New color of money farmers 'climate credits'

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Momentum builds among farmers for 'climate credits'

BY ART HOVEY / Lincoln Journal Star

You could count it as a Martell farmer’s contribution to controlling global warming. And Joel Douglass gets paid to do it.

As a dedicated no-tiller south of Lincoln, Douglass doesn’t disturb the soil between planting seasons with tillage equipment. He plants the next year’s crop right into the plant residue left over from last year’s.

That traps carbon dioxide underground that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere. And here’s the pocketbook plus: His farming methods will earn him about $2,000 in 2007 from the Chicago Climate Exchange. Whether you think of it as the color of money or as the color code for environmental progress, Douglass is going green at the rate of a dollar or two an acre each year.

The idea behind his annual financial windfall links him to such business giants as DuPont, the Ford Motor Company, Motorola and IBM.

Under a trading format put together in 2000, companies with global reputations have voluntarily agreed to a ceiling on their carbon emissions.

When they would otherwise exceed it, they can buy credits that arise from no-till farming, rotated grazing, planting trees and other means that keep carbon dioxide tied up at the earth’s surface.

By signing up as a credit accumulator with the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation, Douglass gets recognition and a bit of spending money from the climate exchange.

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Nobody who digs down into the details of the trading that began in 2003 is going to suggest that the trading of climate credits adds up to enough to allow Al Gore to abandon his global-warming mission or to cancel the need for international agreements to limit atmospheric damage.

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