Hill Heat

Washington Post “We want an America in which we create hundreds of thousands of ‘green jobs,’ but not at the expense of destroying tens of millions of red, white and blue jobs.”

Washington Post “It’s very hard for Congress to do one big thing, much less do a couple of really big issues at the same time,” said Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.), whose state produces coal as well as wind power. Dorgan, who could be a swing vote on a climate bill, said he believes in capping carbon emissions, but not this way. He fears that cap-and-trade will create a market open to manipulation, like existing securities markets. He remains noncommittal about his ultimate vote. “We have a whole mountain range to climb before we get there,” he said.

Washington Post “What they did, we’ll keep,” said  Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee. “We’re going to maybe do some other things that would maybe embellish what they did in the House.” He wants to be more generous with “carbon offset” programs that allow farmers to be paid for no-till agriculture that keeps carbon in the soil.

Delta Farm Press “If the United States passes this bill (without China and India), we’re not going to impact temperatures to any significant degree. Isn’t that correct?” “‘Because overall land area and crops decline due to aforestation, the modeling indicates a net decrease in total agricultural soil carbon storage as carbon is transferred from agricultural soils to the aforestation pool.’ “The whole purpose of this hearing is just to be honest with people. So, what’s going out of production? The important thing about that is it affects the pork producer, the cattle guy — it beats the living daylights out of them. Why? Because prices will go up. They’re out there saying, ‘Look, my input costs are going to go up with electricity, natural gas, fertilizer.’ “Just tell them: how many acres are going out of production?” “Many of the offsets (Vilsack) speaks about wouldn’t go to the row crop person to offset his higher energy, fertilizer and other costs,” Johanns continued. “It would go to the person who is planting the forestland. “But, again, unless you can quantify this, you can’t sell this plan. It becomes the ‘hope and a prayer’ plan for agriculture because you can’t tell farmers and ranchers what they’ll be exposed to in terms of input costs. That’s a huge issue.” It’s no consolation “to stand with one foot in the campfire and one in the ice bucket and say, ‘on average, I’m in good shape,’” said Johanns. “It’s no consolation to tell farmers and ranchers, ‘you’re going to be in good shape, on average,’ if you don’t know the regional differences, the crop differences, if you can’t tell them how much land will go out of production. “And yet we have a House bill (Waxman/Markey) that passed. I find that shocking. I find it amazingly shocking that could happen without the aforementioned information being available.