Farm and ranch delegates at the American Farm Bureau Federation annual meeting this week unanimously approved a special resolution to strongly oppose “cap and trade proposals before Congress.” and strongly support “any legislative action that would suspend (EPA’s) authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.”
The 369 delegates, reiterating the theme of a successful campaign kicked off this fall, said: “Don’t cap our future.”
The resolution asserted that proposed cap and trade legislation would result in significantly higher production costs for farmers, and that potential benefits of agricultural offsets are far outweighed by the costs.
“The administration’s economic projections show that the proposed cap and trade legislation would result in planting trees on 59 million acres of crop and pasture land thereby damaging the capability of U.S. agricultural producers to feed a growing world population and create the conditions for (hiking) consumer food prices,” according to the resolution. “Cap and trade legislation would eliminate jobs, and could result in the loss of 2.3 million jobs in the U.S. over the next 20 years.”
The delegates cited recent developments in the climate change debate as reasons to re-emphasize their opposition.
“E-mails made public, call into question just how unsettled the science really is on climate change and demonstrate the unwillingness of many of the world’s climatologists to share data or even entertain opposing viewpoints,” the delegates stated. “The recently completed Copenhagen summit resulted in demands for the U.S. to transfer billions of dollars to the developing world to fight climate change, but produced no meaningful agreement.”
Source: American Farm Bureau News release. For more information, go to www.fb.org