Posts
The
Fraudulent Science at COP21 Exposed
John
W. Roulac
17
December, 2015
Before
the ink had dried on the COP21 climate
agreement, many from the food movement were reflecting on the process
and plans worked on in Paris.
In
their co-authored Washington Post op-ed
piece, A
Secret Weapon to Fight Climate Change: Dirt, Michael
Pollan and
Debbie Barker wrote, “Unfortunately, the world leaders who
gathered in Paris this past week have paid little attention to the
critical links between climate
change and
agriculture. That’s a huge mistake and a missed opportunity.”
Before
we explore the case of fraud in Paris, let’s first review the
definitions of fraud:
1.
Wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or
personal gain.
2.
A person or thing intended to deceive others, typically by
unjustifiably claiming or being credited with accomplishments or
qualities.
Following
decades of public misinformation, today we know that the tobacco
industry committed fraud by attempting to disconnect lung cancer from
the smoking of cigarettes. And the state of New York is now
investigating ExxonMobil for
allegedly misleading
the publicabout
climate change.
So,
following along on this idea of fraudulence, why has virtually every
COP21 media article repeated the mistaken idea that the only strategy
to fight climate change is the failed one to stop burning fossil
fuels?
Why
Would Industrial Ag Cover Up This Inconvenient Truth?
Yes,
tobacco and Big
Oil have
been well compensated for committing “deception intended to result
in financial or personal gain.” So it’s vital for the public to
identify the latest corporate shenanigans using deception and black
hat PR to deceive public officials for financial gain.
These
would be the giants of the industrial agriculture industry,
including Monsanto,
Dow, DuPont, Syngenta, Bayer, McDonald’s and the entire synthetic
fertilizer industry—the corporations that have undercounted and
misrepresented America’s agricultural greenhouse gas (GHG)
emissions.
Is
the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Committing Accounting Fraud
by Stating 10 Percent GHG From Ag When It’s Known to Be Above 25
Percent?
Sadly,
thanks to Big Ag’s backroom political dealings in Washington, DC,
the USDA and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have agreed on the
ludicrous statement that agriculture contributed only about 10
percent of U.S. GHG emissions in 2013, when in fact it was more
than 25 percent.
When
this erroneous conclusion is corrected and the formerly hidden facts
are well understood by policy leaders and the public, we’ll be able
to shift policies toward more regenerative,
soil-honoring practices and
then we’ll see sales of pesticides and chemical fertilizers
plummet.
It’s
plain to see why Monsanto and friends, via their high-level political
appointees, influenced the U.S. and United Nations delegates at
COP21. They eliminated
agriculture and soils from the COP21 agenda and
thus the final agreement—despite overwhelming evidence that soil
sequestration (carbon farming) is the number
one solution to
stop the rise of CO2.
Luckily,
There’s a Secret Weapon
Barker
and Pollan describe how “a third of the carbon in the
atmosphere today used to be in the soil and modern farming is largely
to blame.” They point out that “practices such as the
overuse of chemicals, excessive tilling and the use of heavy
machinery disturb the soil’s organic matter, exposing carbon
molecules to the air, where they combine with oxygen to create carbon
dioxide. Put another way: Human activity has turned the living and
fertile carbon system in our dirt into a toxic atmospheric gas.”
“It’s
possible to halt and even reverse this process,” the writers add,
“through better agricultural policies and practices.” They go on
to explain how “restoring carbon to the soil is not nearly as
complicated as rethinking our transportation systems or replacing
coal withrenewable
energy.”
Ronnie Cummins and Katherine Paul of the Organic Consumers Association pursued this same point in their recent piece How World Leaders Can Solve Global Warming with Regenerative Farming. They describe how the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) set out to achieve “a legally binding and universal agreement to make sure the Earth doesn’t get warmer than 2C above pre-industrial levels.”
Quoting
Cummins and Paul: “To meet that goal, the French government
launched the 4/1000
Initiative which,
distilled to simplest terms, says this: If, on a global scale, we
increase the soil carbon content of the soil by .04 percent each year
for the next 25 years, we can draw down a critical mass of excess
carbon from the atmosphere and begin to reverse global warming.”
Is
the French initiative realistic? Yes, even by conservative estimates.
Industrial,
degenerative farming practices—which include tilling,
deforestation, wetlands destruction and the use of massive amounts of
synthetic and toxic fertilizers and pesticides—have stripped 136
billion tons of carbon out of the soil and sent it up into the
atmosphere. Using the French government’s modest estimates, we can
transfer, via enhanced plant photosynthesis, 150 billion tons of this
carbon back into the soil in the next 25 years.
How
do we achieve those numbers? All we have to do is help just 10
percent of the world’s farmers and ranchers adopt regenerative
organic agriculture,
holistic grazing and land management practices …”
For
some reason,
Greenpeace, 350.org and the climate movement think putting close
to 100 percent of our policy and educational efforts into shutting
down oil is our one last hope to stop climate change. This is
madness. Can they really believe that fewer people will be driving
cars in 2020 than in 2015? And don’t they realize that every new
hybrid or 100 percent electric car in its making will contribute as
much greenhouse gas emissions as would driving a five-year-old
Toyota?
On
the brighter side, more and more people are now looking under
their feet:
Bill McKibben
Some foodie dude named @michaelpollan explains why soil can help slow climate change. Seriously! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxqBzrx9yIE …
Naomi Klein
Dispatch From COP21: The Convenient Truth About Soil by Seth Itzkan and Karl Thidemann states: “Ohio State University scientist Rattan Lal refers to soil restoration as ‘low-hanging fruit’ and says it can serve as a bridge to climate safety during the transition to a non-fossil fuel economy. In a 2014 white paper, the Rodale Institute showed that regenerative organic farming could capture carbon dioxide in quantities exceeding global emissions.”
Indeed,
soils are the only suitable reservoir for the excess carbon in the
atmosphere.
To
achieve COP21’s 1.5 degree Celsius target, it’s pretty obvious
that we need to lower CO2 back to below 350 ppm. Yet the Paris
climate agreement makes it likely it will be more like 425+ ppm
in the coming decades. Unless we look to the solution under our feet,
we may be reading more stories in the New Yorker such as The
Siege of Miami or
in National Geographic’s Seafood
May Be Gone by 2048, Study Says.
COP21’s
plan will lead to 90 percent of the world’s species disappearing by
2060 unless we sequester soil carbon and stop the ocean acidification
(caused by excess carbon falling into the seas). As plankton die
every year, the planet faces a looming oxygen shortage.
The
Surge in Soil Interest Leads to a Tipping Point
Despite
industrial ag’s obfuscations, the good news story of soils couldn’t
stay hidden. 2015 will be remembered as the
year of soil,
for it brought numerous articles, videos and public figures speaking
out on the timely topic. In California, 900 attendees of a Soil
Not Oil conference
all helped jump-start this growing movement to reverse climate change
via soil sequestration.
Kiss the Ground
Our message is loud and clear: the soil story's time has come
Paris, France #COP21
Healthy soil can store carbon.
And
then, of course, there’s the French “4 per 1000” announcement
of a new program for carbon sequestration in agriculture.
“I
am stunned,” said Andre Leu, president of IFOAM
Organics International,
the world’s leading organic farmers and producers association,
based in Bonn, Germany. “This is a game changer, because soil
carbon is now central to how the world manages climate change. After
all the years of advocating for this at UN Climate Change meetings
and being the lone voice in the wilderness, it has taken off so
quickly and now is global, with numerous countries and key
institutions supporting it. However this is true of all tipping
points.”
This
article has posed some of the hard questions that we all need to be
asking. In my forthcoming EcoWatch article
in January 2016, I’ll be presenting next steps for implementing the
climate solution under our feet
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