New Climate Change Legislation

New Climate Change Legislation. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. New climate and energy legislation is percolating around Capitol Hill. American Farm Bureau Climate Change Specialist Rick Krause says many think it may be the last chance for passage of any climate change legislation this year. KRAUSE: Time is running short this year. With the elections coming up in November the window for trying to get any kind of legislation passed is rapidly closing. General wisdom is that if they don't have anything by April on something that's controversial like this that they won't be able to consider it after than in an election year. We see this as the last gasp for legislation this year. Democratic Senator John Kerry, independent Senator Joe Lieberman and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham have been working on the new plan for months, trying to build consensus on the controversial issue with fence-sitting colleagues and concerned groups, including the American Farm Bureau Federation. KRAUSE: What we said in the past is that we do need to have some alternative sources of energy ready to go and promoted in the event that carbon and fossil fuels are phased out and this bill apparently seems to have some of those provisions, by encouraging nuclear energy and by encouraging offshore drilling. To that extent the indications we've seen are positive. We'd also like to see, rather than farmers and ranchers being regulated or taxed, for them to be provided incentives to reduce greenhouse gases even further. Krause says the new bill is expected to look a lot different from the cap-and-trade bill passed by the house. KRAUSE: it seems that there's going to be a lot of differences in the approaches taken. One approach that is out there in the bill right now is what they call a cap-and-dividend bill. That bill sets a cap on emissions. It would auction emission allowances off to those that want to emit greenhouse gases and then it would use the proceeds from that auction to give rebates to consumers on a per capita basis. That has some merit, but the devil again is in the details. Farming being an energy-intensive business, family farms are going to use a lot more energy than somebody living in town. If this rebate program is such that a person living in town gets the same amount of rebate as a farmers that's expended a lot more energy, that's going to be a problem. So it remains to be seen how all of these factors come into play. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.