FARMING CARBON for POLLUTERS:
Planting the Seeds of Climate Chaos
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Mother Earth breathes. Her soils breathe. The whole universe breathes. Creation’s heart beats. The question: Are farmers going to be tricked into using their farms so governments and Big Oil can pollute more while pretending to save the climate? In this day and age, farmers are among the few people who still recognize the living relationship and cycles of Mother Earth. We, who plant the seeds that miraculously feed humanity, cannot betray the very essence of our being. It is the heart and mind of many of our Native traditional and spiritual leaders that so-called “farming carbon,” promoted by the likes of Monsanto, McDonald’s and Syngenta, perverts the Creative Principles of Mother Earth. Growing carbon credits instead of food so Big Oil can keep fracking, drilling and making global warming worse, makes farmers complicit with the largest wildfire in California’s history and climate chaos’ “death spiral.” Our children deserve better.
What is Carbon Farming? Planting Pollution.
Because soil, plants and trees temporarily absorb carbon dioxide, polluters want your farm to be a sponge for their pollution so instead of cutting emissions at source, they can pollute even more. If you do “carbon farming,” your land becomes polluters’ carbon dump. Carbon farming is also called Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA), “healthy soils” and Soil Carbon Sequestration (SCS). Carbon farming generates “carbon credits” or permits to pollute for polluters like Big Oil, by supposedly reducing emissions with agribusiness, Monsanto’s GMO “climate-ready seeds,” livestock, agroecology, organic farming, agroforestry and “urban forests.” Carbon farming puts agriculture in the carbon market; privatizing, commodifying and selling Nature, seeds, soils, food, grasses, air, pollinators, farms and traditional knowledge systems sometimes for perpetuity.
Believe It or Not! Australia’s Carbon Farming includes Coal Mine Flaring
It is indicative of how corrupt carbon trading is that Australia’s “carbon farming industry,”xiii which is among the most advanced in the world, includes offsets from increasing the FLARING of methane from coal mines.
Before you bet that flaring could never become an offset in the United States, check out the State of California’s 2014 Coal Mine Methane Offset Protocol. In the briefing Burn, Baby, Burn – California’s Coal Mine Methane Offsets, Indigenous Environmental Network explains how this perverse destruction of Father Sky, which incentivizes coal mining as well as fracking and pipelines, is no solution to climate change. Nonetheless, California has authorized seven coal mines to profit from increased flaring, while pretending to save the climate and selling permits to pollute to other polluters. The coal mines receiving California’s carbon market subsidies include the closed Colorado Elk Creek coal mine of a Koch brother, and Wyoming’s Green River Trona Mine. In addition, Australia’s “carbon farming industry” includes permits to pollute generated from prescribed burn of savanna, which ConocoPhillips uses to offset its polluting Liquid Natural Gas plant in Darwin. The Ponca Nation of Oklahoma has condemned these offsets as part of ConocoPhillips’ environmental genocide.
Australia’s Carbon Farming includes Reef Credits for Chevron, which kills Whales
Australia’s carbon farming industry also includes Chevron’s “reef credits,” part of the oil giant’s A$13-million environmental offsets package to allegedly compensate for the destruction caused by the construction and operation of its Gorgon and Wheatstone Liquid Natural Gas plants. Reef credits generate permits to pollute by supposedly reducing pesticide runoff into rivers, which flow to the sea and harm the Great Barrier Reef. Chevron’s offset package includes generating permits to pollute from Chevron “managing” marine habitats, and researching the impact of Chevron’s own climate destruction and dredging on endangered humpback whales, snubfin dolphins and flatback turtles, which Chevron admits to killing.xxxv Entrusting Chevron to “save the whales” is like having a convicted serial killer babysit your daughter. How many of you want to greenwash Chevron with your farm?
General Motors’ Farming Carbon instead of Food to Greenwash Poisoning Flint and the Mohawk Nation
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is now a Sky Selling carbon trader. The USDA brokered the first deal whereby farmers and ranchers in the Prairie Pothole Region of North Dakota are GROWING CARBON INSTEAD of FOOD to offset pollution from General Motors’ Chevrolet. The farmers’ land is in “perpetual easement,” which means growing food like corn and soy is prohibited forever, but trees must be grown to “capture carbon.” Thus, carbon farming is driving the conversion of farmland into monoculture tree plantations and may drive up the cost of staple food crops like corn as much as 75% in coming years. xli Meanwhile, General Motors uses carbon farming offsets to greenwash its role in the poisoning of the people and water of Flint, Michigan, the birthplace of GM. Carbon farming also greenwashes how General Motors’ PCB’s pollution destroyed the way of life and health of the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation, including poisoning the breast milk of nursing Mohawk mothers.
California’s Permits to Pollute with Food
Despite worldwide opposition, California’s carbon market is selling rice offsets, which may pave the way for more carbon trading with food. Microsoft, recently criticized for its work with ICE, was the first to buy permits to pollute from rice. Using staple crops, such as rice, corn and wheat,lii which feed billions of people, to generate carbon credits could impoverish peasants and promote GMOs. Just as free trade agreements decimated local agriculture and caused exoduses of peasants from their land, food offsets could also result in massive land grabs, a “counter-agrarian reform,”lvi immigration, skyrocketing food prices and hunger. In addition to rice offsets, California’s carbon market generates carbon credits from anaerobic digesters to capture methane from pig and cow manure lagoons from livestock farmers, “who are themselves big polluters.”
Organic Carbon Farming
Carbon farming can supposedly be done with sustainable agriculture and organic farming. For example, the World Bank has a project in Kenya with 60,000 small-scale farmers to reduce pesticide use, encourage sustainable practices and sell the resulting carbon credits. However, carbon farming in Africa has been denounced as a “con” as well as a threat to women farmers and food security. African environmentalists warn that carbon farming by any name is just a new form of colonialism.
You could lose your farm Selling the Sky
Some farmers are held liable if disasters like fires, drought, or floods destroy crops used for carbon credits. Carbon farming is expensive, high tech, complicated, financially risky, riddled with debt, and sometimes there is little money left over for growers. And while it is true that soils inhale carbon, soils also EXHALE carbon. Carbon sequestration is NOT permanent. The biosphere is already hyperventilating. Burning fossil fuels is saturating the global carbon cycle. Biotic carbon is not the equivalent of fossil carbon. Climate change is turning carbon sinks into carbon sources, and making crops less nutritious. As farmers learn the truth about these carbon market scams, the movement against Selling the Sky grows and blooms. Be a Sky Protector!
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