Scrutinizing Climate Change

Scrutinizing Climate Change. I’m Greg Martin as Line On Agriculture presents the Harvest Clean Energy Report.

As with all things there are two sides and you usually can find something, some small part of an issue that supports your position. Sometimes it takes a bit of magic, smoke and mirror but you can make your point. Brian Murray, Director for Economic Analysis, Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University is the man who looks past the smoke and mirrors at the whole picture and in this case it’s climate change legislation.

MURRAY: We at the Nicholas Institute are involved in performing objective analysis of environmental policies in general and particularly in climate legislation. Some of the work we do directly involves economic analysis and economic modeling of climate policies on the agricultural and forest sectors.

Their latest work is a study of how current climate change legislation will affect the various industries involved and that includes agriculture. The study is available online at Duke’s website.

MURRAY: The agriculture community as you know has been very interested in the development of cap & trade policy in the United States both from a perspective of what it might cost if energy costs go up in response to cap & trade and how that might impact their bottom line to what the opportunities are in terms of selling carbon offsets in a market that is characterized by cap & trade.

There are of course many parts and pieces to cap & trade legislation and Murray says one aspect that needs to be understood is that agriculture would stand separate.

MURRAY: Because agriculture and forestry by all policy proposals that have been out there would remain outside of the cap, by that I mean they would not be directly bound by the emissions restrictions of a cap & trade program in the United States in the same way the electric power sector or the industrial sector or the transportation sector would be.

Murray also reiterates that it is important to look at all the results of the research and not to cherry pick.

MURRAY: What we were observing was different groups out there were sort of marshalling efforts to make their own case, either for or against the bill and in our view weren’t taking a complete look at the sort of whole economic portfolio of opportunities and costs for the agriculture sector.

We’ll continue this discussion next Friday. For additional information on clean energy, visit harvestcleanenergy.org. That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.

www.harvestcleanenergy.org