COW FARTS AND PATTIES

 

Today we learn some new terminology by way of the proposed budget reconciliation bill of which 40 billion is earmarked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture to address climate change. U.S. Senator Debbie Stabenow is Chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee. She says that most of the money goes to rural power, clean energy, and something now called “smart agriculture.”

 

Some of this sounds like good old fashioned common sense farming to preserve soil health, like no-till farming, rotational grazing, and the expansion of crop cover use, but for some reason sold to us now under a new marketing term, as if this had just been thought up by the Green New Deal policy wonks on Capital Hill, perhaps to justify the 8.5 billion dollar price tag. More pointed, however, is the $3.25 billion to help farmers develop “whole farm conservation” plans to implement “environmentally-directed working farms.” What’s that?

 

At first it sounds okay, although obviously prioritizing conservation over production. But as you read on, it begins to sound eerily familiar for anyone whose been following events in the Netherlands. For those who need a quick primer, after the IMF destroyed Sri Lanka and literally brought down its government by enforcing zero carbon emissions standards for agriculture, the E.U. thought it a great idea to beta test the same thing in the developed world by mandating Dutch farmers to cull livestock herds in order to achieve nitrogen reductions. Have you seen the pictures of those bags the cows have to wear to capture their methane emissions? It’s completely insane.

 

This U.S. proposal touts a “once-in-a-generation investment in effective working lands conservation programs that will put farmers at the center of our national response to the climate change crisis.” Farmers? At the center of climate change? Oh, yeah, all those cow farts. But even the government estimates that our agricultural sector accounts for only about 10% of green house gas emissions. Something stinks like cow patties here.

 

I just finished writing a new piece about The Grid and the Greenwash of renewables, and now I feel like I’m writing the exact same piece again, only about agriculture. It is the same template—profligate federal subsidies for completely unproven and untested technologies, while potentially crashing proven methods, and creating engineered scarcity that will pay insiders handsomely.

 

Speaking of insiders, Joe Manchin has devised a plan to incentivize large corporate CO2 emitters to capture their emissions to be stored in the soil. This is called carbon sequestration, and it relies on pipelines that are “troublesome,” meaning they don’t work. Further, soil scientists don’t know how much carbon can be sequestered in soil or how long it can stay there. They don’t know how to track or quantify it. They do know there is a limit to how much carbon soil can hold and that saturation levels could be reached within a few decades. A few, as in three or four.

 

Never mind that carbon sequestered by other methods, like tree planting, is much easier to quantify and verify and lasts until you cut the tree down. You miss the point. The point is not to capture carbon, it is to shoot steroids into a carbon trading market and make an absolute killing. Exxon Mobile forecasts the carbon capture market will be $4 trillion by 2050, and you’d better believe they are participating, even while a dumbshow is being made of ending the oil and gas industry. It’s a puppet show for children. What this really is? Another massive transfer of wealth under the banner of the Green Economy, every bit as ineffective and disingenuous as “clean energy.”
 

They are encouraging farmers to “voluntarily” participate in carbon credits, but how long before the mandates rollout? And what will that do to American agriculture? Many farmers live season-to-season by the skin of their teeth. They haven’t the resources to invest in soil carbon sequestration technologies. It reminds me of King Biden saying Americans should save on their energy bills by buying electric cars. Let them eat carbon credits!

 

I can assure you that Texans are not interested in policies that put carbon trading ahead of food production. More and more these “existential” topics (the border, the grid, our elections, our food supply) reveal the fundamental issues of identity underlying them. What do we stand for so that we don’t fall for those who would make bank on our ignorance or inaction?

 

The bamboozlers are counting on your silence to be construed as consent. Fight Outloud, Texas.