Greenwashing Big Ag: A BIPARTISAN LAW CLAIMING TO TACKLE GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS INSTEAD JUST HELPS THE AGRICULTURE INDUSTRY LAUNDER ITS REPUTATION.

• Author: Kelloway, Claire

Late last year, Democratic and Republican lawmakers performed a kind of Washington magic trick. In this famously acrimonious time, a bipartisan group not only succeeded in passing a bill designed to take on greenhouse gas emissions in the agricultural industry, which is responsible for as much as a third of all global climate pollution, but did so while appearing to please almost everyone.

The law, the Growing Climate Solutions Act, passed as part of the big year-end government funding package. It was cosponsored by more than half the Senate and heralded by top Democratic and Republican leaders, including Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and minority ranking member of the Senate Agriculture Committee John Boozman. It was also endorsed by more than 175 nonprofits, corporations, agricultural trade associations, and climate activist groups. "The inclusion of the Growing Climate Solutions Act in the omnibus is a tremendous bipartisan victory that will help combat climate change while rewarding farmers for their climate-smart practices," Jennifer Tyler of the Citizens' Climate Lobby, a grassroots advocacy group, said in a statement.

The legislation was built around a simple idea. The federal government would help facilitate private, voluntary, farm-based "carbon markets," wherein corporations, like Microsoft or Amazon, can purchase from farmers special credits, known as carbon offsets. In exchange, the farmers agree to keep carbon in the soil by, say, planting cover crops or improving cattle grazing methods. Big agricultural companies can also pay farmers within their own supply chains to store carbon in the soil, thus similarly claiming a special credit, known in that case as a carbon inset. Either way, big polluting corporations can purchase enough credits to claim that they are "carbon neutral" or a "green" company in commercials, on packaging, or in presentations to investors and board members. Meanwhile, farmers get to pocket a nice paycheck for doing the right thing. Democrats applauded the law for helping to deliver on Joe Biden's campaign promise to make agriculture "the first net-zero industry in America," while Republicans cheered it for helping farmers, corporations, and the environment while avoiding new regulations or government spending. A win, win, win.

Unfortunately, it was too good to be true. These private, voluntary farm-based carbon markets don't actually do what they purport to do. They don't make big polluting corporations carbon neutral. They don't guarantee that anyone cuts their carbon emissions. And they don't generally encourage farmers to transform their operations to remove the most carbon. In fact, they don't even really function as markets at all. Within these shadowy, private exchanges, there is no agreed-upon standard for what counts as "sequestered carbon"; no central oversight mechanism; no cap on corporations' total allowable carbon use; and no penalty for cheating. Studies of other carbon markets reveal that the vast majority of offsets and insets fail to remove any additional carbon at all. The result is that these farm-based carbon exchanges function, essentially, as state-sanctioned greenwashing facilities.

The Growing Climate Solutions Act didn't create these unregulated exchanges, but it did offer them the powerful endorsement of the U.S. government--and that's arguably worse than if Congress had done nothing at all. By lending credibility to these loosely organized programs, the government is helping to fuel already-surging corporate demand for carbon offsets--which may seem like a good thing, but remember, these voluntary, unregulated exchanges operate according to a kind of magical accounting, wherein the number of carbon offsets sold is often entirely unrelated to the amount of new carbon released into the atmosphere. By one estimate, in order to meet their net-zero goals, corporations will demand two to four times more land-based carbon removal offsets than the Earth's plants and soil could even plausibly supply.

It gets worse. With so many...