Scrutinizing Climate Change Part 2

Scrutinizing Climate Change Part 2

Scrutinizing Climate Change Part 2. I’m Greg Martin as Line On Agriculture presents the Harvest Clean Energy Report.

Brian Murray, Director for Economic Analysis, Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at DukeUniversity has been given the task of boiling down the climate legislation or cap & trade to a point that it can easily be understood by the masses. Will it be a good or a bad thing for agriculture?

MURRAY: In our view we’re taking a complete look at the whole sort of economic portfolio of opportunities and costs for the agricultural sector and we have part of a consortium that has developed and run some model of the agriculture and forest sectors of the U.S. So we found ourselves in a pretty good position to take a look at sort of the whole story.

The models used are existing models that took years to develop and have been used in the past for comprehensive studies of agriculture, forestry and climate for over a decade.

MURRAY: We did some economic modeling simulations of how a cap & trade program might affect agriculture and we came out with some results we thought were of interest to the broader public and so we’ve been making them available.

I hate to keep you in suspense so Murray talks about some of the results.

MURRAY: What we show and what other studies had shown well the costs were going to increase for agriculture because energy costs would go up and our model certainly shows that to be the case but what other studies had failed to capture was how that would be passed on in the form of higher prices that would actually allow farmers to pass off their increased input costs to their customers.

The Duke model allowed them to do that kind of analysis.

MURRAY: In addition to their ability to earn offset revenues in a cap & trade program and their ability to sell crops that are used in bio-energy production showed that the benefits of this combined climate and energy program exceeded the cost to farmers by a pretty significant amount. And so whereas previous studies had shown that this was going to be a net-negative for agriculture, our study suggests that it could be a net-positive.

Of course this is a major study with a lot of pieces that needs to be looked at as a whole and not cherry picked. View the entire report online via our website at aginfo.net.That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.

 

www.harvestcleanenergy.org

www.nicholas.duke.edu/institute/ni.wp.09.04.pdf

 

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