Thursday, October 29, 2009

Live Blogging the Climate Hearings   [Greg Pollowitz]

This stood out from yesterday's New York Times live blog of the Senate's climate hearings:

10:00 a.m.: Carol Browner mentions elements of legislation that would allow farmers to get income by selling credits for carbon banked in their fields through changes in agricultural practices. Some specialists in carbon sequestration through forests and farm fields, including Kevin Gurney at Purdue, have told me the policy here is out ahead of the science, given that it remains difficult to measure precisely how much, or even whether, a particular change — for example from plowing fields to no-till agriculture using pesticides to kill weeds — improves the rate of carbon sequestration. That leaves significant potential for “greenwash,” or at least for actions cast as having a climate benefit that the climate system may never notice.

10/29 12:00 PMShare