funding mechanism for global government. Man-made-global-warming --> Cap and Trade --> Global government (and demise of the USA)
It's what we call an "investment"...you should look it up. Spend money today and build value for tomorrow. People do it everyday.
What's this aversion the convervatives have with actually CONSERVING?
I find it difficult to see how some americans can say its nothing to see a loaf of bread go from 3.99 to 4.17 yet these are the same people that complain about a 5 cent increase in gas prices. What these people should look at is the big picture, 18 cents on a loaf of bread, 10 cents on a carton of eggs, 20 cents more for a gallon of OJ, and it goes on and on. If you think about how many items you buy at the grocery store, 15, 20, or more, thats $3, $4 or more everytime you go to the grocery store and that starts to add up. Stand up and stop these silly bills before we wake up one day with restrictions on how much food you can buy, what time of day you can drive, what you can bring with you on a plane and how you bags get there, and the list goes on and on. It starts with something small and then engulfs some of our rights.
Aren't you the guy translating the Bible into conservative over at that crackpot website?
In fact, I am one of many translators at the Conservapedia Bible Project. Now: have you actually read any of the translation work that has been done thus far? It is publicly viewable, or didn't you know that? For that matter, have you actually *been* to conservapedia.com, or are you merely repeating someone's talking points?
Nice article, yes prices of everything will go up, that is a guarantee. Some of the things people ignore are transportation costs, manufacturing costs or energy usage taxes, the price will be passed on to the consumer.
What I do not like about this discussion is converting land back to forests or farms. This must be a joke, trees account for 10-20% of CO2 conversion, it is ALGAE that is the main contributor to convert CO2 and H2O into Oxygen. Is this not the goal?? The majority of the earth is water, in case you dont have a globe to look at, so why restrict our living space instead of focusing our efforts in algae and water plant-life production.
BTW, I just want you to all know that global warming or climate change is a joke. Just remember, when the glaciers melted over the American great lakes, cavemen were not driving Ford Trucks! Stop smoking pot hippies and get a job!
Yes, I have been to that website, more than you think; I go there whenever I think I need a laugh. It amuses me that you think you know better than almost 2000 years worth of biblical scholars - you want to remove disputed passages (not alll of them, just the ones you think are too 'liberal') and use 'conservative' terms to recapture original intent - and somehow you seem to know what that it, despite your claims that the original intent has been obscured by 'liberal bias'. And what amuses me most is that you are not actually translating from the greek, but just converting the English KJV into language more suitable for your extremeist tastes.
52*
Ukraine 1933, Bolshevik commisars confiscated all grain and surplus food from Ukrainian farmers intentionally causing 11 million people to starve to death. People were so hungry that they turned to canibalism and ate the bodies of the dead on the street. The program is called Codex Alimentarius and is part of the Global warming/ Depopulation agenda that will kill half of the worlds people in the next few years. My advice is to grow your own food for as long as you can before they show up at your house with guns to confiscate it. Also I advise you to repent against Satan and his vices of greed, pride, and vanity. This battle has been going on since the beginning of time, this time I feel god will make it right.
i wont see it i feel sorry for the people who are there at that time in the future.
4.5% increase in food prices in 2050? Are you kidding? That is not a story.
The real cost will be for FEMA, trillions of dollars for all the damage from climate change - floods, droughts, coastal erosion, pine bark beetle infestations killing forests, wildfires, mudslides, and to the DOD for water wars between states and climate-change refugee invasions, and to unemployment as farms and (coal and nuclear) power plants have to shut down in state after state from drought by 2050 - if we DON'T pass climate and energy legislation to help us get more renewable energy.
dw-world.de — "Around 40 percent of all food manufactured and put on sale in the United States is wasted"
So Americans arent really worried about the cost of food or nearly half of it wouldnt be rubbish
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