Does not matter: Where broadband and climate change collide — Democrats’ plan to target methane

Aug 23, 2021

Presented by Bayer

With help from Tatyana Monnay and Matthew Choi

Editor's Note: Weekly Agriculture is a weekly version of POLITICO Pro's daily Agriculture policy newsletter, Morning Agriculture. POLITICO Pro is a policy intelligence platform that combines the news you need with tools you can use to take action on the day's biggest stories. Act on the news with POLITICO Pro.

Quick Fix

— The lack of rural broadband access is making it hard for some farmers and ranchers to access carbon markets that could help remove emissions.

— Democrats are looking into methane polluter fees, but Republicans say this will increase costs for consumers.

— The House comes back from break today to kick off the reconciliation process. Committees have until Sept. 15 to draft their portion of the resolution.

HAPPY MONDAY, AUG. 23! Welcome to Morning Ag, where your host is looking for a new spot to get poutine in D.C. Send recommendations and story tips to xbustillo@politico.com and @ximena_bustillo, and follow us @Morning_Ag.

Be a Policy Pro. POLITICO Pro has a free policy resource center filled with our best practices on building relationships with state and federal representatives, demonstrating ROI, and influencing policy through digital storytelling. Read our free guides today .

DRIVING THE WEEK

BROADBAND BLOCKS FARMERS FROM LUCRATIVE MARKET: Farmers and ranchers can be pivotal players in President Joe Biden's fight against climate change as the agricultural carbon credit marketplace grows. But the lack of broadband internet connection prevents them from entering the marketplace sooner, if not all together, our Tatyana Monnay reports.

The ag carbon credit market, referred to by many as the "Wild West," seeks to pay farmers to pull carbon dioxide from the air and bury it in their soil. The emerging marketplace is often difficult for even the savviest farmers to navigate and relatively impossible without an internet connection.

By the numbers: Storing carbon in soil has the potential to wipe out nearly 6 percent of overall U.S. emissions every year, according to the Environmental Defense Fund. While the White House proposed spending $100 billion on broadband infrastructure, the Senate infrastructure deal is throwing $65 billion into the broadband bucket.

Rural states across the country lack broadband coverage, putting farmers behind in their involvement within carbon credit markets.

What to watch: Getting farmers connected will be an important factor in determining the ultimate success and growth of the industry, according to Brent Poohkay, chief information officer at Nutrien, a Canadian agriculture company that runs a platform to buy and sell carbon credits.

Now all eyes are on the infrastructure package's investment. But only $2 billion of the $65 billion pot is explicitly allocated to the Agriculture Department's rural ReConnect program. Further allocations and collaborations across federal agencies remains to be seen.

"No matter how you want to use technology in agriculture or in a farming environment, you can think of broadband access as one of those core, enabling infrastructures, almost like a precondition" Poohkay said. "You need that to do everything else."

THE HOUSE IS BACK: The House is back today, marking an early end to the August recess, to vote on a budget resolution that will tee up the reconciliation process, reports Pro Transportation's Tanya Snyder.

Nancy's plan: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi plans to use the House Rules Committee process to create a rule that would have the effect of advancing the bipartisan infrastructure bill, a voting rights bill and the Democratic budget resolution. The process, which sets up the rules for floor debate, will be voted on Monday night.

Then on Tuesday, she will follow up with passage votes on the voting rights bill and the budget resolution, but not the infrastructure bill, which she has long vowed to withhold until the Senate passes its reconciliation package.

Not everyone is on board. Nine moderates sent a letter to Pelosi last week demanding that the infrastructure bill be voted on at the same time as the budget resolution, and there may well be more who silently agree.

The ideal next steps: Despite the thorny politics, Democrats are expected to get both the infrastructure bill and the reconciliation bill across the finish line. If all goes to plan, the House will adjourn Tuesday evening having passed the budget resolution, formalizing instructions to committees on both ends of the Capitol to write their sections of a $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill loaded with Democratic priorities from universal pre-K to high-speed rail.

The budget resolution instructs Committees to finish their work by Sept. 15.

A message from Bayer:

Did you know that integrated weed management (IWM) is the hallmark of everything we do at Bayer to help farmers protect their crops? We have championed IWM for generations within the agriculture industry. In fact, we invest over $2 billion in research and development for farming solutions every year—nearly double the spend of our closest competitors. Learn more here

Energy and Environment

WHAT DEMS' METHANE PLANS MEAN FOR FARMERS: President Joe Biden and Democrats on the Hill are focusing on methane emissions as a key piece of their climate agenda, Pro Energy's Zack Colman reports this a.m.

Call to action: Carbon dioxide gets most of the attention in climate talks, but methane is the second biggest contributor to global warming among greenhouse gases. Emboldened by a scathing report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released earlier this month, Democrats see tackling methane gas as good politics, as well as good for the planet.

That's a big political gamble, especially in rural areas. While oil and gas production is the main reason methane emissions have boomed since 2007, agriculture (namely livestock operations) remains a massive source of the potent greenhouse gas, accounting for 40 percent of methane emissions worldwide. This is leading to concern among Republicans and farm-state Democrats about regulatory efforts to tackle the problem.

The plan: Senate Democrats plan to include a "methane polluter fee" in their $3.5 trillion budget resolution that would hit energy producers that vent or burn off excess methane and compressors used to pressurize and transport natural gas, Zack writes.

Mark Brownstein, senior vice president for energy at the Environmental Defense Fund, drew connections to ongoing wildfires, droughts and floods in reasoning the public is ready to embrace a fee on methane emissions. He noted that already available technology can reduce oil and gas methane emissions 75 percent from current levels, and that the evolution of remote sensing by drone and aircraft has also reduced costs for curbing methane.

Republicans are not sold. They are preparing to fight Democrats' efforts by saying it would increase costs to everyday Americans for things like home heating, electricity and groceries.

Treading lightly: The Biden administration for months has been careful to avoid spooking the powerful farm industry with any talk of stricter regulations on emissions. Instead, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has focused on voluntary incentives for farmers to adopt more climate-friendly practices.

But any comprehensive policy to curb methane will need to address agriculture. The IPCC report found that atmospheric concentrations of methane are at their highest level in 800,000 years. That set off alarm bells among climate scientists, as methane traps heat 86 times more effectively than carbon dioxide over a period of 20 years. The report asserts that lowering methane emissions is the best option to fight climate change.

BIOFUELS GET THEIR NUMBERS: EPA is preparing new quotas for how much biofuel must be blended into gasoline, as the administration balances competing interests from the oil and agriculture industries, Bloomberg reported on Friday. EPA has told lawmakers to expect a White House review of the plan soon, which would lead to EPA formally proposing new rules in the next few weeks.

While refiners, including small businesses, have been pushing for "reasonable" quotas that keep in the hit the oil industry took during the pandemic, agriculture-friendly Democrats from farm states warn that shorting ethanol producers could jeopardize corn-belt support for the party.

INTRODUCING OTTAWA PLAYBOOK : Join the growing community of Politicos — from lawmakers and leaders to pollsters, staffers, strategists and lobbyists — working to shape Canada's future. Every day, our reporting team pulls back the curtain to shed light on what's really driving the agenda on Parliament Hill, the true players who are shaping politics and policy across Canada, and the impact it all has on the world. Don't miss out on your daily look inside Canadian politics and power. Subscribe to Ottawa Playbook today.

In the courts

DEADLINE APPROACHES ON DEBT RELIEF: The Justice Department, which is representing the Agriculture Department's debt relief for Black farmers program, has until today to appeal the preliminary injunction issued in Florida.

Background: U.S. District Judge Marcia Morales Howard was the first to issue a preliminary injunction on the debt relief program in June. USDA had 60 days to appeal the decision which expired on Sunday and is carrying into today.

The injunction stopped USDA from issuing any payments, but the department is still allowed to do prep work for payments, just in case the program is deemed constitutional.

Coalescing around Texas: The Biden administration is battling at least 13 different lawsuits across the country on the program. But additional attention is also on the lawsuit in Texas backed by Stephen Miller, a former Trump adviser, which has become a class-action suit.

Tough decision: The Biden administration has been silent about their strategy to fight for the debt relief program. While the DOJ and USDA have both said they will defend the program, little legal action in the form of appeals has been taken against several preliminary injunctions. But the program also cannot be abandoned without the Biden administration taking a huge loss on their race and rural equity goals.

Thinking about the future: Sheryll Cashin, a law professor at Georgetown University, writes in an opinion essay for POLITICO that the Biden administration will need to adopt "race-conscious" policies — like the debt relief or legislative fixes for the program — to make appropriate amends for past and present discrimination at agencies.

"Whatever the Biden administration or Congress decides to do about legal challenges to the debt-relief program, relentlessly telling the truth about USDA's past and present racism — and that of other government actors — is necessary to living up to our professed ideal of American equality," Cashin writes.

Row Crops

— The Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair has come out in support of Pelosi's approach to reconciliation. POLITICO's James Bikales has more.

— Canada's Trade Minister Mary Ng spoke with POLITICO Canada's Zi-Ann Lum about ongoing trade with China and the U.S.

— Farmers were initially frustrated with Indigo, an ag-tech company that was a platform for trading carbon credits as well as grain markets. Now, it's reimagining its image and strategy, The Wall Street Journal reports.

— Dairy farmers are facing the brunt of high feed prices and excessive drought this summer. That is worrying younger ranchers about the industry, according to Al Jazeera.

— The first "murder hornet" was spotted last week in Washington state causing the state's agriculture department to begin a plan to trap, track and eradicate the invasive species. Reuters has more.

— Amazon has opened two Amazon Fresh grocery stores in Washington, D.C., but has neglected the lower-income portions of the city. The Washington Business Journal has the story.

THAT'S ALL FOR MA! Drop us a line: xbustillo@politico.com; rmccrimmon@politico.com; hbottemiller@politico.com; gmott@politico.com and pjoshi@politico.com.

A message from Bayer:

Through our Integrated Weed Management program, Bayer empowers farmers to manage the risk of future resistance. We have advocated for many years for farmers to use a variation of weed-management methods, rather than an overreliance on just one.

What does that look like in today's Bayer? Developing digital tools that help farmers do more with less; discovering new chemistries and biologics that target only the threat, not our natural resources; ensuring we keep pace with farmers so the range of sustainable and effective tools at their disposal grows instead of shrinks.

To learn more visit https://www.bayer.com/en/us/protectingcrops