Oakland, Calif.-The California Air Resources Board’s (CARB) climate change proposed scoping plan is understating both the role of agriculture in causing greenhouse gas emissions and the industry’s ability to reduce these emissions, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) has charged. According to EWG, CARB’s plan ascribes just 6 percent of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions to agriculture, excluding several significant sources, including energy used to irrigate and to produce synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. In addition, EWG states, recent modeling efforts funded by the California Energy Commission indicate that methane from the digestive systems of livestock may be double the levels estimated previously. “Similarly,” EWG asserts, “the plan fails to consider how better practices by California agriculture could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It should insist that farmers deploy a variety of voluntary and mandatory measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions before 2012. As things stand now, the board is missing key opportunities to improve water, water pump, and fertilizer efficiency in California’s fields. It’s clear that much more needs to be understood about how California’s complex agricultural systems, especially its growing organic agricultural movement, can further reduce global warming gases. But the plan confines its research goal to a study of nitrous oxide, just one of many subjects crucial to meeting the larger objectives described in California’s Global Warming Solutions Act.” EWG concludes that as the economic sector most affected by our climate, agriculture will undoubtedly be hardest hit by global warming. Therefore, agricultural measures aimed at reducing emissions must be coordinated with efforts to promote adaptive, sustainable farming practices.
Transparency Across the Fertilizer Value-Chain