Web Note: To interject a small positive note in here at the beginning of a disturbing article, has it been mentioned recently how cool Tom Philpott is? We're always wondering how he finds time to farm,  AND cook, AND keep up on current agriculture issues, AND brilliantly skewer Collin Peterson. And could we beg of our readers, please, please remember, that although OCA's main office is indeed located in Minnesota, we are not anywhere near the district that elected Collin Peterson?

I’ve been reporting on it for a while, but now it’s reaching fever pitch: Big Ag is getting downright jittery about climate change legislation.

There’s no mystery about why: industrial agriculture spews out massive amounts of greenhouse gas. Any serious scheme for reckoning with climate change will deal harshly with Big Ag. So Big Ag will work to make any climate legislation as non-serious as possible.

House Ag chair Collin Peterson (D.-Minn.) has been shrieking for days now (here and here) about the EPA’s recent proposed rules on the greenhouse gas footprint of ethanol, Big Ag’s pet government project. He’s been threatening to derail Waxman-Markey unless the EPA completely backs off.

Now, according to an article in The Hill, Peterson is widening his jihad. He wants de facto veto power over Waxman-Markey’s content before it ever leaves the energy committee. And if he doesn’t get it, he vows that all 26 Democratic reps who serve on his committee will vote against the bill, a potentially lethal blow.  Here is The Hill:

Rep. Collin Peterson (Minn.), the outspoken Democratic chairman of the Agriculture panel, has been making it well-known that he wants his committee to have full jurisdictional authority over whatever climate change bill emerges from Chairman Henry Waxman’s (D-Calif.) Energy and Commerce Committee. [Emphasis added.]

Declaring “We’ve thrown a pitchfork in the sand,” Peterson wants “wants a full markup to alter what he and other [ag] committee Democrats think are inadequate provisions on everything from fuel standards to renewable energy definitions to regulations governing the trading of carbon derivatives created through a cap-and-trade system,” The Hill reports.

Mind you, it isn’t as though Waxman and Markey ever intended for their bill to penalize industrial ag for it GHG emissions; ag has been exempted from penalty since the start of the debate. It’s just that Peterson wants to ensure that, for the foreseeable future, any cap-and-trade scheme will reward industrial ag for spectral GHG sequestration, and not penalize it for its all-too-real GHD emissions. And the federal government’s massive and wide-ranging support for corn ethanol, treated by the Minnesota rep as if Moses had decreed it as the Eleventh Commandment, must never be questioned, greenhouse gas footprint be damned. Peterson is blatantly and publicly trying to rig the game before it starts.

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