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. 

Doing science in a greenhouse

The recent furor surrounding the hacked e-mails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University has died down a good bit, but the effects of it will reverberate for a long time The e-mails reveal a good bit of small-minded belligerence toward some scientists whose views depart from the consensus position, and speak of excluding some of their work. The director of CRU, Phil Jones, has stepped down pending an investigation of the episode. Pennsylvania State University said it would review the work of Michael Mann, a faculty member cited prominently in the e-mail messages, to assure that it meets proper academic standards. Climate change skeptics have seized upon the disclosures as demonstration of what they have been saying all along, that the science behind the claimed anthropogenic changes to climate is dubious at best. Republicans in Congress are calling for investigations into the work of US scientists any way connected, inasmuch as they are likely to be supported by federal funds.

What can this episode teach us about the nature of scientific authority? Clearly the authority of many scientists identified in the e-mails has been substantially weakened, and, by association, that of the climate science community more generally. Analysis of this particular case can help us understand more clearly the boundaries between science and other social sectors, and point to how scientists should behave to sustain science’s proper societal roles (See Steven Shapin’s excellent essay on this subject, and the discussion in Imperfect Oracle).

Michael Gerson wrote in the Washington Post on December 11 about the melding of science and politics. In the interests of advancing the case for urgent responses to the threats represented by climate change, some prominent climate scientists “..appear to exaggerate their public certainty on disputed issues, shade the presentation of information for political effect, tamper with the peer-review process, resist reasonable requests for supporting data ..” He speaks of the insularity of the climate science community: “Climate scientists are clearly accustomed to deference. Theirs is a community coddled by global elites, extensively funded by governments, celebrated by Hollywood and honored with international prizes. But outside the Copenhagen bubble, the field of climate science is deep in a crisis of professional credibility, which many scientists seem too insular to recognize.” Gerson is not a climate change skeptic. His concern is that scientific objectivity seems to have been compromised by a drive for political and economic change: “But without trust in disinterested, scientific judgments on climate, most non-scientists will resist costly, speculative, legislative actions. When the experts become advocates, no one believes the experts or listens to the advocates.” He concludes that the climate scientists involved in the episode have diminished the authority of science more effectively than anyone else could have.

But Gerson’s position borders on saying that scientists’ expert authority is compromised whenever they move beyond the boundaries of their expert, or epistemic, authority to argue for what should be done in a given situation, as opposed to what is simply the case. In fact, there is a hierarchy of positions involved. At the first level the scientist is an expert, and exercises epistemic authority by reporting as objectively as possible on the scientific results. In the present case, climate scientists might offer expert opinions on the potential for climate change based on vast amounts of data accumulated on various aspects of the climate, and with the aid of extensively tested computer modeling of what future climate will look like given particular scenarios of fossil fuel use. If those opinions are a realistic representation of what the science community holds to be the case, we have a straightforward example of the exercise of epistemic authority. Beyond this a scientist can exercise moral authority, by moving beyond offering an expert scientific opinion to advise that a particular course of action be taken; in the present instance, to advise that certain policies should be established to mitigate the harmful effects of climate change. This effort to exercise moral authority presupposes the epistemic authority of the scientist. The scientist’s expertise plays a role, but in the broadest sense of making a moral judgment the scientist is no better positioned than anyone else in arguing for what actions should or should not be taken. A non-scientist acquainted with the results of the scientific studies might argue that, assuming a doubling of the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere will result in an increase in the Earth’s surface temperature sufficient to cause much human travail, we should stop burning fossil fuels quickly as possible. In advancing the same argument, a climate scientist's view should not count for more than the non-scientist’s, since both are premised on the same scientific considerations. It's not that the scientist’s expert authority has been weakened, it is simply not the driving influence; in making the moral judgment the science is taken as a given, equally available to both scientist and non-scientist. Beyond this, the scientist and non-scientist alike can move to active advocacy in the public domain for the particular actions that were advised in the exercise of moral authority. In moving into this kind of advocacy, the scientist surrenders her credentials as a scientist; those have already been cashed out.

This of course all seems quite reasonable in the abstract, but when the topic is as huge, urgent and plagued with manifold complexities as climate change, distinctions become blurred. The differences between these different stances with respect to an issue of such wide social importance are not sufficiently appreciated, particularly by scientists. There is nothing inherently wrong in scientists getting caught up in political advocacy for causes that grow out of their scientific work. When they do so, however, they must reconcile themselves to the loss of much of their scientific expert and moral authority. When the arguments are flying back and forth as to what should be done, advocacy for particular courses of action is already premised on knowledge that is taken as a given. If the scientific basis for the argument is contested, we are back at the stage of shoring up expert authority. In the case of climate change, Senator James Inhofe, Glenn Beck and their ilk keep wanting to return the argument to that first stage. It has been tempting for climate scientists to depart from norms of objectivity and disinterestedness in the interest of protecting and enhancing their epistemic authority. But doing so has proven embarrassing for some, and damaging for science’s image as a reliable, trustworthy source of knowledge. Disagreements within the climate science community over data interpretations, adequacy of the models and the reality of human effects on climate are being thrashed out in a glass house. A lot of people are watching; science’s epistemic authority is being determined by what non-scientists can see of how science moves toward increasingly reliable knowledge. Climate scientists can help keep the focus where it should be by not providing further unfortunate diversions.