From DTN News: NAWG Reverses Policy on Climate Change
A statement Friday from Karl Scronce, National Association of Wheat Growers president and a wheat producer from Klamath Falls, Ore.:
“The NAWG Board of Directors met this morning via conference call and voted 26 to 2 to approve a new resolution regarding greenhouse gas regulation. The Board also voted 24 to zero to remove existing resolutions relating to greenhouse gas regulation and an agriculture cap-and-trade program.
“The new resolution reads:
“’NAWG is opposed to greenhouse gas legislation or regulation that has a negative impact on production agriculture. NAWG will strive for a net economic benefit to farmers, agriculture and food production. We believe neither greenhouse gas regulation nor legislation should take effect until the major carbon emitting countries of the world have agreed to regulate their own greenhouse gases in a like manner to ours. NAWG urges USDA to do a detailed economic analysis of any legislation or regulation before it becomes law. Furthermore, NAWG will oppose EPA regulation and will work to overturn the Supreme Court ruling.’
NAWG staff and grower-leaders plan to continue to work on this issue to achieve an outcome that the Board feels is in the best interest of our grower-members. “
Here is the official NAWG resolution statement at the NAGW website
h/t to WUWT reader “CuriousGeorge)
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I love the smell of resistance to Cap N Trade in the morning….
It wasn’t long ago – last year? – that we had a shortage of wheat where I live, along with the higher prices that one might expect. At about the same time, I took a trip to Idaho and was astonished to see tens of thousands of acres that used to grow wheat now growing weeds, sagebrush, and windmills. And the owners of the land were driving fancy new trucks and building fancy new houses. Your tax dollars at work.
Mike McMillan (19:50:33)
No, only the Supreme Court can overturn any of its decisions. The Supreme Court interprets the law, whereas Congress passes laws.
If Congress does not like a Supreme Court decision, Congress may pass a new law that the Supreme Court may then rule on. Thus, you are correct that the Congress may pass a law regarding CO2 as a pollutant.
And what the Supreme Court actually held was that the EPA had the authority to regulate CO2. The Bush administration’s EPA chose not to regulate CO2, but Obama in his vast wisdom is now regulating CO2 as a dangerous pollutant.
The actual language from the case, Massachusetts v EPA, is “Because greenhouse gases fit well within the Clean Air Act’s capacious definition of “air pollutant,” we hold that EPA has the statutory authority to regulate the emission of such gases from new motor vehicles.”
When the crap & fade house of cards comes tumbling down, it will make fanny & freddy look like schoolyard play.
Why is it whenever I read about Co2 everybody gets it wrong?
Plant Basics: 1. Plants generally require a medium to grow in.
2. Hydroponics either require a soiless mix or straight water.
The water solution must have a proper nutrient mix (n-p-k)
or the plant will die (even with lots of CO2). The nutrients are
the food:nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus. The nutrients
are drawn up through the ROOTS.
3. CO2 is a heavy odorless colorless gas which is critical to the
process of photosynthesis. Photosynthesis produces chlorophyll.
Chlorophyll is green and gives plants their basic colour, so it
really is the plants blood so to speak.
4. CO2 fertilization is a misnomer and is wholly incorrect. Increasing
the concentration of CO2 increases the RATE of phtosynthesis and
thereby the plant grows larger by increasing its volume. This
includes ALL of the plant, from its roots to its tip and any fruit
associated with it. Therefore CO2 is solely involved in the
transpiration (breathing process) of the plant.
5. Chlorophyll allows the plants to absorb the sun’s energy and
produce carbohydrates(simple sugars and starches).
To recap:The plants food is drawn from the soil along with water
through the roots. In the presence of sunlight and air
the plant is able to synthesize what it needs to grow.
Enhancing CO2 makes the whole process much more
efficient. So CO2 in, and, of itself is technically NOT
plant food. Plants can draw nutrients and water through
their leaves but one cannot grow a plant decently only
by spraying the leaves.
Also when talking about CO2 one cannot separate the C from the
O2 since the carbon is covalently bonded to the two oxygen atoms.
The ridiculous nonsense that CO2 is toxic or a pollutant makes my
hair stand on end whenever I read or hear it. Reducing CO2 from
present levels will only ensure smaller crop sizes and many people
will indeed end up starving(not the elite). The wingnut politicians
who are apparently a separate species of nitwits will be the ones
responsible.
Whether a skeptic or alarmist lets just get the basic facts straight.
“”Brian (00:26:12) :
Whether a skeptic or alarmist lets just get the basic facts straight.””
Thanks. Appreciate the distinction now. You are quite right. Sad lack of knowledge on both sides of the divide.
Brian, is Carbon not a nutrient for a plant?
”
5. Chlorophyll allows the plants to absorb the sun’s energy and
produce carbohydrates(simple sugars and starches).
”
The sugars, starches and cellulose are primarily made from H2O and CO2 from the air. Thus almost all the weight of the plant is from the air, and all its carbon from CO2.
Let’s not get our knickers in a twist… Surely RW’s tongue was planted firmly in cheek.
Yay. Plowing an acre uses 2.35 gallons of gasoline. How much will fuel prices rise? $4 per acre and more paperwork. Yay.
http://www.ext.colostate.edu/PUBS/farmmgt/05006.pdf
Photosynthesis takes place in chlorophyll, one does not directly produce the other. Chlorophyll’s photosynthesis produces sugar and oxygen, some of both are needed by the plant. The blood of plants is sap and is not usually green; the green in leaves is because the chlorophyll in their cells is near the surface. You might be bright red or bluish, but you might have noticed that most people aren’t. Put some maple syrup on your pancakes and keep reading.
First, we have to get our definitions straight.
From my handy on-line dictionary:
Food n. “Any nutritious substance that people or animals eat or drink, or that plants absorb, in order to maintain life and growth.”
CO2 is plant food. QED.
All,
To put a point on my comments (and thanks to all who elaborated)
Those that control energy control the people…totally…
No wonder the EPA is quietly going about its power grab –
while the gov’munt dazzles the elecorate with glitzy expensive health
care and bailout legislation.
Mike
Congress can also pass a law removing things from the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. They have done so in the past but not very often.
Smokey,
Obviously, the dictionary is denialist propaganda. 😉
Andrew
Since plants are mostly carbohydrates (carbon and water) and only contain minerals/nutrients from the soil as a minor constituent, one can fairly say plants necessarily get most of their food from the air. To take it to the extreme consider lichens and spanish moss that take everything from the air except for a few minerals they take from the rock or tree upon which they live. Actually many plants can be grown like that, consider aeroponics:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroponics
The guvm’t does not want farmers in charge of food prices. Some time ago, some politician came up with the notion that people tend to vote based on how full their stomachs are versus how empty their pocketbooks are. So price subsidies came into being in order to provide cheap food to the voting public. In exchange for removing a farmer’s ability to set the price for wheat, the guvm’t pays us not to grow it. With price controls on food, farmers would go broke in a hurry if they grew food on erodible land (the only kind that can be put in CRP). Without price controls, the cost of growing wheat plus whatever kind of profit a farmer wanted to make would raise the price of bread every time fuel or fertilizer costs increased. Not to mention weather or fire disasters.
So what does this farmer think about the CRP land I have? I was raised on a farm and manage that same farm today (I rent it out to others and keep track of how the land is being used, so it isn’t a big deal). I wish there were no subsidies and I could sell and profit from whatever I grow, adjusting my prices accordingly to keep me in business. So in reality, it wasn’t the farmers who begged for things like CRP subsidies. It was the people who voted for politicians who promised cheap food.
acementhead (18:59:58) : The government pays farmers not to grow certain crops all the time . As I understand it , it is an attempt to keep a surplus down and prices up . CRP keeps land out of production therby preserving topsoil and supposedly preventing excess fertilizer runoff and improving water quality . It has also been a boon to wildlife as most critters don’t live in crop rows . I’m sure there are other posters here who can explain this better .
This will fall on deaf ears.
Yesterday the NAWG, today Japan:
http://heliogenic.blogspot.com/2009/09/japan-scraps-emissions-target-china-and.html
Pamela is absolutely right about the CRP. I have 20 acres, 5 of them in “the program”. The gov’t pays me the huge sum of $240/year to grow loblolly pine trees on it for eventual harvest in about 10 more years. And it’s taxable income. What a deal.
“We all eat and benefit from wheat. Low prices and higher yields are beneficial.”
Nothing could be further from the truth. Simply put, wheat is a terrible food for humans. Always has been, always will be, despite the USDA “food pyramid” (designed to encourage the consumption of the US grain surplus) and the labels proclaiming “whole grains” on the processed cereal boxes and junk foods. We’ve only been eating wheat for about 8-10,000 years or so (some populations far less time), about 300 generations (a drop in the human evolutionary bucket), but we evolved for millions of years without significant sources of annual grasses in the hominid diet. Our “still-paleolithic” physiology does not really deal well with lots of wheat and the protein it contains (gluten), or with the other gluten-containing relatives, rye and barley.
There is ample evidence that wheat consumption wreaks havoc on human bodies. The damage is very obvious in the fossil and bone records, not to mention the stats kept by colonial physicians: shortened stature, rampant dental decay, and evidence of increases rates of chronic disease occurred whenever hunter-gatherers/non-grain eaters took to eating Western foods like wheat flour. Height wasn’t regained until fairly recently, when Europeans relocated to the Western hemisphere (lots of game and pasture) and again had access to more meat (protein and natural fats in the first two decades promote growth in height in adulthood).
In the Industrial Age, wheat hybridization for traits conducive to industry and changes in wheat processing (faster industrial processing which skips traditional soaking/fermentation steps that neutralize anti-nutrients such as phytic acid) have only hastened the physiologic damage to humans who consume a lot of wheat, resulting in rapidly increased rates of “diseases of civilization”* such as cancer, CVD, diabetes, dental disease, allergies, and auto-immune diseases. Those diseases go where wheat goes (concentrated sugar and industrial seed oils, too). The rising tide of disease increased even faster (and in younger humans) since the gov’t started the well-intentioned (but disastrous) experiment in the 1980s, advising reduced saturated fat/higher carb diets for the entire population, in which the processing industry was only too happy to participate with their reformulated edible food-like products emblazoned with low-fat, non-fat, no cholesterol, “lite”, and so on.
Keep in mind that “civilization” is synonymous with grain cultivation and monoculture crop production. In Western civilization, growth of concentrated populations, “culture”, and government began with human manipulation of annual seed crops, primarily wheat (which inevitably leads to the need for armies, accounting, grain storage, bureaucracies, and massive amounts of slave or peasant labor and human subjugation/suppression in general).
Additionally, the monoculture production of wheat is inherently unsustainable, as it eventually wrecks the land and ecosystem of the population it initially supported (go steal more land). But now most people are so entrenched in the culture of wheat (and other annual seeds/grains) that they cannot separate the wheat from the chafe, so to speak.
Back to the blog post. Of course the NAWG is not going to go along with CO2 regulations until the major CO2-emitting nations of the world also agree to do the same. They know that will never happen. And they know that wheat can’t be grown in the massive yields per acre now expected without huge inputs of petrochemicals that result in lots of CO2 emissions.
The NAWG is singularly focused on the short term profitability of wheat cultivation. There is no sustainable way to grow wheat in the long run without killing the land or fouling the environment or reducing profits (for the grain cartels, the farmers don’t even profit much anyway).
Look at the “Fertile Crescent”, the so-called “cradle of civilization”. It isn’t fertile anymore, eh? Fast forward through history and we find that the need to feed the now swollen populations (of grain-eating cultures) involves either implosion from within or imperial expansion to more distant and fertile (undisturbed) soils (oh yes, also massive death and destruction to humans and the environment with wars, dams, stripped and eroded soils, dust storms & so on).
Now the last remaining grasslands are spoiled the world over. In North America that came about more recently and even faster by removal of the American bison to displace the Native Americans, displacing native perennial grasses (with wheat crops ) that held the ancient soil in place with extremely deep root structures (fossil-fueled mechanized farm equipment sped that up even more), and depleting the underground water sources, all which contributed to drought, dust storms, and disaster on a massive scale. How soon we forgot the “Dirty 30s” dust storms that dropped hundreds of millions of *tons* of great plains soil all over eh Eastern Seaboard and onto ships hundreds of miles out in the Atlantic Ocean. We failed to learn the right lessons, because wheat cultivation got a reprieve with the development of fossil fuel-derived fertilizers and massive irrigation projects, so what cultivation continues apace in the North American Midwest. Consider that there simply are no more pristine and fertile grasslands to displace and disrupt for grain production anymore and we are going to run out of fossil fuels very soon. Water is increasingly scarce and competing demands on water further degrade the environment. Wheat and all the other grains are not sustainable much longer, no matter the checkout price rings high or low. The true price is really astronomically high, but most don’t recognize it.
The bigger question is will our mistake in relying on wheat and other grains be universally recognized soon enough and will we adopt a more sustainable/healthy way to produce food for our swollen (in more ways than one) populations? Will we transition to sustainable polycultural systems that mimic nature with many species of plant and animal foods that coexist instead of trying to beat nature into submission by dominating with one crop. Will that occur soon enough? Will it be widespread enough to feed enough people? Or will we remain asleep at the combine harvester wheel?
Anna, you have been drinking way too much kool-aid.
@ur momisugly Anna (12:18:15) :
Really good post. Really. I think we read many of the same books. Ever read any of Marvin Harris’ books(Cannibals and Kings, etc. ) ?
Anna (12:18:15) : I believe that bison were displaced in order to free the grasslands for cattle grazing – the effect it had on indigenous populations may or may not have been intended , but had the same result . It seems to me that the early cattle ranchers despised the farmers who came later . BTW , barley , in its liquid form , is fine stuff ( I don’t mean broth ) . Otherwise it is inedible .