Ag policy people spent part of Thursday slugging it out together in the House Agriculture Committee hearing room talking about the flawed science behind indirect land use, questioning where this theory came from, denouncing the Environmental Protection Agency for trying to base policy on it and generally making the case to each other that the notion of using indirect land use to calculate the carbon emissions of U.S. biofuels is generally flawed.

Unfortunately, no one from the EPA testified, nor did anyone from the California Air Resources Board. These guys know their stuff. They have models. They can tell you, through these various models that it's ethanol's fault that the rain forests are being depleted.

After the hearing, though, an article from Brazil comes up on my Blackberry that blows the whole thing out of the water. Brazil's Congress is going to give away 247 million acres in the Amazon rain forest to 1.2 million people and numerous companies. The Reuters article stated the giveaway "could provoke a new wave of land-grabbing and deforestation, conservationists warn."

Yes, 247 million acres. That's more than the U.S. corn crop, soybean crop and wheat crop combined. Go ahead and throw in cotton too.

Please continue.

The article noted that this is a social justice bill meant to right wrongs from the past 30 years. The article noted that the deforestation has been happening for basically 30 years for a variety of reasons and from everybody from farmers to loggers to speculators. It quotes Brazil's environmental minister. The ownership would improve public policies and impose fines for deforestation, as well as provide incentives for sustainable development.

You mean a country will take care of it's own issues without the EPA's involvement?

Environmentalists in Brazil are outraged, apparently, because they see it as a setback to their efforts to protect the forest.

Unintended consequences from government action? Hmmm.

Oh wait, here's the part where the local environmentalists in Brazil don't mention American ethanol as the reason for deforestation.

"Giving away land is an incentive for deforestation, it makes it even cheaper than it already is to clear forest for pasture rather than recover abandoned land," said Brenda Brito, executive director at the research institute Imazon.

OK EPA, how does that fit into the indirect land use model?

Food for Thought on the Climate Bill

While agricultural groups are pleased that farming and forestry are not specifically regulated in the climate bill, Rep. Lee Terry, R-Neb., a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, noted that the bill would allow the EPA to take into account small emissions and generate an accumulative affect of emissions. Terry said this could allow the EPA to regulate agriculture, or generate lawsuits forcing EPA to regulate livestock emissions.

"It doesn't take a rocket scientist to add up one plus one that the EPA is going to have to enforce this on agriculture," he said.

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I can be found at chrisclaytonDTN.