Good news and bad news
It’s good to see agriculture was spared from the Securities and Exchange Commission’s emissions reporting rule.
The rule would have forced farmers and ranchers to report greenhouse gas emissions in their supply chain, creating a giant headache for them and potentially costing them their livelihoods.
In response to the rule omitting farmers and ranchers, American Farm Bureau Federation President Zippy Duvall said, “Farmers are committed to protecting the natural resources they’ve been entrusted with, and they continue to advance climate-smart agriculture, but they cannot afford to hire compliance officers just to handle SEC reporting requirements. This is especially true for small farms that would have likely been squeezed out of the supply chain.”
The rule would have kept many farmers and ranchers, who raise every product that goes into the nation’s food system, from doing business with public companies.
As you can imagine environmental groups, especially those who want to decimate the agriculture industry, including Friends of the Earth, said the SEC move was a mistake. And you can bet that they will probably sue the SEC for this decision.
The bad news is that these environmental activists are laser focused on destroying U.S. ranches and dairies.
In a recent article from National Public Radio, environmentalists were complaining that the government is paying farmers and ranchers to change their practices to reduce greenhouse gas emissions before they know if these new practices work.
In this article, Jonathan Foley, executive director of the climate solutions nonprofit Project Drawdown, said the federal government should focus on incentivizing practices that more clearly reduce emissions. Almost half of U.S. agriculture emissions come from gas-belching livestock — particularly cattle — and manure management. Foley says one good start? Incentivizing farmers to transition away from producing beef and dairy.
“A lot of the big things the USDA could be doing is thinking about how much meat and dairy do we need,” Foley said. “We’re not even talking about it, let alone funding it.”
The danger in this is who would oversee and make sure these practices are climate friendly?
Most farmers and ranchers already do everything in their power to protect the environment because they depend on their environment to grow and produce crops and livestock.
