Farmers, Farm Bureau, Sonny Purdue So Concerned About Climate That They Held Closed-Door Meeting

[hatrack]

The meeting last June in a wood-beamed barn in Newburg, Md., an hour due south of Washington, had all the makings of a secret conclave. The guest list was confidential. No press accounts were allowed. The topic was how to pivot American agriculture to help combat climate change — an issue so politically toxic that the current administration routinely shies away from promoting crucial government research on the issue.

But this meeting represented a change. It was hosted by the U.S. Farmers and Ranchers Alliance, a group made up of the heavyweights in American agriculture. It brought together three secretaries of agriculture, including the current one, Sonny Perdue, among an A-list of about 100 leaders that included the president of the American Farm Bureau Federation — a longtime, powerful foe of federal action on climate — and CEOs of major food companies, green groups and anti-hunger advocates.

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The sense of urgency that many activists bring to the climate change issue also fits with what some farmers see as a familiar pattern of dire environmental predictions that haven’t panned out. Jim Mundorf, an Iowan who raises cattle on his family farm and makes Longhorn art, last summer took to his website Lonesome Lands to explain why he is so skeptical about an area of science that he admittedly knows little about. “I’m not denying the climate is changing,” he stated. “I’ve been told there were once glaciers where I am sitting. I’m not denying that humans have an effect on the climate. What I am saying is, I don’t know. What I do know is that for 30 of my 39 years on earth, climate ‘scientists’ have been saying we have 10 years left.”

His post links to a 1989 Associated Press story which cites a senior United Nations official warning that “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.” “The environmentalists have been crying wolf, so loudly for so long that fewer and fewer people are listening,” Mundorf declared.

Ed. -Yes, because a 30-year-old AP article is certainly a basis for denying everything you've seen and experienced since it was published. Blahblahblahblahblah.

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https://www.politico.com/news/2019/12/09/farmers-climate-change-074024

[Mike 03]

1. Jim Mundorf almost had me until this sentence:

"What I do know is that for 30 of my 39 years on earth, climate ‘scientists’ have been saying we have 10 years left.”

Because that's a flat-out lie. Twenty, thirty years ago we were told we had a hundred years to sort all of this out. But change is happening exponentially, and permafrost is melting 70 years ahead of schedule, and glaciers are vanishing much faster than predicted by models. People like this will grasp to believe anything before they will admit we need to change our behavior. Game Theory predicts we won't. Nations will more likely get bogged down in finger-pointing, accusations, isolationism, and racing to grab up the last resources. In our rush to shore up our own survival we'll probably burn more carbon, not less (if nations don't bankrupt themselves first).

[sharedvalues]

2. Too F'ing late, Sonny Purdue

Your Koch-network friends MADE CLIMATE CHANGE A BIG PROBLEM, by spending money to deny climate change so the Koches could continue to enrich themselves while the world suffered.

We are not going to let Republican billionaires off the hook for this.