Farmers Concerned About Energy Bill

Farmers Concerned About Energy Bill. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.

A new climate and energy bill – called the American Clean Energy and Security Act – aims to lower greenhouse gas emissions. The way it would do that has its ups and downs for the nation’s farmers and ranchers.

STECKEL: There are provisions in this energy and climate bill that we do support, such as the renewable electric standard. However, we do have strong concerns about the cap and trade legislation and how that will negatively affect agriculture.

American Farm Bureau Energy Specialist Anne Steckel says the legislation ignores agriculture, even though many farming practices actually absorb tons of carbon.

STECKEL: We want to get credit for these practices. Agriculture has not specifically been taken into account and that makes it very troubling because this bill gives a lot of latitude on how agriculture will be regulated or how the offsets will be done.

Farmers like provisions for renewable electricity, because many have windmills or solar panels on their land, and for encouraging the use of tree trimmings to make renewable fuels. But those benefits could be outweighed by higher energy costs if industries pass the cost of new cleaner equipment onto consumers.

STECKEL: We’re not sure what it would do to our energy costs. We’re very concerned about our input costs because that’s not something that we can control.

Steckel explains some of the positive aspects of proposed energy and climate legislation.

STECKEL: This is a very broad energy and climate bill. In terms of the energy provisions, it does include a renewable electricity standard, which the farm bureau does support. It also contains a change to the forest/biomass provisions including woody biomass as a renewable fuel and as a part of the renewable electric standard.

Steckel explains why renewable electricity is an important issue for U.S. agriculture.

STECKEL: An important piece of this energy bill includes a renewable electric standard and this is something that is very important for farmers and ranchers because it says that we’ll be using renewable electricity like wind and solar in our supply system. And we’re going to be using 15 percent of that by the year 2020. We often have a lot of windmills on our lands. There are also a lot of solar operations on the land, hydro operations. These are all things that will benefit farmers and ranchers.

That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.

source: Greg Martin, click here for bio