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It’s all about carbon and footprints

I’m sitting in a very pretty seaside hotel as I type this, and rather than contemplating sun, sand and something liquid with an umbrella in it, I’m thinking about carbon footprints, cap-and-trade and credits for doing the environment a favor. I’ve heard three presentations in as many days on carbon footprinting, emission caps, credits and offsets, and I’m guessing most of the ag community is not ready for this next round of financial routlette game.

Let me give you some context. There’s an environmental treaty called the Kyoto Procotol, a global initiative of some year back to curb emissions of greenhouse gases in hopes of stemming climate change. By all reports, the U.S. led the creation of the treaty, but some how along the way lost leadership of the effort. The result was the rest of the world ratified the protocol, the U.S. did not.

So the rest of the world starts establishing caps on greenhouse gas emissions for various industries and regions of the world — the “carbon footprint” — and creates a system wherein you can literally buy on exchanges credits to offset your emissions, along with taking technology in hand to shrink your carbon footprint. The U.S. is just waking up to this money-maker, though several states and regions of the country have established various variations on the global scheme, and of course, there’s a Chicago exchange that trades in the credits and offsets, etc.

All this sounds very entrepeneurial in a get-rich-quick kind of way, and very Al Gore-ish, but if that isn’t scary enough, Congress is getting into the act. Sens. Joe Lieberman (ID, CT) and John McCain (R, AZ)introduced a bill in the Senate this past session to set up a federal system of emission cap-and-trade. It went no where. Then a week ago, Rep. John Dingell (D, MI) floated a nearly 500-page draft bill that will in the next Congress create greenhouse gas emission caps for the big polluters, and give EPA the power to set individual industry caps for the smaller emitters, while establishing the rules for U.S. cap and trade activities.

This is one of those developments that has “inevitable” written all over it. Combine this new-found energy with the fact the Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations issues a report in September calling on the world to eat less beef to curb greenhouse gas emissions and you kind of get where I’m going with this.

So, start boning up because you’re going to have to figure out that footprint soon, and once the government gets involved, we’ll be capping and trading ’til the cows come home.