Tag Archive for: Policy

Indigenous Land Rights: A Cheap and Effective Climate Change Solution, Just in Time

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Author: David Kaimowitz | Published: November 4, 2016

At the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris last year, the world’s governments agreed to work to keep global temperature rise well below 2 degrees Celsius. The agreement sought to address a clear, urgent problem: Over the past 150 years, concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere have increased by 40 percent. Twice as much CO2 was added to the atmosphere in the past 50 years as in the previous 100—putting our planet at grave risk.

The Paris Agreement formally goes into effect today. Now comes the hard part: putting it into action. Real action will mean burning far fewer fossil fuels like coal, oil, and gas. But changing our energy systems to reduce carbon pollution is, quite simply, not enough. To meet the Paris targets on time, we also need to protect and restore our forests so they can suck much more CO2 out of the atmosphere. If we don’t, it will be practically impossible to cut our fossil fuel use quickly enough to keep our climate stable.

It’s easy to foresee a situation where we reach a tipping point, and the shifts in the climate build on each other and spiral out of control. Indeed, if we keep increasing CO2 levels at roughly the current rate, we will reach the 2-degree threshold in just 20-25 years. We can’t let that happen. We need to buy time while we change the policies, do the research, and make the investments that can stop and ultimately reverse rising temperatures.

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Governor Signs Bill to Help Farmers Adapt to Climate Change

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Published on: September 15, 2016

State Sen. Lois Wolk, D-Solano, chair of the Senate Budget Subcommittee on Resources, Environmental Protection, Energy and Transportation, applauded Gov. Jerry Brown’s approval this week of numerous budget measures on resources, including a number of bills to help the state reach its climate change goals.

The governor signed legislation Wednesday establishing a $7.5 million Healthy Soils Program to support agricultural practices that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and store carbon in soil, trees and plants. The bill, which funds the state’s cap-and-trade program, includes the language of Wolk’s Senate Bill 1350 to establish and fund the Healthy Soils Program.

“By providing farmers and ranchers with greater access to programs and other resources, the state will not only help agriculture adapt to climate change but will also help this sector play an important role in addressing climate change by reducing their greenhouse gas emissions and storing, or sequestering, carbon in the soil,” Wolk said in a press release. “I applaud the governor’s decision to establish and fund the Healthy Soils program, as well as other important programs such as those to provide clean drinking water to disadvantaged communities and protect our state’s natural resources.”

Senate Bill 859 will establish a Healthy Soils Program to support projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural operations and increase carbon sequestration, or storage, in agricultural soil. Benefits to increased health of agricultural soils include the ability to store more carbon and other greenhouse gases through sequestration, provide more nutrients for plants, retain more water, and reduce erosion — resulting in improved air and water quality, water conservation, enhanced wildlife habitat and healthy rural communities.

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These Entrepreneurs Hope to Use Garbage to Change the Way America Grows its Food

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Author: Catherine Clifford

The U.S. has a ginormous, mind-boggling food waste problem. One team of entrepreneurs, investors and infrastructure builders are trying to use some of that garbage to grow more fruits and vegetables.

Consumers, businesses and farmers spend $218 billion a year growing, processing, transporting and disposing of 62 million tons of food that never gets eaten, according to an analysis by ReFED, an organization that raises awareness of the excessive food waste problem in the U.S.

California Safe Soil has invented and patented a technology that takes organic food waste, mixes it with enzymes and creates a liquid, organic fertilizer that has been proven to grow more fruits and vegetables with less water.

The goal is to spread the innovative technology across the U.S. It’s a laudable goal, but it will require both significant infrastructure upgrades and a change in consumer behavior.

Two birds. One stone.

The beauty of the California Safe Soil fertilizer is that it both reduces trash headed to landfills and the use of toxic fertilizers.

“We all go to the grocery store every day and we all see these volumes of meat and produce that are there and we all wonder what happens on the expiration date,” says Alex Urquhart, former CEO of GE Energy Financial Services and partner of Kamine Development Corporation, a New Jersey-based family investment office that is working to commercialize California Safe Soil’s technology. “You take that waste and you add enzymes and you can produce a high-grade fertilizer that increases the yield on crops.”

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How to regenerate organic – privatize it

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Author: Craig Sams

How can we free organic from its self-imposed bureaucratic box? We could always ask Brussels to privatize us, says Craig Sams

Q. What do Slow Food, LEAF, Fairtrade, Rainforest Alliance, Cosmos, Marine Stewardship Council, Red Tractor, Vegan, Vegetarian, Forestry Stewardship Council (FSC) and Woodmark all have in common?

A. They all operate trusted authentication symbols that are 100% independent. They can decide what they can certify and how they can certify.

Q. What do the Soil Association, Ecocert, EKO, KRAV, Nature et Progres, OCIA, QAI, OFF, OF&G and 400 or so other organic symbols have in common?

A. They operate trusted authentication symbols that are 100% Government-controlled. They cannot decide what they can certify and how they can certify.

This ‘nationalisation’ of organic certification didn’t happen by accident or by force, we actually asked for it. The independent symbols have grown organically to global respect and stature while the organic ‘brands’ have been stifled in their self-imposed bureaucratic box.

“This ‘nationalisation’ of organic certification didn’t happen by accident or by force, we actually asked for it”

Back in the late 1980s I got to know key players at the Soil Association (up till then we were OF&G licensees). When I heard they were seeking to get the EU to enforce organic standards I was dismayed. Francis Blake of IFOAM and the Soil Association told me that if I wanted to have any influence I should stand for the Soil Association board. I did and didn’t get elected. Boo Hoo. But the Council wanted me anyway and appointed me Treasurer In 1990. I argued from within against letting our precious organic standards go under the control of the agricultural departments which subsidised industrial farming and were 100% behind GMOs. Regrettably the train had already left the station and, short of tying myself to the tracks, there was nothing I could do to stop it.

The infant organic industry was stressed about fraudulent claims and thought calling in big brother would stop that. In fact the opposite happened. When the Soil Association sampled a licensee’s oat flakes a few years ago and found chlormequat residues at quite a high level they told the licensee to take them off the market. Defra and UKAS and the oat processor who supplied them all cried foul. The paperwork was in order, that was all that mattered to the enforcers. The Soil Association came close to being banned from certifying but luckily the horsemeat scandal broke out and the EU said lab sampling of products should be permitted.

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A decade after ‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma,’ Michael Pollan sees signs of hope

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Author: Michael Pollan

In the 10 years since I wrote “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” many things about the American food system have changed for the better, but perhaps the most important development — and potentially the most challenging to the long-term survival of that system — is the fact that the question at the heart of my book has moved to the heart of our culture.

I hasten to add this is not my doing. When I wrote the book, Eric Schlosser’s “Fast Food Nation” and Marion Nestle’s “Food Politics” had already helped pique the curiosity of Americans about the system that fed them. Yet, in general, all writers can really do is lift a sensitive finger to the cultural breeze and sense a coming change in the weather; very seldom do they actually change it themselves. (Or as one of my mentors once explained, “Journalists are at best short-term visionaries. Any more than that, no one would read them.”) In fact, during the four years I spent researching the book, most of the time I felt like I was late to the story. Something about the public’s attitude toward food and farming was already shifting underfoot, and I became convinced my book was going to be dated on arrival. Food safety scandals, such as mad cow disease in England and outbreaks of E. coli contamination in fast food hamburgers in America, had raised disturbing questions about how we were producing meat. At the same time, climbing rates of obesity and Type 2 diabetes had led many to wonder if perhaps Americans had developed a national eating disorder of some kind. Food, which is supposed to sustain us and give us pleasure, was making people anxious and sick. Why?

Well, I wasn’t as late as I feared, and “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” found a much larger audience than I ever dared to hope. It turned out that millions of people shared my curiosity about where our food comes from and concerns about how it is produced. What’s more, the asking of those questions by large numbers of people, and the surprising answers they yielded, set into motion a certain economic and political momentum. As I wrote in the introduction (though to be honest more in hope than expectation), “If we could see what lies on the far side of the increasingly high walls of our industrial agriculture, we would surely change the way we eat.”

And so we are. Some remarkable changes have taken place in the food and farming landscape since the book was published in 2006. Consider this handful of statistics, each in its own way an artifact of the “where-does-my-food-come-from” question:

There are now more than 8,000 farmers markets in America, an increase of 180 percent since 2006. More than 4,000 school districts now have farm-to-school programs, a 430 percent increase since 2006, and the percentage of elementary school with gardens has doubled, to 26 percent. During that period, sales of soda have plummeted, falling 14 percent between 2004 and 2014. The food industry is rushing to reformulate hundreds of products to remove high fructose corn syrup and other processed-food ingredients that consumers have made clear they will no longer tolerate. Sales of organic food have more than doubled since 2006, from $16.7 billion in 2006 to more than $40 billion today.

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China launches action plan to combat soil pollution

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China’s central government will create a dedicated fund to tackle soil pollution, as well as a separate fund to help upgrade technology and equipment in the heavy metal sector, according to a statement from the cabinet.

The cabinet also said that the government will also continue to get rid of outdated heavy metal capacity.

The Chinese environment minister last year said 16 per cent of the country’s soil exceeded state pollution limits.

Much of the responsibility for the costs now lies with impoverished local governments.

There are currently 100 key soil remediation projects under way in China with an estimated total cost of 500 billion yuan, said researchers with Guohai Securities.

China published its latest five-year plan in March and said the country would give priority to cleaning up contaminated soil used in agriculture.

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How Farmers Could Be the New Climate Warriors: Agricultural Carbon Credits

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Author: Brian J Barth

Environmental advocates have all but given up on their long-cherished goal of a federally-mandated cap-and-trade program to rein in carbon emissions, given the present state of gridlock on Capitol Hill. But amid protracted hemming and hawingover how such a system would stack up against carbon taxes or other broad incentives to reduce emissions, the state of California has stepped in where Washington policymakers fear to tread.

California formed its own state-mandated carbon market in 2012, restricting the emissions of 600 of the state’s biggest polluters, who produce 85 percent of greenhouse gas emissions statewide. Lowering the “cap” will slash emissions in the state 16 percent by 2020. More recently, the California Air Resources Board, which oversees the state’s carbon market, linked arms with allies north of the border—Quebec, Ontario, and Manitoba—to ink an agreement that will integrate the three Canadian provinces’ carbon markets with California’s in the coming years. Struck at December’s United Nations climate change summit in Paris, the deal makes environmentalists’ dream of an ad-hoc North American carbon market seem actually plausible. It’s precisely the sort of regional cooperation that President Barack Obama encouraged in the Clean Power Plan he released last summer.

Yet this bit of good news in the ongoing fight to regulate carbon emissions has gone largely unnoticed amid all the partisan bickering over such incendiary issues as fracking and the future of the coal industry. Typically, carbon offsets have been tied to things like wind farms and tree planting projects. But in California, the Air Resources Board’s new rules have opened the carbon market to farmers. Not only is this an important tool to encourage more responsible agricultural practices—farms are responsible for about 13 percent of greenhouse gas emissions globally—but it seizes on the untapped opportunity offered by crop systems as a means to sequester carbon. In the same way that forests and grasslands act as a carbon dioxide sink, crop plants also pull carbon dioxide from the air, storing it in their tissues and converting it to substances that feed microbial life in the soil. The catch-phrase “carbon farming” has emerged to describe methods which maximize agricultural carbon sequestration, including such soil-building activities as cover cropping and no-till cultivation techniques.

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Rep. Huffman Introduces Healthy Soils and Rangelands Solutions Act to Improve Carbon Capture in Federal Grazing Practices

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WASHINGTON, D.C.— Building on innovative carbon sequestration practices that have been pioneered in Marin County, Congressman Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael) today introduced the Healthy Soils and Rangelands Solution Act legislation that would direct federal land managers to rigorously evaluate how to increase the amount of carbon captured on public lands.

In 2014, Congressman Huffman invited John Wick, the Co-Founder of the Marin Carbon Project, to testify in Washington before a House Committee on Natural Resources subcommittee. Wick’s testimony focused on his groundbreaking work in Marin with a consortium of ranchers, land managers, researchers, and others, to improve rangeland productivity and sustainability through careful research and demonstration. At that 2014 hearing, the first in Congress to explore the topic, Huffman and bipartisan members of the committee explored options to improve public land management and carbon soil sequestration.

“Addressing climate change is the greatest imperative of our generation and California has always been at the forefront of this fight. We have a real opportunity to put our federal lands to work in the fight against climate change, using the groundbreaking scientific work already underway in Marin and drawing from the important bipartisan support for these ideas that we’ve already demonstrated in Congress,” said Rep. Huffman.

“This legislation holds significant promise for advancing the health of American soils, and represents a triple-win; for working lands, for producers and consumers, and for the climate,” said John Wick, the Co-Founder of the Marin Carbon Project.

“As we employ every possible tool to address the climate crisis, our shared public lands must be a part of the solution. This piece of legislation will help us be innovative in how we implement that solution.” said Josh Mantell, Carbon Management Campaign Manager for The Wilderness Society.

“Healthy, resilient working lands are key to sustainable food production and carbon farming is integral to that. On our local ranches we see the results: Sequestered carbon, yes, but also taller grasses, better soil moisture retention and an overall healthier, more profitable working landscape. The opportunity for impact—on climate change and food production—if implemented on public lands across the country is tremendous and one we cannot afford to miss out on,” said Jamison Watts, Executive Director, Marin Agricultural Land Trust.

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Beyond Carbon Metrics

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Authors: Camila Moreno, Lili Fuhr, and Daniel Speich

Over the last 10 years, “climate change” has become almost synonymous with “carbon emissions.” The reduction of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, measured in tons of “carbon equivalents” (CO2e) has emerged as the paramount objective in the quest to preserve the planet. But such a simplistic approach cannot possibly resolve the highly complex and interconnected ecological crises that we currently face.

Global environmental policy’s single-minded focus on “carbon metrics” reflects a broader obsession with measurement and accounting. The world runs on abstractions—calories, miles, pounds, and now tons of CO2e—that are seemingly objective and reliable, especially when embedded in “expert” (often economic) language. As a result, we tend to overlook the effects of each abstraction’s history, and the dynamics of power and politics that continue to shape it.

One key example of a powerful and somewhat illusory global abstraction is the gross domestic product (GDP), which was adopted as the main measure of a country’s economic development and performance after World War II, when world powers were building international financial institutions that were supposed to reflect relative economic power. Today, however, GDP has become a source of widespread frustration, as it fails to reflect the realities of people’s lives. Like a car’s high beams, abstractions can be very illuminating; but they can also render invisible what lies outside their light.

Nonetheless, GDP remains by far the dominant measure of economic prosperity, reflecting the obsession with universality that accompanied the spread of capitalism worldwide. Complex, nuanced, and qualitative imaginings that reflect local specificities are simply not as appealing as linear, overarching, and quantitative explanations.

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One Way to Get Big Agriculture to Clean up Its Act

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Author: Tamar Haspel

This month, I set out to discover whether what we think of as “Big Ag” is cleaning up its act.

What’s to clean up? There’s widespread agreement that, as industrial agriculture has intensified over the past 75 years, concentrating on relatively few crops and dramatically increasing yields, it has also polluted waterways and degraded soil. But we’ve also seen increased focus on such practices as no-till farming and cover cropping, which mitigate or even reverse that damage. How widespread are those practices? Are they having an impact?

[The surprising truth about the ‘food movement’]

I found out. I wrote a column about it. It was boring.

So I scrapped that draft, and I decided to write a different column. Because what’s interesting about these conservation practices is that they raise the possibility of constructive change in one of the most contentious issues in agriculture: government subsidies.

First, though, you should know that, yes, Big Ag is at least beginning to clean up, but adoption of conservation practices still has a long way to go. No-till (growing crops without plowing up the soil) is used on about 38 percent of the acreage of America’s four biggest crops but doesn’t seem to be increasing. (Corn is holding steady; soy has ticked down.) Fertilizer use remains stubbornly high. Cover cropping (growing crops over the winter or at fallow times so the soil isn’t bare) inspires enthusiasm and wins converts — it’s the Bernie Sanders of conservation practices — but as of 2012, the first year the USDA tracked it, it was used on less than 5 percent of crop acreage.

Not all practices are appropriate for all farms, of course, and many of the practices being implemented are too new to be reflected in USDA data. But I found general agreement that farmers are increasingly focused on these issues and that conservation, particularly in the face of climate change, is important to them.

There. Aren’t you glad I spared you the 1,200 words?

Let’s talk, instead, about money. If conservation practices are to be implemented more broadly, somebody has to pay.

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