By Philip Brasher
Farmers are being warned they could pay a stiff price for their contributions to global warming.
That could happen if the Environmental Protection Agency goes forward with regulating greenhouse gas emissions under the federal Clean Air Act, according to the U.S. Agriculture Department.
Under the law, livestock operations of all sizes and farms with as few as 500 acres of corn could exceed emissions thresholds and would be required to pay for permits, USDA says.
These fees could amount to as much as $20 for every hog and $175 per dairy cow, says Rick Krause, who follows climate policy for the American Farm Bureau Federation.
Ron Sparks, a Democrat who is Alabama’s agriculture commissioner and president of the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture, says the fees would drive livestock farmers out of business.
“At a time when we are becoming more and more reliant on other countries for our food, we should be looking for ways to help farmers, not punish them for producing the food we put on the table for our families,” he said.
To farmers, it may sound outlandish that they would have to get permits for greenhouse gas emissions, or even that they are contributing to global warming, but here is the logic:
The Supreme Court ordered the Bush administration to declare whether greenhouse gas emissions harm the public, and if so to regulate them as a dangerous pollutant. The Bush administration hasn’t taken action, but President-elect Barack Obama’s advisers have indicated his EPA will move forward.
Nice. Now we the people can get screwed with even higher food prices, all thanks to the anti-human green revolution.
Yeah Ben, aint it just great? Just wait until cap & trade comes around. We’ll get to pay higher prices for our energy too! And just think, higher energy prices will put an additional burden on farmers and we get to pay even higher prices for food. But it’s all for Mother Earth, so we can’t complain. All we can do is bend over, grab our ankles, and shut our mouths.
Farmers are getting older as less young people want to go farming (I wonder why?) In the near future there will be a shortage of farmers and less profit from farms with all this carbon tax nonsense and lowering livestock numbers because of C02 nonsense and less land ploughed as this is supposed to release more C02. Then we will have a real problem not a fictional one. We will have a shortage of food and people will starve in their thousands.