Poznan Update

Hello all, it’s Sara B here in Poznan as well. Today is the beginning of the high-level discussions among the heads of state and ministers here in Poland. These sessions of the Conference of the Parties (COP) conclude several weeks of meetings on technical aspects of the agreements that are taking shape in preparation for the negotiations next year in Copenhagen.

It is very clear that everyone is watching the United States to see how we move forward with climate change under the next administration … words like anticipation and expectation come to mind. On the US side, it seems that one likely scenario is that Congress may pass some type of “placeholder” legislation in the next year to outline GHG emission reduction targets and the structure of a cap-and-trade program. This (theoretically) would create the structure needed in order for the US to participate in developing the next international treaty on climate change in Copenhagen while leaving room for future iterations and improvements.

On the ag side, there has been some limited discussion here in Poznan on agriculture and soil carbon sequestration. Many expect that agriculture will increasingly enter the negotiations as ag producer countries such as the United States and Brazil become more involved in crafting the solution to climate change. There has also been a good deal of discussion on Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD), a proposal to slow tropical deforestation in developing countries (with implications for land use change and carbon sequestration).

That's all for now, thanks for staying tuned with us here in Poland!

Reporting from the UN Climate Conference

This is Fred Yoder again reporting from Poznan, Poland at the UN Climate Conference. Well, it has been an interesting couple of days so far. There are lots of meetings to pick and choose from as to what to attend. I have been trying to learn how other countries are regarding agriculture as part of a possible solution in the reduction of GHG. Unfortunately, there are very few countries here that I have been able to find as really engaged from that aspect. Brazil has probably taken the most active role in showcasing their renewable fuel production portfolio and talking about all they are doing in their quest for reducing GHG. Really, from what I have seen so far, we have a lot of work to do in talking up the benefits and possibilities that agriculture has to offer in this arena. This afternoon we are going to attempt to talk to some representatives from the E.U. countries to get their level of interest in pursuing the development of ag credits. There has been some real progress in the protocols to include ways the developing countries can get on board with the new agreement by using credits from the forestry sector whereby over time they can transition into more specific reduction systems. Lots of dialogue, and lots of possibilities. More later.

Fred Yoder

Hello from Poznan

This is Fred Yoder reporting to you from the UN Climate Conference in Poznan, Poland. I find it striking that as serious a subject that climate and GHG is, and will affect all of agriculture, I believe I am the only producer from the United States that I know of that is here in attendance. So far, Sara Brodnax and I have linked up with many U.S. legislative staff who are in attendance, and have had some great dialogue with others here from the European Union. I am trying to get a perspective of Europe's attitudes toward cap and trade, since they have had some challenges getting their systems to work. Also, it has been interesting to just observe all of the over 650 NGOs here in attendance and their various perspectives of what should happen as possible solutions. It is certainly evident that it is important to be present to represent one's own ideas, because if not, someone else will, and it may not be the desired message.

I am looking forward to a full day of meetings. It is difficult at times to decide which ones to attend because there are many which would be beneficial to sit in on. I just feel it is vitally important these folks understand the perspective and needs of both agriculture and forestry concerning these issues.

More later,
Fred Yoder

Poland Climate Talks

Hello, it's Sara B again. I will be leaving shortly for Poznan, Poland to observe the UN climate change conference next week.

What's happening in Poznan? Well, the UN climate people (under the UNFCCC or United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) and member country delegates (forming the COP or the Conference of the Parties) are meeting to discuss the current international agreement on climate change (the Kyoto Protocol). This conference is part of the process that will shape the agreement to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, which is set to expire in 2012. These discussions started last year in Bali and will end next year in Copenhagen.

What do I expect? Well, a lot of anticipation and speculation about how the US is going to handle climate change under the new Obama administration (note that the Bush administration will be officially representing the US at this COP). That is, will the US ratify the upcoming agreement or move forward with cap-and-trade on their own or ??

I'll be listening in particular for discussion of approaches to mitigation, including policies for soil carbon sequestration and avoided deforestation. There will likely be some buzz about how countries such as Brazil will be approching avoided deforestation. Brazil just announced bold targets for avoided deforestation and signed a landmark agreement with California and other states on REDD (Reduced Emissions from Avoided Deforestation and Degradation, more on this later).

Anyway, stay tuned and check back as I hope to blog from Poland if possible.

Carbon Offset Consultation

Sara B here, I just wanted to share my thoughts following my participation in the recent Conservation Agriculture Carbon Offset Consultation in West Lafayette, Indiana. The consultation was sponsored by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and Conservation Technology Information Center. The conference brought together a collection of experts and farmers from all over the world to share their experiences regarding conservation agriculture and the opportunities for soil carbon sequestration in a carbon market.

The consultation demonstrated the extensive knowledge and research available regarding the successful use of agricultural practices such as no-till to sequester soil carbon. Not only that, but at the end of the conference, the group was able to pull together their thoughts and experiences to develop a consensus document on the urgency of promoting conservation agriculture to offset carbon emissions.

In other words, a group of over 80 scientists, regulators and farmers from different countries got together in a room and agreed (yes, agreed!) that soil C sequestration is a ready, tested and critical piece of the solution to the issue of global climate change.

The consultation made it clear to me that to move forward we need:
o To institute a cap-and-trade system to establish the protocols and to create the market demand for soil C sequestration
o To involve farmers in the research, system design, and decision-making
o To establish flexible and cost-effective solutions to promote widespread adoption
o To agree on the answers to the solvable issues of additionality and permanence
o To avoid the trap of “paralysis by analysis” by fine-tuning and improving as we learn through experience
o To keep the doors open for international cooperation and the exchange of ideas

In the words of Michael, a farmer and aggregator with Carbon Farmers from Australia, the house is on fire and the children are at home ... so let's not argue about the color of the water bucket!

For a copy of the documents from the consultation, please check out the Resources over at the Ag Carbon Market Working Group website.

Defining Offsets

Below is a story about the National Farmers Union's recent efforts to gin up visibility and support on Capitol Hill for offsets in the next climate bill. While I applaud their efforts for bringing needed focus to the offsets issue, it is dangerous to tie all of agriculture -- and the fate of offsets, to the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) model. That model does not contain the rigor in either project design or measurement that will be required under a mandatory climate market.

The danger of being too closely associated with the CCX is that all those groups who campaign against offsets -- saying they are not real, not measured, and just another subsidy for agriculture, have a much easier time of making their case if offsets are confused with CCX pilot program credits. They are NOT the same thing and it is HIGHLY unlikely that the CCX model of generating offsets will be recognized in the new law.

How can I say this? To my knowledge, there is not one major environmental group that supports the way CCX defines ag ghg reductions/offsets. Not even groups that are very supportive of the concept of ag offsets in a carbon market -- and have put a lot of their own political capital on the line, would be supportive of a system like this.

It will be extremely difficult for any member of Congress to push an offsets title that has zero environmental support.

But beyond the politics -- lets remember, CCX was designed to be a voluntary market -- and it has worked well for what it was designed to be. Once you move into mandatory reductions -- and a program that provides credits to pollute -- which is what an offset will be, we are in a whole new world with new challenges that must be addressed.

If lawmakers get the idea that offsets = CCX, the battle to get the maximum market for agriculture will be made that much harder.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Environment & Energy Daily

CLIMATE: Farmers try to raise visibility of offsets for next warming debate
Allison Winter, E&E Daily reporter0 - 7/30/2008

Farmers are already trying to plant seeds on Capitol Hill for the next climate debate, in an attempt to grow their share of any future cap-and-trade legislation.

The National Farmers Union and key farm state senators met on Capitol Hill yesterday to tout the farm group's partnership with the Chicago Climate Exchange. NFU is sending out checks this weeks to more than 2,300 farmers and ranchers that participate in its carbon credit program, capturing carbon dioxide in their soil in exchange for payments from the carbon market.

The farm lobby wants to highlight its program to lawmakers, in the hopes that agriculture might get more consideration the next time a climate bill comes around. "We want to say, 'Here's something that is working," said National Farmers Union President Tom Buis after a briefing with reporters.

The group was largely preoccupied with the farm bill prior to this year's climate debate, but they are ramping up their presence for the next round on climate legislation. They want to make sure U.S. farmers have a major role in any cap and trade system. And they want a bigger piece of the pie for offsets than the Lieberman-Warner bill would have given them.

Lieberman-Warner put a 15 percent limit on offsets -- the amount of carbon reductions industry can buy from landowners who plant trees, erect methane digesters or practice no-till farming. Lawmakers with a heavy interest in agriculture, such as Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), had an amendment that would have greatly increased the share available for domestic offsets.

Stabenow and Sens. Dick Lugar (R-Ind.) and Ken Salazar (D-Colo.) all praised farmers' participation in carbon markets yesterday. Lugar is a carbon-trader himself. He planted black walnut trees on his Indiana farm to sequester an estimated 3,400 tons of carbon.

But Stabenow said agriculture continues to face a hurdle of proving that it can really reduce carbon. "The big debate is whether or not these are real offsets and can be measured," Stabenow said.

Some environmental groups, like the Natural Resources Defense Council, are skeptical of agricultural offsets. They say the long-term benefits of the offsets are dubious -- if a farmer decides later to till his 'no-till' plot, for instance, he can release much of the carbon he was previously paid to store.

The other major criticism is that offsets might not reduce the carbon in the atmosphere, especially if they are going to farmers who were already doing some of these practices on their land. NFU's program with the Chicago Climate Exchange does not pay farmers for any practice started prior to 1999, in an effort to address that criticism.

"I think there was this assumption, 'Well they're going to do it anyway,'" said Buis. "But if there isn't anything to encourage good behavior, they are going to have to incentivize it."

In addition to the farm lobby, Environmental Defense and other groups are big proponents of offsets as a way to promote conservation, reward private stewardship and reduce carbon. GOP presidential hopeful John McCain supports the use of unlimited domestic and international offset projects for industry compliance (E&ENews PM, May 12).

Offsets are also less expensive than forcing industry to cut its emissions on its own. U.S. EPA and Energy Information Administration studies have shown unlimited offsets could lower the climate program's costs by as much as 71 percent.

The National Farmers Union started its program two years ago. The group is an aggregator for carbon contracts to allow small landowners who would not qualify on their own for the climate exchange's 5,000 ton minimum. NFU identifies farmers who want to participate, enrolls them in the climate exchange and sells their offsets as a group.

Since it began in late 2006, the program has traded more than 86 million tons of carbon offsets and generated $8 million for producers. More than 2,000 farmers participate -- almost half of them in North Dakota, the first state where NFU started the program. Buis said interest continues to grow, mostly by word of mouth.

"What we find is after the checks go out the first year, people go to the coffee shop and tell their neighbors and it grows," Buis said. "We haven't put on a wild marketing program. This is mostly word of mouth."

Geologic vs Biological Sequestration of GHG

The article below is talking about geologic sequestration, not to be confused with soil carbon sequestration. The difference? Geologic seq (often referred to as Carbon Capture and Storage or CCS) refers to capturing CO2 and pumping it underground into geologic formations (underground caves, caverns, mines, etc) and permanently trapping it there. Soil carbon seq, or biological seq - refers to using plants and roots to convert CO2 into carbon, and storing the carbon in the soil as part of the soil.

A key point to note: If geologic sequestration is found too have too many complicating factors -- or is too expensive to become commercialized, than there may be even more demand for biological sequestration and agriculture offsets in the carbon market.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Environment & Energy Daily

Long-term effects of carbon [geologic] sequestration concern lawmakers
(07/25/2008)Katherine Boyle, E&E Daily reporter

Capturing large amounts of carbon dioxide emissions from power plants in order to fight global warming may be feasible in the future, but members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee are nervous about unintended consequences.

At an Environment and Hazardous Materials Subcommittee hearing yesterday, Democrats and Republicans alike said they were concerned burying carbon dioxide (CO2) beneath the ground could be risky and cause new environmental problems.

Rep. Hilda Solis (D-Calif.), for instance, is worried about the effects earthquakes could have on buried carbon stores, particularly in California along the San Andreas Fault. "We're preparing for a big California earthquake," Solis said. She questioned the corrosive properties of CO2 as well and asked what might happen when it is combined with lead or arsenic.

Subcommittee ranking member John Shadegg (R-Ariz.) reminded the panel of the gasoline additive methyl tert-butyl ether (MTBE), which was used to reduce tailpipe emissions but later found to contaminate large quantities of groundwater. "It would be a grave error to move forward with technology that would replace one environmental problem with another environmental problem," Shadegg said.

"That is the framework in which the American people will view whatever we do at this point," he added.

Shadegg also questioned how well the United States has examined environmental damage from carbon injection used to force oil and natural gas out of the ground.

Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) suggested EPA should focus more attention on CO2 conversion. "It yields more baking soda than we'll probably need, but it's dramatically easier to store" than gas or liquid, he said.

'Ace in the hole'

Newly appointed subcommittee Chairman Gene Green (D-Texas) questioned how carbon sequestration could affect groundwater reclamation from saline aquifers, if the water in those aquifers could be purified.

This week, U.S. EPA released its proposal to regulate the underground injection of carbon dioxide by power plants and other industrial pollution sources.

EPA's proposed rule is aimed at protecting drinking water sources during and after the geologic sequestration process. In carbon capture and sequestration, CO2 is captured from fossil-fuel power plants, industrial facilities or other sources and then compressed. At the sequestration site, CO2 is injected into deep subsurface rock formations via one or more wells.

Proposed EPA permitting requirements address well location, construction, testing, monitoring and closure. The goal is to prevent CO2 from migrating into underground water supplies. If the gas infiltrates drinking water, it could push other substances that occur underground naturally, like salt, into the drinking water source. It could also create a corrosive carbonic acid that could lead to CO2 leaks (E&E Daily, July 21).

Benjamin Grumbles, EPA's assistant administrator for water, emphasized that the EPA proposal is only meant to address drinking water concerns.

He predicted carbon capture and sequestration could reduce greenhouse gases by 15 percent to 55 percent over the next century. "Geologic sequestration may not be a silver bullet, but it may be our ace in the hole," he said.

Scott Klara, director of the Energy Department's Strategic Center for Coal, said DOE is working with universities, private partners, regions and states to ensure geologic sequestration will be a safe and viable way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. DOE is working with regional partners on pilot projects to learn more about the technology needed.

"The ultimate success of sequestration will hinge, in part, on our ability to measure the amount of carbon dioxide stored on a site, prevent environmental impacts and mitigate" any harmful effects, Klara said. Another essential aspect is determining whether adequate storage space exists throughout the United States and Canada, he added.