In my post yesterday about the Waxman-Markey bill and the need to shift perspective on the legislative process, I referred to the "pernicious corn barons of the Midwest," but didn't do an amazing job of explaining what exactly they were up to. Luckily, Steve Pearlstein has that covered in today's Post:
For farmers, it wasn't enough to get a free pass on carbon emissions. They are unhappy that the effect of the caps and pollution permits will be to raise the price of their fuel, fertilizer and electricity. No matter that other Americans will suffer similar effects. In the mind of the entitled American farmer, any increase in costs or reduction in revenue -- whether from natural causes, market forces or government regulation -- must be compensated for by the government.
So farmers demanded that they be allowed to earn some extra cash by reducing the carbon footprint on their farms and selling these "offsets" to the factories and power plants unlucky enough to be subject to the carbon-cap regime. They want to be paid extra if they change the feedstock to cut down on cow burps and farts. Or if they use the no-till method for planting seeds, which doesn't release the carbon trapped in the soil. Or if they put in devices to trap the methane released from animal poop.
And they demanded to be paid not just if they do these things in the future, but also if they did them last year or the year before. They demanded the payments even if they are already getting a check from the government to do the same things as part of some other conservation program. And perhaps most notably, they demanded that the job of supervising this offset program be shifted from the Environmental Protection Agency, whose focus would actually be ensuring that the reductions are real, to the Department of Agriculture, which sees its mission as preserving, protecting and defending American farm subsidies.
Ugh. And that doesn't have cover the ethanol concessions. It's no wonder that one of the first cost-cutting methods proposed by the president -- cutting some hundreds of billions of dollars in unecessary agricultural subsidies -- was DOA in Congress.
Also, when you read the whole column, figure out what's going on with the "Elmer" thing. Is that just a stereotypcial farmer name? Is the farm lobby referred to as Elmer a lot? I didn't get it.
-- Tim Fernholz
Photo courtsey Flickr user Gem66.
