Ag subsidies are contributing to global warming

It's been nearly two months since I wrote an addition to this blog. Since that time I suffered a terrible loss; my beloved wife Audrey developed a sudden illness and died on January 10th, 2020.  We had a joyous 69 years and 5 days as a married couple. At a time when consolation is hard to come by, I am cheered by the outpourings of others’ shared sorrow and the love and affection expressed for Audrey.  Now it’s time for me to find my way back to some of the things we shared and others that she left me to pursue on my own. That brings me to my abiding concern over global warming.

For me personally, this may be a time to reassess what I’m about. I want to start with a question, “Where the heck are we with respect to slowing or even reversing the levels of greenhouse gases?”  If I look at any of the many graphs published online, I see that things are not looking good. For example, here’s a graph of global carbon emissions up to 2014:

To appreciate the significance of this graph, you’ve got to realize that it is showing us how much new carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are being added to the atmosphere.  Every year we add more, and the planet becomes still warmer.  We’re told that that the advanced economies are polluting less,  slowing down just a bit, as the graph below shows, but still at suicidal rates:

The advanced economies (black) are showing a slower rate of emissions; still pumping out lots of carbon emissions, but not so rapidly.  At the same time, the rest of the world (green) is adding carbon dioxide at a higher rate than ever.  As to where we are on slowing greenhouse gas emissions--we’re in a bad place. If we don’t improve  substantially from the status quo over the next couple of decades, harmful changes in the global climate will occur at an accelerating pace.

Awareness of climate change has grown in the general population, but we are nowhere near a level of concern that would provide the impetus for major economic and social moves starting right now.  Simply put, we humans have got to up our game. In the U.S.,It’s time to shift the conversation from talking about lifestyle changes that smack of “green”: veggie burgers, fewer airline trips, electric cars, conferences that don’t seem to progress beyond channeling the mantras of ecological good works and the like. Lifestyle changes are good, we’ll be better off and healthier for adopting them, but as Michael Mann, a prominent climatologist recently wrote in Time Magazine:

 “[F]ocusing on individual choices around air travel and beef consumption heightens the risk of losing sight of the gorilla in the room: civilization’s reliance on fossil fuels for energy and transport overall, which accounts for roughly two-thirds of global carbon emissions. We need systemic changes that will reduce everyone’s carbon footprint, whether or not they care. The good news is we have tactics to bring environmentally friendly (and non-lifestyle-disrupting) options to fruition­: pricing carbon emissions and creating incentives for renewable energy and reduced consumption.”

Mann identifies two major initiatives that could lead to significant reductions in the emissions we see graphed above, but they’re not the only ones.  I keep fairly close track of the literature on climate change; everything from the science involved to the politics and economics.  It’s a veritable blizzard of stuff!  I have good friends working on initiatives different from those that preoccupy me, and I feel guilty that I don’t know more about those areas, or that I’m not  making contributions there. I’ve come to realize, though, that if I’m going to be effective I must look for just one or two areas in which to concentrate my attention and advocacy. That won’t mean ignoring all the others; I do  need to stay in community with many others whose goals with respect to combating climate change I share. 

So I’m going to try to focus in the near term on land conservation, agriculture, and food.  I acknowledge that isn’t really a sharp focus. Whole areas within those topics could call for intense inquiry, but anything I look at will be of sufficient breadth and depth to bear significantly on greenhouse gas emissions; for me that’s the coin of the realm.

So let’s dive into this complex, hugely important subject with a report published in December, 2019, by Politico, of a closed-door, highly selective meeting of the big wheels of American agriculture.  Hosted by the U.S. Farmers and Ranchers Alliance, about 100 attendees, including the current and past Secretaries of Agriculture, the American Farm Bureau Federation, CEOs of major food companies, representatives of green groups and anti-hunger advocates--a truly broad array of interests. The Politico article reported that the topics covered included many that would not have been on the table a couple of years ago.  Climate change has been a politically fraught topic in farm country, which tends to be strongly Republican. The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication reported in a survey conducted in November 2019 that although 73% of registered voters think that global warming is happening, only 41% of conservative Republicans agree. But for the Politico meeting, though heavily Republican and rural, climate change was in the room.

I’ve not been able to locate recent survey data on how farmers today view climate change.  A 2013 survey showed that at that time, farmers were strongly inclined to think of dramatic changes they’d recently experienced in the fields as a manifestation of just variable weather. It’s a safe bet that fewer farmers today accept that view. Though they don’t seem all that ready to accept the scientific consensus on climate change, they’re reluctantly coming to  recognize that large and persistent change is in progress. Recent insights into the views of rural America on the environment and conservation come from the Nicholas Institute of Duke University: “Broadly, our study suggests that the urban/rural divide on the environment is not a function of how much rural voters care about the environment. Nor is it a function of how knowledgeable they are—rural voters appear relatively sophisticated about environmental issues.”  

Then what are the important factors at work?  Interviews and surveys reveal that a key factor for those living in rural settings is their strong feeling of place. Where they live is an important part of how they define themselves, which in turn shapes their views. They’re rural, country--definitely not into an urban perspective. They don’t trust the federal government, even though it currently spends more than $20 billion a year on agricultural subsidies. At first this seems surprising, but consider this: about 39 percent of the nation's 2.1 million farms receive subsidies, with the lion's share going to the largest producers of corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, and rice. Estimates vary, but it appears that more than 60 percent of farmers are not directly benefiting from subsidies. 

The story of how subsidies originated, and the rationales for them can be traced to the historical fact that as the nation expanded westward in the 19th century, agriculture was the major driver.  Through the Morrill Act of 1869, the Federal government took an active role. Agriculture was the dominant industry in  the expanding nation, but people needed help in learning how to farm and build farm-based communities.  Decades later, during the years of the Great Depression, the government enacted many programs that would sustain farm owners through complex, far-reaching legislation covering commodity price supports, supply regulations, import barriers, and crop insurance. Those programs have been expanded, modified, and expanded over the decades, even as agriculture has metamorphosed from small farm operations into ever-larger businesses and corporate operations. The result is that the huge amounts currently spent on agricultural subsidies have had distorting effects, and are a poor use of public funds.  But proposals to shift from practices supported by subsidies to more environmentally friendly, less polluting, alternatives are seen by powerful interests as an assault on a time-honored way of life, an economic threat. 

So what is the justification for farm subsidies as they are today?   I’ve drawn some figures from the Cato Institute blog, Downsizing the Federal Government. We’re going to get into a lot of numbers here, but bear with me. Subsidies go mainly to high-earning households. The average income of all farm households was about $118,000 in 2016, 42 percent higher than the $83,000 average of all U.S. households. In that same year, the median income of farm households was around $76,000, 29 percent higher than the U.S. median of about $59,000. It is sometimes claimed that farm subsidies help to alleviate rural poverty, but that’s obviously not the target of most of the  billions expended annually.  Just 2 percent of farm households fall below the poverty line, compared to 14 percent of all U.S. households.  USDA data show that while less than one-third of farms with revenues of less than $100,000 received federal subsidies, three-quarters of farms above that threshold did. I’m not a fan of the philosophy that informs the libertarian Cato Institute, but Chris Edwards’s blog seems to be well researched, with solid referencing. It has me convinced that the Federal Government’s agricultural policies as they apply to subsidies are misguided. The 2018 article in Forbes on agricultural millionaires, courtesy of the federal government, makes me grind my teeth. 

Most farm subsidies are wasteful of money and they’re largely bad for the environment. Climate change is producing ever more unpredictable weather phenomena, from flooding to drought. We’ve got to move away from past practices toward conservation, regeneration  of the soil, massive reductions in use of nitrogen fertilizer, and much more. The needed changes are slow in coming, in part because farmers can’t accept that widely accepted growing practices could be producing all the alleged environmental destruction, and in part out of a sense of being blamed unfairly. But the average farmer could, I believe, come to understand that federal programs designed to promote regenerative agricultural practices and the like would be to their advantage.  Our problem is to somehow force the millionaire beneficiaries to let go of  cushy subsidies designed to make wealthy interests even richer.

 Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa is reported by the Des Moines Register as having received more than $367,000 in disaster, corn, oat and soybean commodity subsidies over a recent 21 year period. Grassley is one of six House and Senate leaders that sit on committees that draft the farm bill that renews every five years. Grassley’s take is not a lot in comparison with the $5.3 million haul taken in by California Representative Doug LaMalfa and his family.  I do wonder just what public good is served by paying subsidies to public servants who are already well paid, comparatively wealthy, and stand to eventually collect nice pensions from the federal government.   Grassley and LaMalfa, who have been farming (though not active farmers, obviously) most of their work lives, did nothing illegal; they just followed the rules.  And who made the rules?  There is a moral conflict of interest here that cannot be papered over by saying only that the laws are being strictly obeyed.  To Grassley’s credit,  he’s been espousing farm subsidy reforms that would cut into the profiteering of large corporations and wealthy absentee landlords who take in billions in federal money.  The fact remains that substantial reductions in farm subsidies will be an important step toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions. 

One final point:  That green area in the figure above, the emissions from developing and underdeveloped nations, is growing in part because of misdirected subsidies paid out to underdeveloped nations by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, as I discussed in my previous blog of December 25.  Please read it if you haven’t done so. We have work to do on both the domestic and global fronts.