What We Could Do - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 27

mechanization of agriculture, of course, alters the picture; by now, the
manufacture of fertilizer and herbicides, the use of fossil fuels to power
farm machines, and the release of methane and nitrous oxide into the
atmosphere, especially from the application of nitrogen-based fertilizers,
makes the situation even worse. The 2007 IPCC assessment estimates
that today agriculture contributes around 13.5 percent of greenhouse
gas emissions worldwide. Luckily, we already know the basics of how to
reverse these practices; according to one study, with smart soil manage-
ment, the greater use of cover crops, no-till agriculture, manuring, and
agro-forestry, we could sequester between 5 and 15 percent of the world's
annual fossil-fuel emissions in the soil, transforming a contributor of car-
bon into a major carbon sink. 56
But making this shift will require a wholesale transformation in agri-
culture. In the United States, that's not an industry that yields easily to
public pressure, nor is it a political constituency that accepts the urgency
of action to save the climate. How exactly are we to bring about the nec-
essary change of atitudes and practices to make a diference? Certainly
the federal government could impose new regulations on farm practices
or new taxes on certain goods. But farmers could block new rules by liti-
gation or delay new legislation through political pressure. Finding a solu-
tion on this one is difficult.
Several paterns emerge from this brief discussion of these questions.
For one thing, there are only a few technologies that are ready to go, that
can be implemented without difficulty, and that we can build on a suf-
ficient scale to make a real difference. For the most part, new techniques
require skills we don't yet have, infrastructure that isn't built, or public
approval that will be difficult to gain. As Fred Krupp, President of the
Environmental Defense Fund, and Miriam Horn argue, entrepreneurs
and inventors are busy creating next-generation technologies that may
soon provide solutions to many of our energy needs, but only political
intervention to increase the cost of generating greenhouse gases (through
the mechanism, for example, of a cap-and-trade system, possibly of the
sort that California is now launching) would make it possible for these
innovators to generate energy on the scale we require. 57 In a similar vein,
Thomas L. Friedman urges the United States to forge into the lead on cre-
ating new energy technologies, demanding that our government produce