Carbon farmers

[per]

My wife and I have this conversation often. The following is her take on the subject....

Here we are trading the very thing that is essential to every life form, carbon dioxide. Warm-blooded animals exhale it and plants inhale it, it is all part of the natural design of life on earth so that everything exists symbiotically. Why do we want governments and big businesses to quantify it and place a value on the very essence of life, as we know it on this planet?

We farmers are sometimes lulled into believing that governments are helping us. But you would think that we would remember from history what they have done for us. They have taken away our freedom to sell our products freely. Big business has taken the very essence of plant life – the seed – away from farmers to trade and sell to fellow farmers with the blessing of the government who granted them the right. They have the patent on the seeds that we grow for food. They also control our water, which the government sells to them for pittance then they sell it in plastic bottles. Why do we want to give them, the government and big business, the ability to further control our environment? Selling carbon credits is the first step of many that may lead to the taxation of any activity that creates carbon dioxide, such as breathing, taking a vacation, or driving to town to get parts.

Every time we give up our ability to control our environment we move closer to the old system of serfdom where big business controls and we farmers do the work for nothing. Do we want to be known as the generation that sold out our ability to be entrepreneurs and became peasants? Trading carbon tax credits is the beginning to this absurdity of quantifying and value placing on the things that occur naturally. Maybe we should be more concerned about real pollutants.

[silverback]

Oh I agree also Wil, but I cannot for the life of me figure one thing that Burb is happy about on this planet.

[rkaiser]

I see your points about government involvement folks, but what of the potential for environmental change? Shall we simply become better stewards of the land and only have our pride as payment? The evidence of healthy soils through management is obvious and I even think that it carries a certain amount of economic gain over a long period of time, but incentive would speed up that process, would it not?

If not a carbon credit program - what else? Just seems like a capitalist approach vs. standing with our hands out, or paying on our own.

I guess we simply fight the conventional system our entire lives and hope that that effort puts a few bucks in our pockets from the increasingly aware consumer. Would be nice if it did not take a lifetime of effort.....

[per]

I hear you Randy and when push comes to shove I am completely ready to participate in a program that lets market forces incent people to be good stewards. That is why we have been researching what is available for carbon trading and how it will work. I think you are wrong if you think good stewardship has only long term gain though. Especially those that haven't been good stewards all along will see a noticable gain in production and cost per unit of production tends downward in a healthy ecosystem.

That being said it is still enabling poluting industries to keep poluting. It is all about money transfer and not cleaning up our act. An area where none of us are completey inocent.

per