Biden Admin Commits Billions To Green Tech It Doesn’t Know Will Work
Nick Pope on August 7, 2023
The Department of Agriculture (USDA) is set to spend billions of taxpayer dollars to boost green agricultural technology that it is unsure will work as intended, Politico reported Monday.
The USDA is beginning to send around $3 billion to American farmers to test out various technologies in hopes of reducing the agricultural industry’s carbon footprint, according to Politico. The spending will promote some green technologies, such as carbon sequestration, that have not yet proven their environmental value at scale, according to Politico.
Robert Bonnie, the USDA official credited with devising the initiative, recognizes that the USDA’s approach is experimental, according to Politico. Environmental interests opposed to the spending initiative worry that some data that would demonstrate the efficacy of subsidized technologies will not be released to the public, as the government would be disclosing proprietary information or trade secrets in some cases.
“Our job here is to basically do this in a way that will attract support,” Bonnie said, according to Politico. “And then prove it can work and prove it’s durable.”
“We’re going to have some learning to do. They’re pilots,” Bonnie said of the programs, according to Politico.
The carbon sequestration technology that the USDA is funding is premised upon planting “cover plants” in the harvest off-season to suck up ambient carbon dioxide, according to Politico. However, a 2022 study by the Stanford University Center on Food Security and the Environment found that this sequestration strategy may actually drive more emissions globally, since the cover plants reduce crop productivity and incentivize farmers in other areas to increase their production in order to plug the gap.
Carbon sequestration is one of the technologies receiving the most funding from taxpayers in the USDA initiative, according to Politico. The USDA projects that sequestration projects will sequester up to 60 million tons of carbon from the air, an amount equivalent to reducing the number of cars on American roadways by 12 million, according to Politico.
“It’s not really clear how this is going to do a whole lot more, in some of the projects, than just create another source of income for somebody,” Cathy Day, climate policy director for the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, said, according to Politico. Day’s concerns echo those of environmentalists who worry that the spending may ultimately amount to a subsidy for huge agricultural corporations while doing little to address emissions concerns, according to Politico.
The USDA did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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