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A farmer plants cover crops following a corn harvest in Maryland on October 9, 2020.
Climate and agricultural policies aimed at bolstering carbon markets will fail to curb planet-heating emissions while enabling powerful agribusiness corporations to greenwash their polluting operations and augment their control over the food system.
That’s according to Agricultural Carbon Markets, Payments, and Data: Big Ag’s Latest Power Grab, a report published Wednesday by Friends of the Earth, an environmental advocacy group, and the Open Markets Institute, an anti-monopoly think tank.
While farmers could play a key role in mitigating the climate crisis by adopting agroecological practices capable of sequestering more carbon in the soil, the report warns that U.S. lawmakers from both major parties have embraced a “market-based” approach—centered around the buying and selling of so-called “carbon offset” credits generated through minor tweaks to industrial monoculture production—that is likely to tighten Big Ag’s chemical-intensive stranglehold on the food system and disenfranchise small-scale farmers, all while failing to reduce greenhouse gas pollution.
“Carbon markets have become a top strategy for agriculture and climate, despite a history of fraud, failure to reduce emissions, and corporate greenwashing,” report co-author Jason Davidson, senior food and agriculture campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said in a statement. “Such corporate schemes will strengthen the power of the largest agribusinesses, hand over private farm data, and fail to address the climate crisis.”
“Instead of another handout to Big Ag, the Biden administration and Congress must support farmers in pursuing proven climate solutions.”
As the report explains: “The idea begins with granting credits to farmers who adopt certain practices, such as planting more trees and cover crops, that are supposed to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Farmers then receive compensation for their efforts by selling these credits to other entities, typically large corporations. These corporations, in turn, use their purchases of such credits to justify claims of environmental responsibility.”
Though these corporations “may still be emitting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, they claim to have ‘offset’ these emissions by paying others to pollute less or actively sequester carbon, often to the point of asserting that they now have a ‘net-zero’ climate impact,” states the report.
A recent investigation revealed that 94% of the rainforest carbon offsets sold by a leading market player provided no measurable climate benefits, casting further doubt on the very notions of ‘net-zero’ and ‘carbon neutrality’ that corporations promote in a bid to maintain or expand their own polluting activities while portraying themselves as green.
Despite mounting evidence of the ineffective or counterproductive nature of ‘net-zero’ commitments, one-fifth of the world’s biggest corporations have made them, meaning that demand for carbon offsets is growing, the report notes. Meanwhile, the federal government is providing key support to such programs, including indirectly through the Inflation Reduction Act and directly through a pair of bills embedded in the Fiscal Year 2023 Omnibus Appropriations Bill.
The first, the Growing Climate Solutions Act, instructs the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to “list private carbon market facilitators on its website and broadly list protocols for measuring carbon sequestration,” the report explains. The SUSTAINS Act, meanwhile, threatens to lend government legitimacy to “fledgling soil carbon offset schemes,” which “could influence their value in voluntary exchanges” and “fan the flames of a speculative industry that stands to divert resources from effective pollution reduction and regulation.” Moreover, through its so-called Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities pilot program, the USDA is poised to offer more than half a billion dollars in grants to several agribusiness giants.
According to the report:
Big agribusiness corporations are using the system to deepen their own monopolistic power. Programs run by corporations such as Cargill, Bayer, Nutrien, and Corteva pay farmers for adopting specific farming practices that either depend on the companies’ proprietary technologies or require farmers to use their digital agriculture platforms.
[...]
Under these private carbon offset programs, agribusiness giants define climate-smart agriculture and promote large-scale, monoculture, chemical-dependent farming methods that can harm the environment in the long run and further entrench their market power. By controlling the same private, unregulated carbon-offset markets in which they trade on their own account and set their own prices, they are also subject to massive conflicts of interest.
“We can’t trust the very corporations that got us into this climate crisis to get us out of it on their terms and timeline,” said report co-author Claire Kelloway, food program director for the Open Markets Institute. “Corporations are designed to serve their investors, not the public, and that’s exactly what these carbon offsetting schemes will do by locking farmers into their networks, protecting product sales, and stalling meaningful regulation.”
A joint statement from Friends of the Earth and the Open Markets Institute explained three major pitfalls of private soil carbon credit programs:
“There’s no doubt that farmers should be supported in shifting to ecologically regenerative methods,” the report says. “But the evidence shows that using carbon offsets to do so is a counterproductive and inequitable approach that will let big polluters off the hook and fail the needs of family farmers.”
Davidson said that “instead of another handout to Big Ag, the Biden administration and Congress must support farmers in pursuing proven climate solutions.”
As Congress debates the next Farm Bill, the report’s executive summary calls on lawmakers and the USDA to take the following steps:
Notably, a separate report published Wednesday by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy showed that 3 out of every 4 farmers who applied for EQIP and CSP funds in 2022 were denied.
“We do not have time or resources to waste on ineffective approaches to addressing the climate crisis, especially those that greenwash corporate pollution and risk increasing greenhouse gas emissions,” wrote Davidson and Kelloway. “Congress and the USDA must channel the billions of dollars that are being invested in climate-smart agriculture toward proven and transformative solutions.”
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Climate and agricultural policies aimed at bolstering carbon markets will fail to curb planet-heating emissions while enabling powerful agribusiness corporations to greenwash their polluting operations and augment their control over the food system.
That’s according to Agricultural Carbon Markets, Payments, and Data: Big Ag’s Latest Power Grab, a report published Wednesday by Friends of the Earth, an environmental advocacy group, and the Open Markets Institute, an anti-monopoly think tank.
While farmers could play a key role in mitigating the climate crisis by adopting agroecological practices capable of sequestering more carbon in the soil, the report warns that U.S. lawmakers from both major parties have embraced a “market-based” approach—centered around the buying and selling of so-called “carbon offset” credits generated through minor tweaks to industrial monoculture production—that is likely to tighten Big Ag’s chemical-intensive stranglehold on the food system and disenfranchise small-scale farmers, all while failing to reduce greenhouse gas pollution.
“Carbon markets have become a top strategy for agriculture and climate, despite a history of fraud, failure to reduce emissions, and corporate greenwashing,” report co-author Jason Davidson, senior food and agriculture campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said in a statement. “Such corporate schemes will strengthen the power of the largest agribusinesses, hand over private farm data, and fail to address the climate crisis.”
“Instead of another handout to Big Ag, the Biden administration and Congress must support farmers in pursuing proven climate solutions.”
As the report explains: “The idea begins with granting credits to farmers who adopt certain practices, such as planting more trees and cover crops, that are supposed to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Farmers then receive compensation for their efforts by selling these credits to other entities, typically large corporations. These corporations, in turn, use their purchases of such credits to justify claims of environmental responsibility.”
Though these corporations “may still be emitting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, they claim to have ‘offset’ these emissions by paying others to pollute less or actively sequester carbon, often to the point of asserting that they now have a ‘net-zero’ climate impact,” states the report.
A recent investigation revealed that 94% of the rainforest carbon offsets sold by a leading market player provided no measurable climate benefits, casting further doubt on the very notions of ‘net-zero’ and ‘carbon neutrality’ that corporations promote in a bid to maintain or expand their own polluting activities while portraying themselves as green.
Despite mounting evidence of the ineffective or counterproductive nature of ‘net-zero’ commitments, one-fifth of the world’s biggest corporations have made them, meaning that demand for carbon offsets is growing, the report notes. Meanwhile, the federal government is providing key support to such programs, including indirectly through the Inflation Reduction Act and directly through a pair of bills embedded in the Fiscal Year 2023 Omnibus Appropriations Bill.
The first, the Growing Climate Solutions Act, instructs the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to “list private carbon market facilitators on its website and broadly list protocols for measuring carbon sequestration,” the report explains. The SUSTAINS Act, meanwhile, threatens to lend government legitimacy to “fledgling soil carbon offset schemes,” which “could influence their value in voluntary exchanges” and “fan the flames of a speculative industry that stands to divert resources from effective pollution reduction and regulation.” Moreover, through its so-called Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities pilot program, the USDA is poised to offer more than half a billion dollars in grants to several agribusiness giants.
According to the report:
Big agribusiness corporations are using the system to deepen their own monopolistic power. Programs run by corporations such as Cargill, Bayer, Nutrien, and Corteva pay farmers for adopting specific farming practices that either depend on the companies’ proprietary technologies or require farmers to use their digital agriculture platforms.
[...]
Under these private carbon offset programs, agribusiness giants define climate-smart agriculture and promote large-scale, monoculture, chemical-dependent farming methods that can harm the environment in the long run and further entrench their market power. By controlling the same private, unregulated carbon-offset markets in which they trade on their own account and set their own prices, they are also subject to massive conflicts of interest.
“We can’t trust the very corporations that got us into this climate crisis to get us out of it on their terms and timeline,” said report co-author Claire Kelloway, food program director for the Open Markets Institute. “Corporations are designed to serve their investors, not the public, and that’s exactly what these carbon offsetting schemes will do by locking farmers into their networks, protecting product sales, and stalling meaningful regulation.”
A joint statement from Friends of the Earth and the Open Markets Institute explained three major pitfalls of private soil carbon credit programs:
“There’s no doubt that farmers should be supported in shifting to ecologically regenerative methods,” the report says. “But the evidence shows that using carbon offsets to do so is a counterproductive and inequitable approach that will let big polluters off the hook and fail the needs of family farmers.”
Davidson said that “instead of another handout to Big Ag, the Biden administration and Congress must support farmers in pursuing proven climate solutions.”
As Congress debates the next Farm Bill, the report’s executive summary calls on lawmakers and the USDA to take the following steps:
Notably, a separate report published Wednesday by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy showed that 3 out of every 4 farmers who applied for EQIP and CSP funds in 2022 were denied.
“We do not have time or resources to waste on ineffective approaches to addressing the climate crisis, especially those that greenwash corporate pollution and risk increasing greenhouse gas emissions,” wrote Davidson and Kelloway. “Congress and the USDA must channel the billions of dollars that are being invested in climate-smart agriculture toward proven and transformative solutions.”
Climate and agricultural policies aimed at bolstering carbon markets will fail to curb planet-heating emissions while enabling powerful agribusiness corporations to greenwash their polluting operations and augment their control over the food system.
That’s according to Agricultural Carbon Markets, Payments, and Data: Big Ag’s Latest Power Grab, a report published Wednesday by Friends of the Earth, an environmental advocacy group, and the Open Markets Institute, an anti-monopoly think tank.
While farmers could play a key role in mitigating the climate crisis by adopting agroecological practices capable of sequestering more carbon in the soil, the report warns that U.S. lawmakers from both major parties have embraced a “market-based” approach—centered around the buying and selling of so-called “carbon offset” credits generated through minor tweaks to industrial monoculture production—that is likely to tighten Big Ag’s chemical-intensive stranglehold on the food system and disenfranchise small-scale farmers, all while failing to reduce greenhouse gas pollution.
“Carbon markets have become a top strategy for agriculture and climate, despite a history of fraud, failure to reduce emissions, and corporate greenwashing,” report co-author Jason Davidson, senior food and agriculture campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said in a statement. “Such corporate schemes will strengthen the power of the largest agribusinesses, hand over private farm data, and fail to address the climate crisis.”
“Instead of another handout to Big Ag, the Biden administration and Congress must support farmers in pursuing proven climate solutions.”
As the report explains: “The idea begins with granting credits to farmers who adopt certain practices, such as planting more trees and cover crops, that are supposed to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Farmers then receive compensation for their efforts by selling these credits to other entities, typically large corporations. These corporations, in turn, use their purchases of such credits to justify claims of environmental responsibility.”
Though these corporations “may still be emitting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, they claim to have ‘offset’ these emissions by paying others to pollute less or actively sequester carbon, often to the point of asserting that they now have a ‘net-zero’ climate impact,” states the report.
A recent investigation revealed that 94% of the rainforest carbon offsets sold by a leading market player provided no measurable climate benefits, casting further doubt on the very notions of ‘net-zero’ and ‘carbon neutrality’ that corporations promote in a bid to maintain or expand their own polluting activities while portraying themselves as green.
Despite mounting evidence of the ineffective or counterproductive nature of ‘net-zero’ commitments, one-fifth of the world’s biggest corporations have made them, meaning that demand for carbon offsets is growing, the report notes. Meanwhile, the federal government is providing key support to such programs, including indirectly through the Inflation Reduction Act and directly through a pair of bills embedded in the Fiscal Year 2023 Omnibus Appropriations Bill.
The first, the Growing Climate Solutions Act, instructs the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to “list private carbon market facilitators on its website and broadly list protocols for measuring carbon sequestration,” the report explains. The SUSTAINS Act, meanwhile, threatens to lend government legitimacy to “fledgling soil carbon offset schemes,” which “could influence their value in voluntary exchanges” and “fan the flames of a speculative industry that stands to divert resources from effective pollution reduction and regulation.” Moreover, through its so-called Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities pilot program, the USDA is poised to offer more than half a billion dollars in grants to several agribusiness giants.
According to the report:
Big agribusiness corporations are using the system to deepen their own monopolistic power. Programs run by corporations such as Cargill, Bayer, Nutrien, and Corteva pay farmers for adopting specific farming practices that either depend on the companies’ proprietary technologies or require farmers to use their digital agriculture platforms.
[...]
Under these private carbon offset programs, agribusiness giants define climate-smart agriculture and promote large-scale, monoculture, chemical-dependent farming methods that can harm the environment in the long run and further entrench their market power. By controlling the same private, unregulated carbon-offset markets in which they trade on their own account and set their own prices, they are also subject to massive conflicts of interest.
“We can’t trust the very corporations that got us into this climate crisis to get us out of it on their terms and timeline,” said report co-author Claire Kelloway, food program director for the Open Markets Institute. “Corporations are designed to serve their investors, not the public, and that’s exactly what these carbon offsetting schemes will do by locking farmers into their networks, protecting product sales, and stalling meaningful regulation.”
A joint statement from Friends of the Earth and the Open Markets Institute explained three major pitfalls of private soil carbon credit programs:
“There’s no doubt that farmers should be supported in shifting to ecologically regenerative methods,” the report says. “But the evidence shows that using carbon offsets to do so is a counterproductive and inequitable approach that will let big polluters off the hook and fail the needs of family farmers.”
Davidson said that “instead of another handout to Big Ag, the Biden administration and Congress must support farmers in pursuing proven climate solutions.”
As Congress debates the next Farm Bill, the report’s executive summary calls on lawmakers and the USDA to take the following steps:
Notably, a separate report published Wednesday by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy showed that 3 out of every 4 farmers who applied for EQIP and CSP funds in 2022 were denied.
“We do not have time or resources to waste on ineffective approaches to addressing the climate crisis, especially those that greenwash corporate pollution and risk increasing greenhouse gas emissions,” wrote Davidson and Kelloway. “Congress and the USDA must channel the billions of dollars that are being invested in climate-smart agriculture toward proven and transformative solutions.”
Democratic lawmakers are vowing to investigate the Trump administration's pressure campaign that may have led to ABC deciding to indefinitely suspend late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel.
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) announced on Thursday that he filed a motion to subpoena Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr one day after he publicly warned ABC of negative consequences if the network kept Kimmel on the air.
"Enough of Congress sleepwalking while [President Donald] Trump and [Vice President JD] Vance shred the First Amendment and Constitution," Khanna declared. "It is time for Congress to stand up for Article I."
Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, also said on Thursday that he was opening an investigation into the potential financial aspects of Carr's pressure campaign on ABC, including the involvement of Sinclair Broadcasting Group, which is the network's largest affiliate and is currently involved in merger talks that will need FCC approval.
"The Oversight Committee is launching an investigation into ABC, Sinclair, and the FCC," he said. "We will not be intimidated and we will defend the First Amendment."
Progressive politicians weren't the only ones launching an investigation into the Kimmel controversy, as legal organization Democracy Forward announced that it's filed a a Freedom of Information Act request for records after January 20, 2025 related to any FCC efforts “to use the agency’s licensing and enforcement powers to police and limit speech and influence what the public can watch and hear.”
Democratic lawmakers on Thursday vowed to fight back against US President Donald Trump's efforts to attack and dismantle liberal and progressive organizations.
Led by Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), the Democrats introduced the No Political Enemies Act aimed at protecting organizations' free speech rights from retaliation from the federal government.
During his speech touting the new legislation, Murphy recounted recent actions by Trump and his administration, including the president's threats to "arrest members of the Soros family simply for funding groups that oppose his agenda," as well as Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr's pressure campaign to get ABC to fire late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel.
Murphy then said that the No Political Enemies Act was necessary because "Donald Trump is right now instructing his Department of Justice to go on the hunt for his political enemies" for challenging him.
"Trump is making it 100% clear that he is going to ramp up his efforts to use the power of the federal government to punish his critics," he said. "This is legislation that makes sure that the law is on the side of free speech and the right to dissent."
The proposed law would give political organizations and individuals new tools to combat political harassment from the federal government, and would allow them to both recover attorney fees and more easily file lawsuits against federal officials who abuse their authority for political purposes.
Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), who also expressed support for the legislation, put the stakes facing Americans in stark terms.
"We are in the biggest free speech crisis this country has faced since the McCarthy era," he said. "The murder of Charlie Kirk was a horrific crime, and it's clear that Trump wants to hijack that horrific crime to silence anyone who disagrees with the president about any issue."
Casar, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, also took a shot at major corporations who have been caving to the president's demands in recent months.
"As we saw last night, far too many billionaires and corporate-owned media companies are bending the knee: Disney and ABC, Paramount and CBS, the Washington Post editorial board, Facebook," he said. "Let's be clear, the ultrawealthy men who own these companies are making a choice. David Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Bob Iger—these men are enriching themselves, auctioning off the United State's First Amendment to a wannabe dictator and tyrant."
Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) pointed out that the FCC's pressure campaign on ABC to fire Kimmel is particularly nefarious given that Sinclair Broadcasting Group, which is the network's largest affiliate, is currently involved in merger talks that will need FCC approval.
"All of this ties back to money and people enriching themselves, and bending the knee to Donald Trump to make it happen," he said.
The Democrats' proposed legislation comes after Trump announced late Wednesday night that he planned to designate “antifa,” a movement of autonomous individuals and loosely affiliated groups who oppose fascism, as a “major terrorist organization."
It also comes comes days after Trump adviser Stephen Miller began pushing a plan to "dismantle" the organized left using the power of the federal government.
During a recent appearance on Fox News, Miller described the entire left as a "domestic terrorism movement in this country," and vowed "to dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence."
President Donald Trump's Department of Education has announced that it will partner with right-wing think tanks and organizations to develop a new curriculum for “patriotic education” in American classrooms.
Earlier this week, the Trump administration redirected $137 million initially meant for programs aimed at minority students toward what it described as "American history and civics education."
Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced Wednesday that the money will be directed toward discretionary grants aimed at K-12 schools that adopt a new curriculum being drawn up by the 250 Civics Education Coalition—a consortium of more than 40 right-wing groups that launched on same day. The goal, McMahon said, was to advance education that "emphasizes a unifying and uplifting portrayal of the nation's founding ideals" in advance of the nation's 250th anniversary in 2026.
It is not Trump's first crack at instilling the nation's youth with a "patriotic education." In the waning days of his first term in office, Trump unveiled the 1776 Report, which, education columnist Jennifer Berkshire recently noted in The Baffler, "was widely panned by actual historians for its worshipful treatment of the Founding Fathers, its downplaying of slavery, and its portrayal of a century-old 'administrative state' controlled by leftist radicals."
While little has been publicized yet about what McMahon's new endeavor will look like, it is known who will be crafting it. The initiative is being led by the America First Policy Institute, a MAGA-aligned think tank that has been responsible for staffing Trump's second administration and has received over $1 million from his political action committee, the Save America PAC. Until 2023, McMahon herself served on the board of AFPI.
In 2022, the group presented a piece of model legislation for a "Civics Course Act" to be introduced in states. It included requirements for students to spend ample time studying the nation's founding documents and figures while banning the teaching of what it called the "defamatory history of America’s founding," which suggests that slavery or inequality are in any way inherent to the nation's institutions.
It also banned the concepts of "systemic racism" and "gender fluidity" and forbade teachers from giving students course credit for engaging with "social or public policy advocacy."
Also included in the coalition is Hillsdale College, a private Christian liberal arts school in Michigan that has proposed its own K-12 curriculum, which Vanity Fair notes "has been criticized for revisionist history, including whitewashed accounts of US slavery and depictions of Jamestown as a failed communist colony."
Another participant is PragerU, the overtly partisan and often factually loose YouTube channel that has been tasked with creating children's educational content in nearly a dozen red states.
The group has produced content venerating figures notorious for practicing slavery, like colonist Christopher Columbus and Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. Its videos have argued, among other things, that climate change is a myth, that European fascism was a "far-left" ideology, and that Israel has "the world's most moral army."
The pro-Trump youth group Turning Point USA will also be involved in crafting the curriculum. Its longtime leader, Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated in Utah last week, went on a crusade last year to, in his words, "tell the truth" about Martin Luther King Jr., whom he described as "an awful person," while claiming his signature achievement, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, was a "huge mistake."
An offshoot of Kirk's group, Turning Point Education, said Kirk's assassination has increased its resolve to promote a "God-centered, virtuous education" in US public schools.
The 250 Civics Education Coalition has not yet published a curriculum. But according to the Department of Education, it will be rolling out "a robust programming agenda" over the next 12 months.
During Trump's second term, he has undertaken an effort to purge federal museums and national parks of what one executive order called "improper ideology," which has resulted in the erasure of exhibits and monuments to Black and Native American history. Last month, he lamented that the Smithsonian Museum focuses too much on "how bad slavery was" and ordered a review of the museum's content.
Federal websites, meanwhile, have systematically eliminated many pages that acknowledged the accomplishments of nonwhite historical figures or important events in women's and LGBTQ+ history.
Critics in the education world view Trump's effort to use grants to induce them to adopt his preferred curriculum as an illegal effort to propagandize children.
"The law is clear," said education historian Diane Ravitch in a blog post. "Federal officials are prohibited from seeking to influence or direct curriculum in any way."
Since 1970, the federal government has been barred by law from "any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum" of public schools.
"Civic education is and must be non-partisan," said Ted McConnell, the executive director of the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools. "While the funding is long sought, this is the wrong approach and smacks of authoritarianism."