The Farm Bureau’s Rick Krause has a post up on The Hill’s Congress Blog this morning stating that the Kerry-Boxer “Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act” will cost American farmers and consumers without providing any benefits. His post goes on to both get the facts he uses wrong and ignores the benefits that combating climate change will bring to our country’s farmers.

Krause uses the scare figure of $1870 per household as the energy costs from the bill. Setting aside the fact that he doesn’t explain if this is an annual cost, or the present value of future costs (if it’s the latter, then it has less impact on your budget than your daily newspaper), Krause’s figure is just wrong. While the most authoritative source on costs from legislation – the Congressional Budget Office – hasn’t published an analysis of the Kerry-Boxer bill, in June it published a breakdown of the costs from the similar Waxman-Markey bill. The key finding there was that the energy costs were an order of magnitude smaller: “the net economywide cost of the GHG cap-and-trade program would be about $22 billion—or about $175 per household.” Even better, those in the lowest quintile of households will see a net benefit of $40 a year.

Krause claims that Kerry-Boxer is “not a climate bill” because “the United States acting alone will have virtually no effect on global warming.” He’s right that the US acting alone will not solve this problem, which is why the Kerry-Boxer bill is more vital than ever. As the world’s largest economy, US leadership on this issue is what will allow us to meet the challenge of climate change. The fact that over the past decade the US has not done anything to address climate change – and under the previous administration was denying that it was an issue – has given large parts of the world cover to not act on the issue. With the US addressing the problem domestically, we can now lead on this global issue and use diplomacy to work with our partners and other major polluters in such venues as last month’s G-20 meeting and this winter’s climate change conference in Copenhagen.

Finally, Krause also ignores the fact that farmers are some of the worst effected by climate change. Climate change just isn’t about rising temperatures. It’s also about rapidly changing weather patterns that can bring drought to the Great Plains or devasting strengthened hurricanes through the breadbasket of America, the Midwest. Rather than protect farmers, by being on the wrong side of the issue, the Farm Bureau is putting farmers in harm’s way. This threatens not only their livelihood, but also our national food security. By ignoring the challenge of climate change now, we will reap the whirlwind later.

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