Plan to turn farms into forest worries Obama official

Hmmm. Looks like the USDA in conjunction with EPA is setting up a push in the direction of an at least partial repeal of that environmentally risky 5000 year experiment with agriculture.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has ordered his staff to revise a computerized forecasting model that showed that climate legislation supported by President Obama would make planting trees more lucrative than producing food.

The latest Agriculture Department economic-impact study of the climate bill, which passed the House this summer, found that the legislation would profit farmers in the long term. But those profits would come mostly from higher crop prices as a result of the legislation’s incentives to plant more forests and thus reduce the amount of land devoted to food-producing agriculture.

Questions come to mind…how is this plan supposed to work, and what sort of modeling is being used to generate it, and are the predicted changes actually valid? The latter two issues are far from being trivial, given the proven tendency of environmentally oriented (junk-)scientists to fake and distort statistics, and use demonstrably invalid computer modeling in order to prove their (pre-determined) conclusions.

In spite of that, it seems like the first question is shaky enough in its premises that the Ag Secretary is calling the idea into question.

According to the economic model used by the department and the Environmental Protection Agency, the legislation would give landowners incentives to convert up to 59 million acres of farmland into forests over the next 40 years. The reason: Trees clean the air of heat-trapping gases better than farming does.

Mr. Vilsack, in a little-noticed statement issued with the report earlier this month, said the department’s forecasts “have caused considerable concern” among farmers and ranchers.
“If landowners plant trees to the extent the model suggests, this would be disruptive to agriculture in some regions of the country,” he said.

Gee…d’ya think, maybe so? Wonder what the first clue was?

He said the Forest and Agricultural Sector Optimization Model (FASOM), created by researchers at Texas A&M University, does not take into account other provisions in the House-passed bill, which would boost farmers’ income while they continue to produce food. Those omissions, he said, cause the model to overestimate the potential for increased forest planting.

Oh yeah: the pesky bit about invalid computer modeling again!

Mr. Vilsack said he has directed his chief economist to work with the EPA to “undertake a review of the assumptions in the FASOM model, to update the model and to develop options on how best to avoid unintended consequences for agriculture that might result from climate change legislation.”

One HAS to question the outcome of any revision just as strongly as the original scvheme. Given the political realities, it seems not unlikely that the revisions will be crafted to give the APPEARANCE of solving problems, while continuing in effect to “nudge” (in the terms of B.O.’s Czardomry) us in a direction back towards the cave.

The legislation would give free emissions credits, known as offsets, to farmers and landowners who plant forests and adopt low-carbon farm and ranching practices.

Can you say “Cap and Trade”?

Farmers and ranchers could sell the credits to help major emitters of greenhouse gases comply with the legislation. That revenue would help the farmers deal with an expected rise in fuel and fertilizer costs. But the economic forecast predicts that nearly 80 percent of the offsets would be earned through the planting of trees, mostly in the Midwest, the South and the Plains states.

The American Farm Bureau Federation and some farm-state Republican lawmakers have complained that the offsets program would push landowners to plant trees and terminate their leases with farmers.

The model projects that reduced farm production will cause food prices to rise by 4.5 percent by 2050 compared with a scenario in which no legislation is passed, the department found.

Ooops! Maybe THIS is the problem with the projection…it would give ammo to opponents of the overall (pseudo) green policy framework, which after all is built on the foundation of junk-climate science as propounded by the Great Church of St. Gore the Green.