SUBSCRIBE to Climate Change Weekly
IN THIS ISSUE:
- Farm Groups Fear Losing Climate Subsidies, Not Climate Change Itself
- Oceans Remove More Carbon Dioxide Than Previously Believed
- BRICS Nations Announce Support for Continued Fossil-Fuel Use
Farm Groups Fear Losing Climate Subsidies, Not Climate Change Itself
The Heartland Institute has worked since its inception to reform the nation’s agriculture laws and regulations, freeing farmers from onerous, unnecessary regulations and higher costs imposed by federal and state governments. Simultaneously, Heartland has supported efforts to wean farmers from the welfare created by farm subsidies in the form of subsidized crop insurance, payments for low prices for choosing the wrong crop in a particular year, payments for leaving ground fallow, and subsidies to create biofuels, among myriad other support payments for farmers.
The evidence is that most of this support doesn’t even go to the small family farmers that ag-state legislators talk about every time the farm bills are up for renewal. The vast majority of federal farm money goes to politically connected, wealthy, corporate farms.
Allies at The Heritage Foundation have been working to reform agricultural policies for decades, most recently outlining comprehensive reform in the “Department of Agriculture” chapter of its Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership document. I largely support the analysis and recommendations contained therein.
As part of its “all of government” approach to fighting climate change, the Biden administration instigated a whole new slew of farm subsidies, some of which undercut efforts to increase production and secure the food supply. The re-election of Donald Trump as president has climate alarmists and the farmers and farm groups running scared. After all, Trump has regularly referred to climate change as a hoax and vowed to cut unnecessary government spending and unjustified power, so it is fair to believe the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (DOA) climate programs are in the crosshairs for swift elimination.
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which reposted an article by Inside Climate News, certainly seems to think so. The article falsely claims American farmers have suffered from climate change for eight years and, as a result, have become less skeptical that the world is in the midst of a climate crisis. Some farmers and farm lobbying groups may be displaying less skepticism toward claims that climate change is making it harder to farm, but if so, that’s not because the climate change has made it harder to plant, tend, produce, harvest, or put food on the nation’s grocery store shelves and peoples’ dinner tables, or that weather disasters are increasing amid climate change. If farmers and the lobbying organizations appear less skeptical about dangerous climate change than they have been in the past, it is likely due to the huge federal subsidies that have flowed to farms from the federal government in its futile effort to control the weather.
In the article, titled “US farms are being battered by climate change. Trump wants to put a climate denier in charge of the USDA,” Georgina Gustin of Inside Climate News warns that President-elect Trump’s nominee to head the DOA, climate skeptic Brooke Rollins, may reduce federal largesse for agricultural climate programs—money that farmers have come to enjoy and expect.
Rollins has both a law degree and a degree in agricultural development, and she served as director of the Domestic Policy Council during Trump’s first term, so she is well qualified to run the DOA. Rollins knows both the challenges facing farmers and the ins and outs of the regulations and laws governing agriculture policy.
Rather than being an unknown as Inside Climate News implies, Rollins’ views on climate change and climate policy are well known. She has spoken at The Heartland Institute’s America First Energy Conference and is on record as supporting withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement and ending the Obama administration’s disastrous Clean Power Plan.
In fact, as Rollins is well aware, data and research presented at both Climate Realism and Climate at a Glance clearly demonstrate weather hasn’t become more extreme, so farmers haven’t faced worsening growing and harvesting conditions over the past eight years, or the past 30 for that matter, contrary to false media reports.
During the past 30-year period over which climate change is measured, from 1993 to 2022 (the last year with available data), the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports America’s dairy farmers have seen their production increase by more than 50 percent, with the most recent record production occurring in 2022 (see figure below).
Over the same period, cattle ranchers have seen a 23 percent increase in production, setting new records for production each year since 2018 (see figure below).
The FAO also reports U.S. crop production has done well over the past 30 years. Cereals, fruits, roots and tubers, and vegetables have all experienced production exceeding almost every year’s output prior to Trump’s first presidential term, refuting the impression of farmers struggling over the past eight years given in Inside Climate News’ story.
Changing weather patterns or lost production are not what is worrying farmers; it’s Rollins’ support for Trump’s goal of cutting government waste, particularly costly, nonsensical, and futile climate spending, that has Inside Climate News and farm lobbyists in a tizzy. Under the Biden/Harris administration, harvesting climate subsidies became a lucrative sideline for many farmers, as Inside Climate News acknowledges:
In the eight years since the last Trump administration began, American farms have been repeatedly battered by extreme weather, requiring the USDA to direct tens of billions of dollars in disaster relief and crop insurance payouts to the country’s farmers.
“Many more farmers have had their eyes opened to the threat of climate change,” Karen Perry Stillerman, deputy director of the food and environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Inside Climate News. “Many more farmers have benefited from these giant investments in farming and conservation, and have gotten some incentives and support to shift their practices. That may be harder than people think to wind back.”
Also during those years, the most powerful agricultural lobby group, the American Farm Bureau Federation, shifted its position on climate change, influencing conversations in farm country. The group had long denied the scientific consensus that human activity is driving greenhouse gas emissions, but has since softened its denial as funding for climate-focused programs has flowed to farmers and as carbon markets, based on carbon storing-farming practices, have promised the potential of revenue to its members [emphasis in original].
Inside Climate News calculated farmers have received roughly $23 billion in federal climate change support across multiple farm programs under Biden and Harris. This massive federal funding provides a powerful incentive for farm groups and the organizations that lobby on their behalf to eschew climate skepticism and embrace alarm and all the money that has come from jumping on the “climate change causes everything bad” bandwagon.
In the end, the weather is not getting worse, and agricultural production is doing fine. Farming has always been a precarious profession, beset by the seasonal and annual vagaries of weather. There is no evidence climate change is making farming harder than it has always been. The climate gravy train is coming to an end as the incoming Trump administration has promised to cut government waste. Based on the evidence, climate subsidies for farmers are unjustified and a good starting point for cuts.
Source: Climate Realism; Climate Depot; Bulletin of Atomic Scientists; The Heritage Foundation
Oceans Remove More Carbon Dioxide Than Previously Believed
Recent research published in the journal Nature finds oceans remove more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than previously believed, necessitating a rethink of the Earth’s carbon budget and assumptions built into climate models about how the oceans and the atmosphere interact.
In this study, an international team of 15 scientists from universities and research institutes in the United Kingdom and The Netherlands examined the temperature gradients at different depths of the ocean, studying the fluxes of carbon dioxide moving through and remaining in different gradients.
Their laboratory experiments and observations showed temperatures are “highly sensitive” to the air–sea CO2 fluxes. Transecting the Atlantic Ocean repeatedly in 2018 and 2019 to collect data, they found “accounting for vertical temperature gradients reduces the difference between direct and indirect fluxes by half suggesting the Atlantic’s carbon sink is much greater than previously believed.” As a result, they conclude, “Accounting for this increased ocean uptake will probably require some revision to how global carbon budgets are quantified.”
Always remember: models’ outputs are only as good as the quality of their inputs and the assumptions built into them. The findings of this research, if accurate, are a big factor present-generation climate models fail to account for properly.
Source: Nature
BRICS Nations Announce Support for Continued Fossil-Fuel Use
The annual summit of the BRICS nations—Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and recent new members Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates—met in Kazan, Russia from October 22 through 24, just a couple of weeks before the COP 29 gathering in Baku, Azerbaijan.
While the BRICS meeting didn’t get the headlines COP 29 received, in many ways the agreements forged there were more important than those made in Baku. BRICS participants, representing some of the largest energy producers and users and largest greenhouse gas emitters, made it clear that commitments to fight climate change came a distant second to increasing economic development, in large part through a more intensive use of fossil fuels.
“The Kazan declaration agreed to by BRICS countries … openly declared that their domestic energy needs and economic wellbeing will take precedence over international climate agreements like the Paris Accords and ‘net zero’ initiatives,” notes CO2 Science analyst Vijay Jayaraj in an article behind a paywall at BizPac Review.
Jayaraj writes that although the governments attending BRICS said they were committed to sustainable development and fighting climate change, that appeared to be window dressing for the real message in the declaration. I quote Jayaraj at length:
A superficial glance at the Kazan agreement would lead one to believe that the BRICS consortium stands with the global climate movement and committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the energy and transportation sectors.
For instance, there are laudatory words about the Paris agreement, noting a “critical need for active climate adaptation projects.”
However, a closer look reveals that these nations—many of them still early in their development as modern societies—are in no mood to compromise on their national energy security and the use of fossil fuels.
At the heart of the declaration lies a fundamental truth that the Western climate industrial complex often refuses to recognize: Access to affordable and reliable energy and economic development cannot be sacrificed at the altar of “decarbonization” if people are to thrive.
The Kazan declaration’s emphasis on “technological neutrality” is particularly telling. By explicitly endorsing the use of “all available fuels, energy sources and technologies,” including fossil fuels with abatement technologies, BRICS nations have effectively rejected the notion of a rapid phase-out of conventional energy sources.
The declaration says that “energy security, access and energy transitions are important and need to be balanced …” In other words—in a style similar to that of the original Nationally Determined Contribution documents of India in 2017—domestic energy needs will be prioritized ahead of emission reductions.
It also calls for an uninterrupted energy supply chain, underscoring the importance of affordable energy—something that only fossil fuels can provide to countries with high poverty rates.
The declaration notes the “necessity for resilient global supply chains and stable, predictable energy demand in order to provide universal access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy sources as well as to ensure national, global and regional energy security.”
Directly challenging the European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, the Kazan statement labels such levies as “unilateral, punitive and discriminatory protectionist measures.” This is a rejection of the E.U.’s attempt to export its climate policies through trade. …
The BRICS leaders emphasize that their immediate goals—poverty eradication, infrastructure development, and economic expansion—require a secure and stable energy supply.
If China, India, Russia, and other countries representing 45 percent of the global population are all-in on fossil fuels, it’s fair to ask what hope the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The short answer is none. This means that if human fossil fuel use is causing dangerous climate change (a belief that I reject), world leaders better plan on improving their infrastructure and adapting to the changing world.
Sources: Government of India; CO2 Science
Recommended Sites
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News.
Related
