The Farm Bill is the most important climate bill this Congress will pass

In this episode, Peter Lehner, head of the food and farming sustainability program at Earthjustice, gives his expert perspective on the upcoming Farm Bill and its potential impact on agricultural decarbonization in the US.

(PDF transcript)

(Active transcript)

Text transcript:

David Roberts

As longtime subscribers know — indeed, as the name makes plain — Volts is primarily focused on the energy side the climate fight. I haven't paid much attention to agriculture over the years. I understand that agriculture is a huge piece of the puzzle, both for decarbonization and for sustainability more generally. It's just not really been my jam.

However! The Farm Bill — which requires reauthorization every five years — is likely to pass in coming months, and it is arguably the most important climate bill Congress will address this session.

To talk me through the agriculture/climate nexus and discuss opportunities in the upcoming Farm Bill, I contacted Peter Lehner. He is the head of Earthjustice’s food and farming sustainability program, and the author of Farming for Our Future: The Science, Law, and Policy of Climate-Neutral Agriculture.

We talked about how US agriculture has evaded environmental laws and become the source of 30 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions, ways that the upcoming Farm Bill can be tweaked to better fight climate change, and what's next for agriculture decarbonization.

Peter Lehner of Earthjustice, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming on.

Peter Lehner

Great to be here, Dave.

David Roberts

As you may know, if you have read my work over the years or followed me at all, I'm pretty heavily, deeply into the energy world as the source of most of my time and attention in the climate fight. I know on some level, partially because I've been lectured by people numerous times over the years, that agriculture is a big piece of the puzzle — and land use and oceans, which are other things that I also don't spend much time on. And I fully acknowledge that they're important, they're just not my personal passion. However, I've felt vaguely guilty about that for years.

And I know the Farm Bill is coming up, which is a significant marker, I think, possibly the source of some significant action. We'll discuss that in a while. But at the very least a good excuse, I think, for me to check in and just sort of see like, what's the state of climate and agriculture, you know, action stuff, what's going on there? So, that's what you're here for, Peter, because you are the expert author of a book on the subject, numerous podcasts, been studying this for a long time. So before we get into the Farm Bill, just maybe — I know that the subject of the ties between agriculture and climate and carbon and methane greenhouse gases is very complicated.

You've written entire books on the subject. But I wonder, for people like me who have had their nose mostly in the energy world, if you could just summarize relatively quickly what are the big kind of buckets where agriculture overlaps with carbon and decarbonization and climate generally? What are the big areas of concern that people should have their eyes on?

Peter Lehner

Sure, you know, I should say, Dave, that I came to this really the same as you. I'd been working on energy issues for a very long time. For three decades, I've sued many power plants. I've worked on many different environmental laws dealing with regulation of the power sector. And what happened is, over time, doing general environmental law for New York State, for NRDC, for Earthjustice where I am now, I kept seeing the impact of agriculture as really being enormous and impeding our ability to achieve our environmental and health goals unless it was addressed. So that's why I'm focusing on this now.

But like you, I think most environmentalists focus much more on the industrial sector, the power sector, the transportation sector. And part of what I've come to realize is that we all should pay a lot more attention to the agriculture sector. And we'll talk about the Farm Bill coming up. But really the Farm Bill is the biggest environmental law Congress will address that most people have never heard of. Now why is that? So, I'll tell you quickly. First, agriculture uses most of our land. It uses about two thirds of the contiguous U.S.

David Roberts

Can I pause you there?

Peter Lehner

Sure.

David Roberts

That took me two or three seconds to catch up with that before my mind blew. Two thirds of the land of the contiguous United States is devoted to agriculture?

Peter Lehner

62%, yeah. And that's about using rounder numbers, about 400 million acres of cropland. About half of that is used to grow food that people eat, and about half of that is growing food that animals eat. And close to 800 million acres of grazing land, some of that is federal land, some of that is state land. A lot of that is private land. But all told, it's over a billion acres of land, almost all in the lower 48 is used for agriculture.

David Roberts

That is wild.

Peter Lehner

So think about it. If you fly anywhere and look out the window, what do you see? You really see agriculture, whether it be the irrigation circles or just the fields or whatever. That's what has transformed our landscape. And part of the result of that, of course, is agriculture is really the biggest driver of biodiversity loss. So much of biodiversity loss is habitat loss. And look, I've spent decades working on issues like grizzly bears and wolves. But what those issues are at bottom is agriculture because we are grazing in grizzly and wolf territory. And so much of habitat loss, whether it be land or polluted waters, is driving other biodiversity loss.

So in addition to that, what I was going to mention is the environmental laws that you're probably familiar with, Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act have actually done a pretty good job of addressing air and water pollution from industrial sources, from the energy sector. But they really have not done a very good job addressing air and water pollution from agriculture, whether it be these hundreds of millions of acres of row crops. Or these hundreds of million acres of grazing. Or these more industrial scale facilities where thousands or tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of animals are crammed together into buildings — those are called concentrated animal feeding operations. Those are now the largest source of water pollution in the country.

David Roberts

Did the laws pass over them or just inadequately address them?

Peter Lehner

A little bit of both. What happened was in 1972, say, when the Clean Water Act was passed, Congress really wasn't thinking that much about agriculture. But also agriculture has changed tremendously since then. It has become so much more industrial. So that a small number of facilities that are gargantuan produce, for example, almost all of our meat, but those didn't exist in 1970. And as you probably know, in the Clean Water Act, it did a good job dealing with pollution coming out of a pipe. But pollution, say, coming off of city streets, that's called non-point source pollution.

The regulation was much less strong, and they relied more on grants and education and sort of nudges, as we say. And much of agriculture — 400 million acres of cropland, 800 million acres of grazing land — that's not, by and large, water pollution coming out of a pipe. So essentially, the Clean Water Act doesn't cover it. And similarly, the Clean Air Act does a great job of addressing stuff coming out of smokestacks. And while there's some, like from these concentrated animal feeding operations, there's very concentrated air pollution coming out of the vents. But out of all of those acres of cropland and grazing land, those are called area sources under the Clean Air Act and are addressed much, much less.

But still, air pollution from agriculture, I bet this would surprise most of your readers, kills about 17,000 people a year. It's a major source of air pollution in this country.

And that is mostly methane or other criteria pollutants?

Methane is actually one of the ways agriculture drives climate change. It's actually other pollutants, largely ammonia and hydrogen sulfide, which come from overfertilization and animal waste. And ammonia is a major precursor to the fine particulate matter that gets into our lungs and causes disease and kills us.

David Roberts

Which we're finding out, as I've covered on the pod, is worse. You known, every time a new round of science comes out, we find out it's worse than we thought.

Peter Lehner

Yeah. And in a place like, say, the San Joaquin Valley in central California, which has some of the worst air quality in the country, almost all of that PM, that fine particulate matter, is driven by animal agriculture.

David Roberts

And I'm also going to guess maybe you're going to get to this, but that when you take wild land and make it into agricultural lan