Collin Peterson’s Short-Term View of Agricultural Interests
Those of us who are interested in climate change but not congressional procedure junkies have been surprised to learn that comprehensive energy legislation apparently needs to make its way through the House Agriculture Committee. And those of us who aren’t House Ag junkies have been surprised to learn that the Chairman of the Committee, Collin Peterson of Minnesota, is apparently quite conservative on environmental issues. Consequently, he’s emerged as a major impediment to action. And also as the kind of guy who doesn’t seem to even understand what climate change is:
We’ve just had the biggest floods and coldest winters we’ve ever had. They’re saying to us [that climate change is] going to be a big problem because it’s going to be warmer than it usually is; my farmers are going to say that’s a good thing since they’ll be able to grow more corn.
Sadly, he’s not joking about this. Back in the real-world, farmers in any given place have worked over the years to achieve a setup that’s well-suited to the climate they face. If you drastically change the climate, that’s a big problem. What’s more, as Brad Johnson points out “global warming brings not only warmer temperatures but also heavier floods.” What’s more, a recent NOAA report concluded that “even moderate increases in temperature will decrease yields of corn, wheat, sorghum, bean rice, cotton, and peanut crops.”
The agriculture system is heavily implicated in our current, unsustainable climate trajectory. Consequently, adjustment may be painful for practitioners of industrial agriculture and for communities that depend on it. But simply pretending that the problem doesn’t exist doesn’t make the problem go away. Agriculture is also heavily exposed to the potentially devastating impact of climate change. Farmers and farm communities are being done no real favors by Peterson’s attitude.
20 Responses to “Collin Peterson’s Short-Term View of Agricultural Interests”
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June 18th, 2009 at 8:45 am
Re: What’s more, a recent NOAA report concluded that “even moderate increases in temperature will decrease yields of corn, wheat, sorghum, bean rice, cotton, and peanut crops.”
Yes. I recently had occasion to look into some of the literature on this topic, and the forecast is not pretty. While people sometimes argue that increased carbon dioxide concentration could increase yields of some types of crops, it’s important to note that such yield increases are 1) dependent on increased fertilization and 2) completely negated by increasing temperatures. Warmer climates, even with increased carbon dioxide, are going to be bad for most of our crops.
Now to some extent we might be able to deal with this by changing what crops we grow where. Conceivably we could shift the zones where we grow wheat further north in Canada, and areas that now grow corn could grow sweet potatoes or something. (Which is a quite heat tolerant crop). But this is going to be a difficult and laborious transition. And _overall_, on a global scale, I would suspect that agricultural yields are going to suffer, though I don’t know if anyone has studied changes in productivity on a global scale.
June 18th, 2009 at 9:30 am
Sorry people, but I am a non-believer. This is the biggest scam ever. Scientific “consensus” is not science. Moreover, Cap and Tax isn’t going to improve anything. 85% of permits will be given away, and I have little doubt any monies generated will be pissed away like the stimulus.
If you have a problem with CO2, plant more trees.
June 18th, 2009 at 9:31 am
We Americans seem to think of intelligence as a Nicomachean virtue – too much or too little makes someone immoral.
June 18th, 2009 at 9:45 am
Shooter 242,
What the F*ck? Planting more trees is not going to solve the problem, at least not in our lifetimes.
1) Many plants are limited by nitrogen, phosphorus or other nutrients, and increasing carbon dioxide will not increase their growth one damn bit.
2) Many other plants have natural, innate limitations on growth and aren’t going to be able to fix more than a small amount of extra carbon.
3) Experiments in the Smoky Mountains showed, I believe, about a 20% increase in tree growth under increased carbon dioxide, which was well below what had been hypothesized. I’m going from memory so you’d do better to look this up yourself.
4) Increasing plant productivity _may_ simply increase herbivore populations, which would eat up the increased stock of green matter, and result in no net change in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
5) even if increased plant cover can _gradually_ convert carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into long-term stored carbon (in the soil, for example, or in ocean sediments), this is going to be a _very_ slow process.
6) it’s quite possible, as I suggested above, that increased temperatures will completely negate any effects of increased carbon dioxide on plant productivity. Put simply, warmer temperatures tend to suppress photosynthesis and increase plant respiration.
I don’t deny that plants can do something to help us alleviate global warming, but they will do much, much less in that regard than you suppose. Put simply, we are f*cked, and and all the tree planting in the world (which is a good and necessary thing) will not keep us from being f*cked at least in the short term.
June 18th, 2009 at 10:04 am
This is the biggest scam ever.
If pooter has grandkids, I hope they line up to shit on his grave when he’s in the ground.
June 18th, 2009 at 10:27 am
@ pseu
Nice. Is this the kind of behavior you think they should emulate instead? Tsk.
June 18th, 2009 at 10:38 am
Plant hardiness zones are shifting. That will cripple any agriculture that is dependent not only on temperature but terrain. Agriculture does not equal corn. California’s agriculture industry (which dwarfs Minnesota’s) would be devestated because of shifting terrain and reduced water issues.
Peterson is playing a dangerous parochial game.
More on zone shifts – http://wwwp.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/usda/climate-change-comes-to-your-backyards
More on the threat to CA’s agriculture from global warming – http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~olivier/media/cct_012307.htm
June 18th, 2009 at 10:49 am
85% of permits will be given away
This is, of course, because the original plan in which they weren’t given away was considered “too left-wing” and “not bipartisan enough” so that was the compromise to make it more amenable to industry and the right. It’s hilarious that that’s your complaint about it now. I guess we could go back to how it was originally.
June 18th, 2009 at 11:16 am
Colin Petersen is no liberal,that’s for sure. His district is primarily rural and conservative. It borders St Cloud which is with Michelle Bachman’s district, so having any kind of a Democrat as it’s representative is somewhat surprising. Peterson panders to the corn ethynol interests as they are a cornerstone of his support, financial and otherwise.
The only answer I see is for the technology to move past corn based ethynol, any information on where that’s at?
June 18th, 2009 at 11:29 am
In the short term all anyone has to offer is crippling business, taxing us into penury, and encouraging less breathing. If you have some actual science showing how much CO2 trees can absorb, and how many it would take to sop up the excess, let’s see it. Otherwise my idea is as good as any other.
If nothing else using stimulus money for tree nurseries is better than millions for a single turtle tunnel.
June 18th, 2009 at 11:51 am
This is the same kind of clown-show thinking that promises great things for agriculture in northern Alberta and Saskatchewan – leaving aside the 500 years or so that it will take for the soil there to accumulate to sufficient levels to grow anything…
June 18th, 2009 at 12:52 pm
Forget climate change. The chairman of the Ag committee doesn’t even know what agriculture is. I’m a left-wing city-living graduate student, and even I know that agriculture is ALL about managing risk in one’s income portfolio: risk from weather, insects, crop failure, prices, transportation cost, you name it.
Anything that adds risk, and in particular anything that changes any of the moments of the stochastic processes generating any of these variables is not a good thing for farmers, prima facie. Now, maybe in a hundred years the mean temperature in northern Alberta will be greater, but getting from here to there is an unpredictable unmanageable mess. And the guy who’s supposedly looking after farmers’ interests in Washington doesn’t get it.
June 18th, 2009 at 12:57 pm
Actually, farmers only really care about the number of acres they are able to plant at the begnning of the season. Because of the “3 legged stool” the underpins our farm subsidies – which includes direct payments, subsidized crop insurance, and huge amounts of disaster assistance – having half your field destroyed by a flood doesn’t significantly impact your income.
The new lingo that the environmentally minded (and corporate) ag folks have adopted is “ecosystem services” – basically paying farmers for planting trees and not pouring gallons of fertilizers onto fields that runs off into nearby water sources. Whether it (which is essentially a bribe) can gain any traction (and funding) will determine the extent to which the ag industry can be coopted into not destroying the land.
June 18th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
Re: The new lingo that the environmentally minded (and corporate) ag folks have adopted is “ecosystem services” – basically paying farmers for planting trees and not pouring gallons of fertilizers onto fields that runs off into nearby water sources
Ecosystem services is a much broader term than that- basically it refers to how much a particular type of plant or landscape contributes to processes that underlie a healthy ecosystem. These could range from sequestering carbon, increasing soil nitrogen, mineralizing nutrients, reducing leaching, supporting more pollinators and predatory insects, and a whole slew of other things.
June 18th, 2009 at 1:17 pm
@Shooter242:
Honestly, do you really think that no one has thought of ‘plant more trees’ before you wrote it down on this thread?
Many/most of the current global climate models incorporate plant sequestration of CO2 ( see here ). Unfortunately, one of the big sources of CO2 is land clearing, particularly in the tropics. We aren’t planting more trees, we’er cutting them down, and globally, there is little we can do to reverse that trend except through price signalling on the meat that is produced by the cleared land. In order to do that, we need to sell 100% of the permits and account for emissions resulting from land use change. As pointed out above, that was the plan until everyone realized that we couldn’t implement a hippy plan like letting the market work.
The main temperature issue with respect to crop yield is water. Small increases in temperature drive more evaporation and transpiration by plants. Since we supply everything else in excess (nitrogen, phosphorus, etc.) via fertilizers, that will reduce yield.
There’s also the issue of the nutritional quality of the food. When plants grow under higher CO2 cnoditions (holding soil fertility constant), they tend to have lower nutrient concentrations in their tissues. That’s why the huge beefsteak tomatoes have no taste – it’s just water and cellulose. Hector raises a number of other potential feedbacks and indirect consequences.
June 18th, 2009 at 2:11 pm
Of course, the people who suffer the most from climate change are not going to be rural Minnesotans at all, but those who live in South America, Africa, and South Asia. It’s one thing to be a denialist, but it takes a special kind of monster to accept the science while insisting that the convenience of a million American farmers outweighs the well-being of a few billion residents of the global South.
June 18th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
Climate change is Nature’s way of informing us that we’re not worth saving.
June 18th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
[...] damaging being done by Minnesota Representative Collin Peterson to the Waxman-Markey climate bill is so severe that [...]
June 18th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
Honestly, I wonder if Obama’s EPA should just implement cap and trade on its own, as some anlysts argue it can under the Clean Air Act.
June 18th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
It wouldn’t surprise if ag production in parts of Peterson’s district is benefitting from warming that has already taken place. Ag land values in some counties in the southeastern part of North Dakota (which borders his district) have gone through the roof lately, in part because the weather patterns of the last decade (a bit warmer, more rain) have allowed farmers to grow soybeans to a degree that wasn’t possible before.
Of course, what’s good for his district isn’t necessarily good for the country or the world.