The 2008 Farm Bill has barely left the lot and Congress has pulled it back into the garage for some tinkering. The U.S. Senate has proposed $331 million in cuts to a series of conservation programs designed to leave some land in its natural state rather than plowing every square inch under for crops. Last week, the Environmental Working Group — those folks who publish how much every farmer gets in Farm Bill subsidies — held a conference call to protest.
With first compliance deadline in WTO cotton decision looming, Brazil explores a novel trade retaliation: suspension of intellectual property rights for U.S. products.
On behalf of our millions of members and activists, we strongly urge you to oppose the Emerson Amendment (#019) and any other attempts to sidestep the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) process to assess the full lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions of biofuels (including emissions from indirect land-use change).
Government conservation money in Iowa should be targeted to farms in areas that pollute the Mississippi River basin and cause a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, an environmental group says.
A group of America's ethanol producers dedicated to furthering the nation's economy through cleaner, "greener" energy has called upon the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to raise the limit on ethanol blended in gasoline.
President-elect Obama’s support for biofuels faces a few early tests, including a decision on whether to provide more aid to the corn ethanol industry, which critics say already gets too big a piece of the money pie.
A California environmental agency this week will consider a controversial new way to evaluate the carbon footprint of biofuels. At stake for the ethanol industry is continued unencumbered access to the state that uses the most motor fuel in the country, and the prospect that other states could follow California’s lead.
The subject of offsets and which federal agency has the responsibility of determining what qualifies has emerged as a problem for some environmental groups, too.
Farmers who already conserve carbon in the soil by not plowing it could qualify for the new credits to keep them from breaking up the land and releasing the carbon into the air.
A frayed regulatory framework and dependence on voluntary action has done little to mitigate the damage from agricultural activities in the six states in the Chesapeake Bay watershed.
The Environmental Working Group recently analyzed the House climate bill and noted that the legislation allows farmers to earn credits under the cap-and-trade regime for practices such as low or no-till farming even if they've been going on since 2001.
A new analysis from the Environmental Working Group estimates that the House bill could allow the equivalent of more than 67 large coal-fired power plants to avoid any new controls on greenhouse gas emissions without requiring landowners to create any new carbon sequestration projects.
An environmental group is mounting a fresh assault on the climate change legislation that squeaked through the House and faces an uncertain future in the Senate, raising the prospect that the delicate coalition of support around it could fray.
