COLUMBUS — Carbon credits are at the center of the Growing Climate Solutions Act.
“The basic idea of a carbon credit is, if I’m in an industry — let’s say the airline travel or manufacturing space that emits a lot of carbon and I want to somehow offset the amount of emissions, the volume of carbon, I put into the atmosphere. Then I can buy a credit or a permit or a certificate, whatever you might want to call it,” agriculture expert Andy Vance said. “And on the other side of the transaction, the person I’m buying the credit from is doing something to capture or reduce that carbon, so in this case, we’re talking about farmers doing activities like reduced tillage farming or planting cover crops or planting trees on their land that will reduce carbon from the atmosphere or sequester it into the soil in some way.”
The emitter of carbon pays whoever captures carbon.
In June, the U.S. Senate passed the first-ever climate mitigation bill involving agriculture. The House of Representatives will now take up the issue.
Vance said this is probably the most bipartisan bill that has come out of Washington, D.C. in some time.
“The idea here is that the USDA will create a specific system for helping people set up the carbon market, so they’re going to do a certification program that says this is what farmers are doing, here’s how farmers can benefit, so that way when one of those emitters wants to come on the market and purchase credits. They know these farms are doing what they say they are and we’re not just doing some sort of greenwashing campaign to make everybody feel good,” Vance said.
Vance said there is great potential with what lawmakers hope to accomplish.
“Farmers are maybe the most obvious source of doing carbon capturing,” he said. “The question is: Does this just become this big greenwashing project where everybody feels good, but it doesn’t actually move the needle? At some point, you also have to ask: Are we doing enough to limit the amount of carbon we are putting into the atmosphere from industries like, let’s say again, the airline transportation industry?”
