NASDA meeting votes to block EPA action on GHG emissions

By Jon H. Harsch

© Copyright Agri-Pulse Communications, Inc.

Washington, Feb. 5 – Congressional efforts to block EPA authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions won near unanimous support from state agriculture commissioners Friday.

At the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture (NASDA) Mid-Year meeting in Washington, Minnesota Commissioner of Agriculture Gene Hugoson offered a motion that “NASDA should work with congressional leaders to find a legislative solution to halt the EPA’s efforts to regulate greenhouse gases (GHG) through the Clean Air Act.” The motion explained that EPA is acting under a Supreme Court decision, based on the public health threat posed by emissions. The motion noted that EPA’s recent endangerment finding “will not directly impose requirements on certain industries, including agriculture” but added that “many critics believe this decision will lead to further-reaching actions from the EPA, especially without legislative action on climate change.”

According to Commissioner Hugoson’s motion, “The potential impacts on agriculture and rural America are grave, and it is critical to pursue a legislative fix before the EPA can continue further with these efforts.”

During discussion of the motion, NASDA members warned that the climate change legislation which has stalled in Congress is very unlikely to be passed this year whereas “the EPA will have its rules out in a few months” – so that threatened EPA actions must be stopped quickly.

Montana Department of Agriculture Director Ron de Yong was the only one speaking out to oppose the motion. As a grain producer farming not far from Glacier National Park’s disappearing glaciers, he says that “If we’re going to mitigate carbon, to deal with the effects of carbon build-up on climate change, there are only three basic mechanisms. You can regulate it. If you regulate it, the costs are going to increase for your inputs. You can put a carbon tax on it. The costs are going to increase to pay for the tax. Or you can put a cap on it and then create the carbon credits, and your costs are also going to go up. Out of those three, the only one that allows you to mitigate those costs and, according to USDA studies, actually more than mitigate the costs, is with cap and trade, through sequestering carbon into the ground and having farmers sell carbon credits. So for farmers and agriculture, that is the preferable option. . . the fastest way to actually have an impact on climate change is to have agriculture involved because we can sequester carbon very quickly, in large amounts, much faster than you can build pollution control equipment to control carbon emissions.”

Those points didn’t seem to impress de Yong’s fellow ag commissioners. Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Bill Northey said that “I don’t think this process of EPA using the Clean Air Act from the 1970s that was not designed for CO2 is the right lever.” He warned that if EPA is allowed to regulate CO2, “EPA can look at other things and extend that philosophy” to other areas such as new regulations affecting non-navigable waters.

North Dakota Agriculture Commissioner Doug Goehring said that with the climate change issue tainted by “biased science,” the goal should be “having EPA stop what they’d doing and let Congress deal with this. . . Congress has their hands full, but . . . I think they might get this right.”  

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