 Good afternoon and thank you for joining us. My name is Tori Bosch and I'm the editor of future tense future tense is a partnership of slate magazine the new America Foundation and Arizona State University and our goal is to examine breakthrough technologies and look at their implications for public policy and for society. In addition to live events. We have a channel on slate where we publish daily commentary about technology and science news which you can find at www.slate.com slash future tense. Before we get started, a couple of quick housekeeping notes. First of all, if you're on Twitter, you can join the discussion using the hashtag green farms. Also the event is being streamed online. So when we get to the Q&A, if you could please wait until the microphone comes to you so that everyone watching online can hear the question. So for the past month, future tense has been running a fascinating and provocative, if I may say so, series of articles on agriculture and climate change. Instead of just looking at ways to mitigate agriculture's carbon footprint, we've looked at how we can leverage agriculture as a weapon against the damage that's already been done. The pieces included things like how open source GMOs could transform agriculture without lining big ads pockets and why so many farmers are climate change deniers and whether it even matters if they are. Also New America's Barry Lynn and Lena Kahn looked at whether big ag will prevent green technology from being widely adopted, which Barry will discuss later this afternoon. But the driving force of the package and today's events has been Mark Hertzgaard, who is the Schmidt Family Foundation Fellow at New America and a veteran journalist who has long covered climate change and the environment for publications like The Nation. His most recent book is Hot Living Through the Next 50 Years on Earth. His two pieces for the future tense package on slate included an interview with Michael Pollan and an in-depth look at Biochar. Ever the dedicated journalist, Mark even stuck his arm in a pile of compost so he could really get the feel for the story. Mark's going to kick us off with a 10 minute look at how agriculture could help combat climate change. Then he'll join moderator Kate Shepard from Mother Jones for a 50 minute panel. So Mark, I'll hand it over to you now. Thank you very much. Thank you, Tori. And can everybody hear me now? In the back, can you nod your head? Yeah, you can nod your head. All right. And John, I assume that I'm going, that you can hear me in the back there. So thank you all for being here and thank you, Kate, for coming to moderate for us. And thank you, Tori, for doing such a terrific job of herding all the cats and the five part series that we've done. If you haven't read it, I urge all of you to take a look on the future tense site. I hope it will be provocative and inform your own work in this area. I will start by confessing that our main goal here, at least mine, has been to broaden the gaze of our climate change discussion. I've been covering climate change now for longer than I'd like to remember for a lot of different magazines and in various books. And one of the things that is striking about the conversation is that it is focused almost entirely on energy, the energy sector, transportation, buildings, et cetera. And that's very understandable because that is the largest contributor of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that are driving the problem. But it is a mistake to ignore agriculture, and agriculture has been largely sidelined in these discussions. And that's a mistake for at least two basic reasons. One is that agriculture, especially if you include forestry as part of agriculture, is a big part of the problem. It's responsible for a lot of emissions. And you can argue about the exact number. The World Watch Institute and its recent State of the World report put it at 25 to 30 percent. You've seen the UN Food and Agriculture Organization give figures ranging from 18 to 40 percent. There's even a couple of former World Bank economists, Robert Goodland, among them, who say that if we really counted it properly, that agriculture could be responsible for as much as 48 percent of all of the global emissions. In any case, it's a big part of the ongoing emissions. But the other reason, and I say this as the father of an eight-year-old daughter and an eight-year-old who was the main motivation for me writing my last book, which is a book called Hot Living Through the Next 50 Years on Earth. And it's about how my daughter's generation can live through the amount of climate change that is now loaded into the system. And so for me, I have a very strong personal stake in finding some way to reverse this problem. And agriculture, I think, offers the most promising means of actually turning back the clock on climate change. And one of the things we've tried to do in this series is to suggest that we need a paradigm shift in our approach to climate policy, not just to incorporate agriculture into the policy, although that's a big part of the discussion that's necessary, but rather to really shift how we look at what a solution means. To date, most, when we talk about solutions to climate change, and you see this in the media coverage, you see it in the kinds of discussions that happen in think tanks like this and lobby groups around town. Most of that discussion is not only focused on energy, it's focused on the ongoing emissions. So we talk about let's shift our electricity supply from coal to solar or wind. Let's improve the energy efficiency of our buildings, as President Obama said in his landmark address last month. All of these things are vitally important. I don't want to be misunderstood here. We absolutely need to do that. But they are all about the ongoing emissions, the current and future emissions, which are adding about two parts per million carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, two parts per million every year. Again, that is important, but what is driving the problem now are the 400 parts per million that are already up there in the atmosphere. That's why we have seen what the World Meteorological Organization recently described as, quote, an unprecedented number of extreme weather events in the first decade of this century. Not just Hurricane Sandy, but before that last summer, which as you doubtless remember, was the hottest summer on record in the United States, worst drought in 50 years in the United States. Two years before that, worst drought that had ever, and heat wave that had ever hit modern Russia. Going back 2003 to the record heat wave in Europe that killed 71,000 people in the space of six weeks. Think about that number for a second. 71,000 people. That's many more people than we lost the war dead in Vietnam in six weeks in one of the richest parts of the world. That's the kind of extreme weather events that we are now experiencing. And it's not because of the two parts per million that we're adding every year. It's because of the 400 parts per million that are up there already. And yet all of our discussion, and it gets very heated, as you know, in this town in particular, all of the discussion about climate policy is focused on that two parts per million. How can we stop doing that? When we also have got to get serious about that 400 parts per million. We've got to figure out ways to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to draw down that 400 parts per million. You can argue about where it needs to go to. Jim Hansen, the former NASA scientist, has famously said it has to be 350 parts per million. There's indeed the organization now, 350.org, that my longtime colleague Bill McKibben is running. But at the very least, it's clear that 400 parts per million look at what it's already doing today. In 2013. And remember that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases stay in the atmosphere for a long time. So that even if we were completely successful under the current paradigm of cutting all new emissions, which is a pretty hard thing to do, but let's imagine for a second that we did that. So no more coal plants in China. No more deforestation in Malaysia and Indonesia and Brazil. No more gas guzzling automobiles in the United States. Even if we did all of that tonight, given that 400 parts per million that's up in the atmosphere, the temperatures on this planet would continue to rise for another 30 years. And as those temperatures continue to rise, we will continue to see the kind of extreme weather events that we've experienced in an unprecedented amount in the last 10 years, according to WMO. So this paradigm shift that I'm advocating is to go after that 400 parts per million. Now, I'm not the first person to say this. I'm sure you've also heard a lot of talk, an increasing talk in last year or two about so-called geoengineering. And that is a means of intervening in the climate that goes after this same purpose, to try and either withdraw some of that carbon from the atmosphere or shield our planet from its effects. So you've got these very... I remember Tori put this line into my piece. It was very good at sci-fi ideas that are by no means clear that they would work, but things like let's put some giant mirrors up in space between us and the sun so that we can kind of deflect some of this heat away from us. Others have said, let's drop iron filings into the ocean so that would draw down some of the carbon dioxide. It would also ruin the oceans, but that's one of the problems with a lot of these geoengineering ideas. Not only is it not clear they would work and not only would they cost enormous amounts of money, but they would have both predictable and unpredictable consequences. By contrast, agriculture, at least in theory, offers us a way to draw down that 400 parts per million through the process known as photosynthesis, which is the basis of agriculture, which is in fact the basis of all life on this planet. The reason we are sitting here today is that plants extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and they turn it into useful food for us, for animals, etc. That's all the things you learn in third grade science, how plants breathe in CO2, they exhale oxygen so that we can breathe that oxygen, and then they use that CO2 to create their stems, their leaves, their roots, and so forth. So the idea that first Michael Pollan and I described in the first piece in this series, and then I returned to in a later piece, is to use photosynthesis to extract carbon from the atmosphere and store it underground where it cannot contribute to global warming, at least for many, many, many years. There's scientific debate whether it's decades or more likely centuries and even perhaps millennia. And as Michael described in the first piece, we can do that through changing how we use livestock, and as I described in the later piece, also with how we grow crops. In the case of crops, it involves something called biochar. Let me just see a show of hands if I could. How many people here know the term biochar? Raise your hand if you could, please. Some. I will predict that if we were having this discussion two years from now, almost every room in this hand would go up. Biochar is a phrase you will become familiar with. And it's partly because it offers, again, in theory, a means of turning back the clock on climate change. And I'll be very brief in describing it and then we can bring everybody else up and discuss it. The essential idea is that, as I said, with photosynthesis plants capture CO2, they hold it. And then when the plants die, they will release that CO2 back into the atmosphere. Which is why, by the way, how many people here have seen the graph that's captured from the Mauna Loa in Hawaii of the CO2 emissions over time? If you've seen that, you'll notice, especially if you kind of zoom in on it, you'll see that it goes, of course, it goes up like this from 1958 when they started taking the readings to today. It goes up like this on the graph, but it goes up in little sawtooth amounts. Each year, as it goes up, it goes up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down. And that's because plants, as they grow in the spring and the summer, they are taking CO2 out of the atmosphere. So the amount goes down. Then in the fall and winter, when they fall to the earth and they decay, they release that carbon and that's where you get the upslant on that sawtooth. So that's sort of the necessary backdrop to understanding this. What biochar would do, and there's many different kinds of biochar, but essentially would be to capture that CO2 and not let it back into the atmosphere, but rather to bury it under the ground. And the way this would happen, let me just say biochar, and this oversimplifies slightly, so I apologize, but for the purposes of this discussion, biochar is essentially a fancy scientific name for charcoal. And it's something that has been used by indigenous peoples for a very long time. We have archeological evidence in Brazil going back about 2,000 years. And essentially what charcoal does, the way you create charcoal is usually with wood, but you can do it with other plant material, is you heat it. You do not burn it, though. You heat it in a low-oxygen environment, so they're kind of smolders. If you burn it, of course, it would just release everything back up into the atmosphere. But if you heat it rather in a low-oxygen environment, you char it. Hence the name charcoal. And that charcoal, then, if it is put under the ground, buried into the ground, or inserted into the ground in whatever fashion you want, it is then removed from the atmosphere, cannot get back into the atmosphere for at least a very long time. And by doing that, you use photosynthesis, capturing all that material, and then you put it back under the ground. And so in theory, you should be able to dial back that 400 parts per million. That's the theory of it, and I want to emphasize that there's still a lot of reporting that needs to be done. I don't know if I shared with you, but when Michael and I ran that first piece, we got two or three very huffy responses from academics who said, this is not proven, and no soil scientist in the world would tell you that it's proven. Well, that is a vast overstatement, but it contains a kernel of truth. The biochar, in particular, and the livestock side of this, still have to be vetted and proven. And there's two or three basic questions about that, and I'll stop there. We have to see, does it really work in practice? We know it works in theory, and we know it's worked in the past in the Brazilian example I mentioned. But can it really work under modern conditions? Two, can it be scaled? Can it work in enough places at a large enough volume to really make a dent in that 400 parts per million? Which was one of the other complaints that one of the academics raised with us, saying that you'd have to basically, that it's logistically unfeasible for the world to turn that much biomass, trees, plants, et cetera, into biochar. So is it scalable? And third, what are the social consequences of doing it? Because one way you could do it, which we know would be terribly destructive socially, would be to just plant vast tree plantations, clear-cut them, and biochar them. Now, you could certainly extract a lot of carbon that way, but you would also create probably more problems than you were solving. For one thing, you would be driving an awful lot of poor people off of the only land they have. And that's been one of the problems with big picture environmental and development policies for many, many decades now is that the people who design them don't think about the average peasant on the ground. So can it be done in such a way that it is socially helpful rather than harmful? And related to that, and I hope this is something that Barry will be talking about in the second session, is how does biochar and other means of soil, carbon, sequestration, how do they fit or contradict the currently dominant model for agriculture, which is an industrial monopolistic model where we've got a few very large companies who control most of the land, most of the inputs, most of the wealth, and crucially, most of the political decision-making. Does biochar reinforce that dominance or does it subvert it? These are all questions that remain to be answered, and I'm happy to say that I'm actually going to, I'm continuing to do reporting on this. In fact, I'm leaving this afternoon to go see some more fields and research stations, including, surprisingly perhaps, US Department of Agriculture. It turns out that the US Department of Agriculture is about the only major institution, agricultural institution in the world that is seriously looking at biochar. So I would say stay tuned on this. There are many questions still to be answered, but the main message here that I hope you will take away from today is that we need to broaden our gaze to discuss climate change. We have got to make agriculture central to that discussion, not just because it's a big part of the problem, but because it might very well be a crucial part of the solution to actually dialing back the problem. So thank you very much for your attention to this opening part, and then I think, do I introduce the others or do you, Tori Bosch? I believe you do. Kate, or maybe Kate will do it then. Kate Shepherd, my colleague at Mother Jones Magazine. Do you want to come and join here and I'll sit over here. Well, let me call up our other two panelists first. We have Peter Beck, who is the director and producer of Carbon Nation and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. And we have Judith Swartz, who is the author of Cows, Save the Planet and Probable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth. Thanks so much for coming up today, guys. I will start out by saying that I cover climate change a lot, but I almost never cover agriculture. I grew up on a farm in New Jersey, and I think that's why I probably avoid the topic of agriculture. But just last month my... We've got two farmers up here, farmers kids. You and me, are you guys farmers too? No. Last month my family's farm lost 50 acres of squash because of the just relentless rain that they had throughout the month of June. It caused this disease to spread in the soil. They had to tear it all out. It was pretty terrible. And I talked to my father afterwards and I said, you're a Republican farmer. I think a lot of people probably would think that you don't believe in climate change. He says, of course I believe in climate change. I go outside and I can tell it's all effed up. So to put it in delicately, he was right. I think most farmers probably realize that things are changing and they don't really exactly know what to do with it, but it's something that they realize is happening. So I'm really excited to be here, and this is a subject that I do care about for a lot of reasons. So I guess I want to start with my first question. We're going to have about 35 minutes of discussion up here between the panelists, and then we'll have about 15 minutes for audience questions. So start thinking of your questions now. So my first question, in his big climate speech last month, President Obama didn't even mention agriculture at all. Why do we largely ignore the topic of agriculture in policy debates about climate change? The reason people are ignoring it is beyond me. I mean, when I started researching Carbon Nation in 07, our point was to make a film about solutions to climate change. I learned about ag as a solution within three or four months. And so it's powerful. The first people we talked to were folks at the Marin Carbon Project, and they were just starting up. And the idea that they work on is to add a half inch of compost to the soil and see what it does over a period of time to that soil. They're also integrating rotational grazing, somewhat with the Alan Savry method. And they're doing the science, which has been lacking, as you mentioned. And so Wendy Silver, UC Berkeley, they've been taking samples for five years now. And so they're taking compost from the city that was going to be emitting a lot of methane. They're taking trash from the city dump, making compost, and the dump it was going to be emitting a lot of methane. They're then putting a half inch on the soil, and it's basically turning on the soil. As I'm sure you've found, in the U.S., most of our soils are losing carbon. They're exhaling carbon, where carbon is naturally supposed to be in the soils. Do you want to add just to what you were saying before, that when we talk about the CO2 load, that we often are just talking about emissions from the energy sector, but over time way more CO2 has gone into the atmosphere from agriculture. So once you start to think about agriculture as the source of that particular problem, then you can look at solutions anyway. It's just a carbon cycle. It's exactly what you were describing with biochar as a possible solution. Carbon goes up, carbon goes down, carbon goes up, carbon goes down. But what the marine carbon projects finding is, once they put one half inch of compost on the soil, they're flipping on the soil, and all of a sudden the natural systems are actually kicking in all on their own. And from the soil scientists I've met, they said about 10 years ago they would have told you they knew about what 10% was in the soil, what microbes are in the soil. Now the smart ones are telling us they know 1%. They just don't know. But we're calling it a biome. And if I hold a handful of very healthy soil, I've got 70,000 different types of organisms in my hand. And I've got more organisms in number than humans, all the humans have ever lived on earth, in one handful. So the fact that it's not in policy, it's been mind-blowing to me. It's been mind-blowing. I think another reason it hasn't been in policy, well two more, is that frankly, most of the people who are engaged in policy discussions are urban people, who think that your food comes from a grocery store. And that's one of I think the great achievements that the food movement is beginning to have in this country, especially with our kids, is to understand, go to a farm and see where your food comes from. And if you're eating meat, which is your choice, know what that means to eat meat. So that's one reason. The other reason I think is that the people who are running the agriculture system are quite happy with things as they are. And they don't want this to be messed with. And there's no benefit that I can see to Monsanto, or Cargill, or any of the big agribusiness players in getting involved in the climate debate. I know some activists are saying that no, some activists have even begun to criticize biochar, by the way, because they think that Monsanto is behind it and the Bill Gates Foundation is behind it and they are going to just clear cut the entire planet in the name of making biochar. But I don't think that's, I mean, that may be, for all I know, perhaps that's true, but I certainly don't see that, that doesn't appear to be Monsanto's strategy. They seem to be much more focused on, in particular, genetically modified organisms. So I hope that the policy discussion will begin to include agriculture because it's, because without it, I just don't see how we solve the problem. We don't. So in Michael Pollan's piece, he lays this out as a sun food versus oil food question and that we need to move from an oil food system to a sun food system. What kind of changes need to happen, big picture, to make that change? You go ahead. Well, I would say that we need to move from agriculture from an extractive model to a regenerative model, which is, I think once we start making that shift, then a lot of other things will start to fall into place. Not only the CO2, but other ways of restoring land and land function. What I'm learning now is that that biome is also feeding us and now we're a biome. We're looking at that humans are 90% of what's in my body and your body is not you. It's a different DNA organism. So if we feed the biomes correctly and we know this, we know this relationship, getting to know it well with cows and the soil and that that biome relationship is very, is very clear. I think what's really missing right now is just respected farmers putting 40 acres aside and trying a real strong non-chemical farming method because they're respected in their community and see it and try it. I think that's really what's missing right now. I don't think farmers are inherently happy that they are farming with seeds that they can't use the next year and things like that. I don't think that's like a thing that farmers are inherently happy about. They want to have yields. So the missing piece right now is the proof that you can have higher yields not using chemicals and what I'm getting at now is there's a presentation that just came out of New Mexico State where these guys are getting yields much higher than any chemical farming and they're doing it with how powerful they make their compost and getting the soil carbon up to 17%. A really healthy soil is about 5%, 4% soil carbon. Of all the stuff that's in there that's got carbon in it, that's a good healthy soil. Right now in the US the average, according to the USDA, is 1.2% carbon. A lot of people say carbon is our biggest export. It's the world's biggest export. We're just shifting it and putting it in the air and it's dropping in the ocean, making it acidic. And so I think right now it's getting the story out there, writer, writer, filmmaker, writer. I mean we're working at this, right? And getting the respected folks in communities, it's going to start small, but it's not small right now. I think this is what critical mass feels like a couple years before it hits. I think this thing's going to really power on. And it's just going to, I think that's the thing. Get those respected folks to do it. They'll see. I want to suggest one other that does not disagree with either of what these two points have been, but perhaps precedes it, which was the real point that Michael and I were trying to make in our first piece. That piece talked about, and sort of the gimmick to that piece was that anybody who read Pollan's book, Omnivore's Dilemma, you came out of that book thinking, wow, I better not eat meat if I care about the climate. And the gimmick of our piece was that Michael was saying, well no, actually you can eat meat. And eating meat could actually even help the climate. The question is not meat versus no meat. The question is what kind of agricultural system do you grow the meat under? And if you grow it under the current system, whereby we plant monoculture vast amounts of corn in particular, we feed it to these poor animals, we were grouped together at these massive industrial feedlots in really inhumane conditions, and then we eat way too much of it in a diet that is way more meat-based than it should, that's very destructive of the climate. But if you change the system away from the industrial model to an ecological agricultural model, eating meat can actually be a positive if those cattle instead are grazed on grass. Because as Michael explained in that piece, what happens again with the carbon cycle is when a cow, let's say, is grazing in a field, and let's say that just for ease of understanding, let's say that the average piece of grass is one foot tall, 12 inches tall. Well what that means is that under the ground there's 12 inches of root system. Nature tends to equal out. So if the cow chomps that down to one inch, so 12 inch stem of grass goes to one inch, the plant responds by seeking equilibrium. So the 12 inches of root that are under the ground, 11 inches are shed. And what that means is that all the carbon that's caught, that's embodied in those roots, is turned into new soil. The nematodes and the microbes and all that that are in the soil chomp that down and that becomes new soil and captures that carbon, the carbon that the top of the plant had originally carried. So that's how even eating meat could actually help fight climate change. But it assumes that you're going to have grass-fed beef. And not just grass-fed, but that is a whole different way of growing. Certainly you wouldn't need all those vast monocultures of corn that you see if you drive through Iowa. But also it implies a very different kind of ranching. And those of you who know anything about ranching, it would be much more labor-intensive, frankly, than the current model, where you just put a bunch of cows in a place and you don't really care what happens to them. So make a long story somewhat shorter, I hope, is that I think that what we really need is not just to get the news out, but to challenge the current industrial agricultural system. As long as that system remains in place, it's going to be very hard for any of these common-sense solutions to really break through, to be anything more than marginal. Because you see a lot of activity around the country, culturally and just on the ground, if you will, of people going to farmers markets and encouraging their local farmers. And the Rodale Institute, for example, has 30 years of data showing that in fact, ecological agriculture can out-compete, reduce even industrial. I don't think the problem is a lack of information so much as the current stranglehold that the big boys have over our policy. And when most of the federal research dollars and most of the policy, as we saw in the Farm Bill over and over again, goes towards perpetuating an industrial agricultural system, it's very hard for these alternatives to break through. May I jump in on a couple of points? Yeah, Rodale's awesome. And they've been doing it for a long time. These side-by-side tests, chemical farming, non-conditional farming. The idea of grazing being different, it really starts with Alan Savry, but a lot of people are taking it and moving, taking Alan's work and moving on and doing it their own way. I was just filming a rancher in Mississippi named Alan Williams. And it actually is taking him less work to do the work that we're talking about. It's grass-fed and grass-finished is the key. You never want the cows to be eating corn because they weren't evolved to eat it. It causes all sorts of health problems. Some people even call corn for a cow poison. But when a cow is eating grass, that's its natural state, that's its natural evolution. And so what's happening is, as you mentioned, when you eat that grass down to one inch, you want to get that cow away from there now so the land can regenerate. So Alan Savry's method is to basically replicate moving herds being hunted. That's the basic concept. And so they break the farms down into paddocks and they use this one strand of electric wire on a spool, make a new paddock, get the cows in there. The cows know the food's better over there. It's very easy to get cows to move where there's better food. It's astoundingly easy. And so he's not now going and cutting hay on someone else's land. He's not putting inputs into his land by grass because he's got a monoculture of grass, which is what's feeding a lot of grass-fed cows right now. It's not a monoculture. It's more a biodiverse diet of grass. The one we want. Exactly. But the one that's unconventional is a monoculture of grass. They do one grass in the summer and one grass in the winter. So these monocultures don't help anybody. Look at this room. It's a lot of different people. This is how things get done. And so he's actually having less work. He's making more money because he's selling his meat for more money. And so there's a lot of success stories out there. Here's the trick. Here's the biggest trick. You touched on this. The way science has developed to test things right now is a very linear testing. Let's try this. Okay, let's do a control where that's not happening. And then let's put the two things together and that's that. But all of these methods that turn on the soil that Paulin's talking about, that you're talking about in your book, they're complex because nature is complex. And so the science of studying the complex issues is brand new. And up until just recently, I couldn't find anyone doing it. But the USDA, exactly your point. This is really exciting. The USDA has a group called the NRCS, Natural Resource Conservation Service. Is that right? And they're actually going to do a complex test of this rotational grazing in Colorado. With the Environmental Defense Fund, with the Nature Conservancy, with a bunch of ranchers. It's going to start in September. They've done all the legwork. They're going to try a complex scientific study. And so that's great. But if you go to these ranches and you go to these farms, you see something wonderful is going on. I mean, you've been out there, right? I have been to the Marine Carbon Project and I have to, as a journalist, I have to say that in fairness to the other side of the argument, Wendy Silver and the farmer who we visited, John Curle, John Kirk, rather, they are not yet seeing that the Allen Savory Method is working. Correct. And they are... What you hear when you say that back to the Savory people is that, well, they probably didn't follow the protocols, right, A and B. That, look, we're not doing this to prove it to academics. We're doing it because it works. And I do think that if it's going to really get institutional backing that you do, in the modern world, you do have to be able to do peer-reviewed studies that prove that it's work, that it works. We are still very early. You're right. The science isn't there yet. It doesn't mean that it can't be there. But when even people like Wendy Silver and John Kirk who are certainly open to it working, when they're saying that, well, we don't see it yet, you know, let's just be careful that we bear that in mind, too. So given all that we said about, you know, how we have a lot of more studies to do and we're not really quite far along in a lot of these studies yet, I mean, can the changes that need to happen happen fast enough and can they be done to scale to make a real difference, considering that we have all acknowledged that we don't have a huge timeframe here? What I'm looking is who is at scale needing these products already, right? So you look at McDonald's. What people are finding, when you have grass-finished beef, it's high in omega-3, which is good for us. When you have corn-finished beef, it's high in omega-6s, which is not good for us. So imagine if McDonald's said to their supply chain, we want grass-finished beef. They can then say to the world, our main product is a health food. That, to me, is how you get to scale. Walmart. If Walmart decides they want to do this, it gets done. But Walmart did decide that. Walmart did make that statement, not about meat, but they said a couple years ago that we're going to demand that our supply chain obey child labor laws and pay attention to environmental sustainability. And the record over the last two years is less than stellar. So I think it's... Let's be careful about seeing... Putting too much stock in one big corporation changing their rhetoric about this. We have to look at this systemically, and this is something Barry Lynn will be talking about later. But as long as you've got a system where, you know, Walmart's basic business model is to cut labor costs and all the other associated social costs of environmental protection and so forth, so that they can keep that price to the average American consumer as low as possible. There's only so much that the twiddling around the edges can change that, I would think. I'll make sure Judith gets them here as well. Oh, okay. Well, I mean, one way to make things happen really fast, but I'm not convinced that this is possible right now is to begin to internalize some of the costs that are now externalized. And by that I mean, in the cost of a product, just the damage that it's causing, et cetera. And flipping that around to subsidize rather... Even the word subsidize makes me very nervous, but somehow have people encouraged to use regenerative practices because when you're building soil carbon, not only are you sequestering that carbon, but you're also creating a scenario where the land can hold water, which has a huge, huge impact in terms of dealing with resilience to drought in terms of dealing with flooding because if the land isn't dry, then the water can go in because basically flooding often happens when you have drops of water... Flooding begins when you have drops of water hitting dry earth. So when you're building the system and people are rewarded and encouraged to build the system, then it will shift. One other thing that could happen, too, and we've just seen this recently with Obama's recent speech on climate change. If the United States, building on the efforts of the Department of Agriculture, now began to go into third world countries and change how we subsidize and help assist with their agricultural policies. You could have an enormous difference on this. In his speech, the President said that he was going to encourage an end to public financing to overseas coal plants. And you may have noticed that shortly thereafter in the last couple of weeks, both the World Bank and the U.S. Export-Import Bank have followed suit and said, we're not going to do that anymore. That is potentially a huge breakthrough because without that public financing, most of the coal plants that are now poisoning the people and fouling the skies in China and India would never have been built. So that's a big deal. And if we were to do a correspondingly big shift in our agriculture policy overseas to encourage things, not just biochar, but just the general ecological approach to agriculture that, frankly, a lot of those farmers already know and are inclined to do and things like evergreen agriculture and planting or growing trees in the midst of that, there's a lot. We have the tools and we've got 10 or 12 case studies around the world. We know what works. All it needs is to just scale that up and that would take us a long way towards solving the problem. Can I just add one thing to what Judith was saying? Yeah, we're going to have questions after that. Sure, sure. So talking about externalized costs, of course, the big externalized thing is carbon. So putting a price on carbon, a simple carbon tax, not even getting complicated with the cap and trade system. And I think a lot of people in Washington would think that's impossible. Certainly every economist that I interviewed for the film thinks it's the most logical way. But what I'm seeing right now is I'm seeing an incredible growth in people who understand the benefit of a carbon tax. My libertarian friends, my libertarian cousin, they hate externalities, hate them. And they think a carbon tax would make perfect sense and actually they want that. So I can see strange bedfellows coming together to propose such a thing. And a lot of people are talking about doing an income tax neutral carbon tax, where the money just goes straight to people, but it incentivizes getting carbon out of the system. You put a price on carbon for these farmers. They're business people. That would kick it the fastest. Let's get a question from the audience. Make sure that you have the young lady in the back has the microphone, that she brings you the microphone before you start speaking. We'll go up here to the young lady in the corner in polka dots first. Up here behind the divider. Hi, my name is Alexis Baden-Maren with the Organic Consumers Association. I'm reading Judith's book. And one of the most interesting new concepts that I wasn't aware of was how mycorrhizal fungi helps draw carbon into the soil. Can you explain that for everyone? I thought that was fascinating. Oh, wow. Okay. So, well, you mentioned carbon tax and carbon trading. What happens is in the soil, carbon trading is going on all the time. That carbon is the currency in the ground. So, basically, through photosynthesis, the plant makes compounds, draws the carbon compounds down into the soil. And then there are other creatures, the zillions that you mentioned, that want that carbon as food. So, via these networks of mycorrhizal fungi, they make exchanges. So, mycorrhizal fungi are really, in addition to being difficult to say, they're also really incredible because they expand a plant's reach for what they need. Let's say water or minerals, and that brings them up into the plant. But, yeah, and one component of them is a substance called glomalin. It's a glycoprotein. And this was only discovered in the late 90s. I mean, it's kind of extraordinary. And they think, scientists are finding that that's a key component of carbon storage. And, of course, anytime you're doing conventional agriculture, you're tilling and you're severing those relationships, which means the plants have a harder time getting what they need and the carbon is not stored as easily, et cetera. Any more questions? Okay, I'm right in front of her there in the green shirt. Hi, Shafali Sharma, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. I was actually, we were quite involved in the discussions on the international level on agriculture and looking at incentives. And it's interesting that you're mentioning both tax and carbon trading because an example is the World Bank project where they decided to spend a million dollars on a carbon methodology in Kenya. And we actually looked at it in great detail and realized that the bulk of the money actually went to the carbon methodology developers. And the organization on the ground, which had been there for 25 years, had had to put all this upfront financing. So carbon trading as a model to do this. We wholeheartedly support the idea that there's potential for changing these practices and even mitigation. But the science also on the feedback loops around rising temperatures and rain, moisture. So from an environmental perspective in terms of looking at numbers and emissions, I'm not sure it's a great way to look at this, but from a transformative, regenerative point of view as you're talking about, it's a great way to look at transforming the agriculture system. And like you said, getting Walmart to do that isn't necessarily going to change that, but trying to create a systemic change does. So I'm wondering what your experience is and we're watching the California market and looking at offsets. And the notion that you can take this kind of scheme and then say, well, then coal-fired power plants can use that as credits doesn't necessarily help us with what is there already, the 400, you know, what we're talking about, the 350 parts per million. So just wanting to get your thoughts on all this. Can I clarify your point, please, before you sit down? Are you saying that when you say that it's the benefits that the research indicates that the benefits are clear in terms of regenerative agriculture? That I follow. But you then say that it's not clear that these practices would actually lead to a drawdown of carbon. And is that, am I understanding you correctly? And second, is that because of your skepticism about the carbon trading mechanism for achieving that or is it skepticism on the science front and the amount of biomass that would have to be turned around? That's great for asking that. Well, two fronts. There's definitely enormous skepticism in terms of the carbon trading because it's part of a financial casino and derivatives and all of that. And so at the end of the day, what are people on the ground getting? But in terms of the science, I think we need to be aware that yes, there is a swell carbon sequestration, whether it functions in a linear fashion and in the way that we think it's going to function because there's so much land use change and there are so many natural occurrences, weather events. There's all kinds of things that affect soil and the ability for the soil to be able to retain that carbon, which is what a carbon trading methodology takes for granted, right? It takes for granted 20-year time this much carbon over 20 years. And so the idea is, yes, it will sequester. Yes, we need to do this. It's the right thing to do. The question is how do we start to frame it in a way where it's not just this equals this and therefore this much money and this much credit so that oil companies and coal companies and everybody else can take credits off of that? It just has one last thing. So if the mechanism of achieving this were not to be carbon trading but rather a carbon price through a tax or what have you, would that allay some of your concerns or would the scientific concerns still be there? I think we need to, we would definitely support the idea that we need different types of incentives and a carbon tax and we need to recognize the value of the sequestration. I think to the extent, I think the scientific integrity is where we start to quantify exact measures and how long it's going to last. So that's an issue that we just need to put on the table. That is on the table. The protocols that are being worked on right now is how do you measure the carbon? How deep do you measure it? How do you know it's going to stay there? And so if a farmer is going to say, I'm going to do carbon farming with my cows or my corn and I'm going to guarantee the carbon is going to stay in the ground, well there needs to be mechanisms to do that. So what's going to have to happen is that farmer's going to have to put an easement on his property or her property saying this property will not be used for 100 years in any other way than this method. So it's complicated. How do you get someone to say something's going to happen for 100 years? That's the number that the protocol folks are working on right now. There's a guy named Steve Appelbaum who I highly just look, AP, FEL, BAUM. His group is right at the forefront of all of these issues. And so it's being worked on. And I would say that the science is coming in that this stuff is staying in the ground. I mean certainly with the biochar example you can go back 5,000 years and look at that. But there's so many other examples of the stuff is staying there. And the one thing that we haven't talked about that if it wasn't in your article is certainly what I'm sure you and Michael are talking about, which is the nutrition of the food. And once we get a lot of carbon in the soil that biome turns on and it's giving us the nutrition we need. Right now a lot of our foods don't have anywhere near the nutrition they had 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago. So the carbon in the soil is a remarkable thing. I've been tasked in tasking my partners. What's the downside? You know we can say what's the downside of putting iron into the ocean. We can look at downsides of putting mirrors up in space. But what's the downside of getting a lot of carbon in the soil? You get great water retention for flooding. You get great porosity for flooding. You get great water retention for drought. You get much more nutrition. So the carbon cycle, the water cycle, the methane cycle, the mineral cycle, all those things get pounded into a good state. And the only thing I can think of, and this came from John Wick at the Marine Carbon Project, is if everyone does this and we get the carbon back to 350 and all of a sudden it's a 280 and all of a sudden it's a 200, we're going to have to burn coal to get more carbon up in the air. That's literally the only downside I can find other than there's certain companies that will have to really retool themselves to stay in business. Any other questions? A friend here in the orange shirt. Hi my name is Stephen Schwartz. I'm a video producer with a company called Local Flavor. And I look at the policy and the debate over carbon tax and agriculture methods and the different economic systems as one discussion. But the real discussion I think that we really ought to take a look at is how do you increase public demand? Because we live in a capitalist system that's not going to go away. And you can see industries turn on a dime as soon as their customers start changing their preferences. So in my opinion, one strong question is how do you get people to favor the kinds of food that translates into the kinds of soil and the kinds of mineralization and carbon sequestration? Just at the very top, for example, you can measure the amount of nutrition in the food that you buy at the grocery store in a refractometer. You bring it home and if you look at a chart you'll see that what you just paid for is organic is actually a four. And poor starts at six. So the organic versus conventional and all of these different discussions translate into a mom who's putting a bowl of carrots on the table for her children. She needs to put a much bigger bowl of carrots for those kids to get the nutrition Yeah, well you mentioned I don't remember this point where the food movement is really really powerful in this. And another aspect of demand is I think getting the word out, getting the stories out about the potential for regenerative agriculture and what that can do in terms of climate. One reason is that I think people are so demoralized about all the news that we get about climate. So I think a little bit of hope will go a long way. I think that's something that people would get really excited about. And are getting excited about. I'm going to take an issue with you a little bit because I think that's exactly what's been happening in the last five years. And that's been a great achievement for the food movement. But even in my grocery store back home there's now an organic section. Because they're smart enough to see what it is still, let's be honest, it's something that the people in this room can afford because it does still cost extra to buy organic. And it's something that most of America still cannot or thinks it cannot afford. And why is that? Because we are still, as a society, subsidizing artificially cheap food that is bad for your health through the agribusiness model. So yes, it's important to try and change demand. But we have to remember are creating the desires in your heads all the time with all of the advertising that is constantly on television radio, media, billboards. Now they're putting them on Japan the other day. They're starting to put ads on young girls' thighs. I mean, where's it going to stop? So it's not enough to just say well, let's change the demand. We've got to get political as well. So we were talking about this before. If you want it, what do you do tomorrow? We're going to change the food movement. And one way into that movement is to change what you're buying. But another way is to get involved with the groups that are out there who are fighting to change the policies that are creating this larger issue. To your point, don't underestimate a vote. Great. That's all we have time for, I think. One more question. I'll take both these questions because you both look really eager. But we're going to do a rapid fire. You have to respond quickly up here. And you have to make sure your question is concise. So we'll take the pink shirt first, and then the lady in the white sweater up here. Second. We could even hear both questions first. Diane signs with climate nexus. Can you stand up please? Diane signs with climate nexus. Toward that end, how do we replicate examples like kale? Somebody's marketing kale is a deep leafy green vegetable that has extraordinary nutritional value. And a lot of people are getting the message, even in low income neighborhoods. So could you talk a little bit about that? And how do we create more demand for high nutrition foods even in food deserts? Okay. And then the white shirt. Hi, I'm Kai Roberts, and I work actually with a lot of the big bad boys on sustainability issues. And I think the level is one of the ways to get what you want to get done. That's in parentheses for the recording. But my question is actually, you know, the time horizons are one of the big blockages. We've got long-term needs. It takes a while to build up the carbon, and yet you've got short-term contracts that need to be fulfilled so that all of us can get to buy our food at the grocery store. And so American Farmland Trust is one example has provided funding to farmers who are adopting so that they can experiment and not be penalized by experimenting because they get reduced yields. So I'm wondering if there are any other good models or policy incentives you might suggest that provide that transition funding to allow for the longer-term practices to be adopted despite the short-term needs of farmers and the companies. Great. Okay. I can speak to that when somebody else gets the kale. Vis-a-vis the devil, let me just recall that imperishable line of people dead that friend of the devil is a friend of mine. Look, the kind of transitional policies you're talking about is exactly what the U.S. Farm Bill should be doing and does do in certain sectors. So it's rather than to get down in the weeds about the specifics, there's a number of things that they're doing, for example, to help young farmers is one of the key issues. How do young farmers get into the field, if you will? One of the big things that are stopping young farmers is the price of land. And why is that the case? Well, because I'm sorry, but the big boys are buying up all the land. And so it's very tough if you grow up in Nebraska or like my family in Minnesota and you want to stay on the land and farm, it's very tough to get your hands in there because of the price of land. That's the kind of thing that the Farm Bill and that U.S. federal policy should be doing. And frankly, I'm more interested in those kinds of things than in helping Monsanto or Cargill transition. They'll be fine and if they're not fine, I'm fine with that. I'm not fine with young people who want to get into farming, who can't get in because of the stranglehold that the big guys have now. Yeah, right now that's happening more on a local regional level. That's true too. Anyone want to tackle the kale question before we wrap up? Good storytelling, good marketing. But let's get that refractometer on there and see if the kale is actually what they say it is. Yeah, that's one thing I learned. Organic doesn't necessarily mean nutritious. There's a fellow named Peter Donovan who I've been talking to. So he was saying he's looking at organic farms from Google Earth that are fallow. There's no cover crop in the winter. And that's as bad as you can do to keep your soil healthy. So therefore there's no nutrition yet they're not using chemical inputs. So there's systems here that work. And with regard to scale that is a question. There's a lot of supply chain issues. If everyone went to grass fed beef there's not enough butchers to do it right now, literally. And so there's a lot of issues like that. Great, well I want to thank Mark and Judith and Peter for being here today. And I'm sure you guys can grab them and thank you. And thank you to Kate for doing the moderating. Thank you so much Kate, Mark, Judy and Peter. It was a great conversation. And now I'd like to call to the stage Matt Iglesias and Barry C. Lynn. Barry is the director of the Markets Enterprise and Resiliency Project here at the New America Foundation and he's the co-author with Lena Kahn of New America on a recent piece about how Big Ag could or might not adapt to climate change. Matt is a Twitter superstar and the business and economics correspondent at Slate and the author of the book The Rent is Too Damn High. Thank you. Are we on? Hopefully. Well, I'm really glad to be here. Glad you all could come. And I guess we are here to talk about your new piece. Obviously as people have been saying about climate change, but it's both a driver of events that happen in the atmosphere and that impact the environment and also one of the economic sectors that's most directly impacted by climate changes and firms participating in the agricultural sector are going to have to adapt or suffer the consequences and the question is about how does the structure of the industry sort of create the opportunities for that to happen. One of the things that Lena and I did was really sort of shine a light on the ability of our society to generate the ideas and test the different techniques that we're going to need to grow food in the future, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years out. And this is a time as we know of pretty rapid climate change and maybe some of these ways of sequestering will turn out we have to adapt our systems. And now we've done actually as human beings we've done a really good job of adapting our systems over the last few centuries of expanding them, of mastering new ways to grow a lot more food. But we have to be able to keep doing that and what we're saying in this piece is that we have a really, really big problem. And the problem is that we've seen massive concentration of power over most of our technological systems. We talked about Monsanto but this is true throughout the political economy in the United States but it's a really big issue. If there's concentrated power over the production of mattresses which there is that's something we can live with at higher prices but when it comes to your food this is something that could really affect the supplies of grains of produce that we have tomorrow. So we've had for 100 years or so now antitrust law on the books in the United States enforced with different levels of vigor at different times but we also increasingly have intellectual property law and patent law where the idea is actually to deliberately promote the creation of monopolies in certain kinds of sectors. I mean that's what a patent is essentially and this you write some about the role this is playing in the farm sector. Patents are built the patent system goes back to the Constitution and the monopoly itself is not bad it's really a matter of what do you monopolize how long do you monopolize it for to what end are you monopolizing it and the idea is that we're going to give people short-term monopolies over ideas so that they can raise capital bring this to market get some reward for sort of bringing forward a better idea of some sort that's a good thing the issue is really how bigger the monopolies how long do they last how are they structured and what we've seen over this is something that people really became aware of more than 150 years ago at the time there was big patent fights in the 19th century Thomas Edison improved before he got into electricity he was a major inventor of telegraph machinery and he got into these big fights between Jay Gould and other people trying to control the telegraph industry in this country and people have known that using that having a patent combined with a large corporation that kind of integration can lead to really bad things and what we've seen in this last generation really since the early 80s is this new era of using patents to both build and then reinforce and buttress and defend giant corporate monopoly and it's the extension of this sort of into the agriculture sector though is relatively new right I mean you didn't traditionally have patents on different kinds of crops or animal breeds and that's actually a super important point which is that for all human agricultural history agricultural systems were wide open and people traded ideas and traded seed and what we've seen and it's been a series of decisions it goes back into the 1930s but there's been a series of decisions that have sort of shifted more and more control over the agricultural technologies to a few corporations and this is a pretty different space that we're in now and this is something there's we have all the models we need actually to figure out how to improve our technologies and open systems this is something we've done in agriculture as I mentioned but we do it there's software systems that are entirely open and so it's really how do we want to organize the institutions that empower our scientists and our engineers to bring us forth better ideas so can we make this more concrete I mean what what are the main levers that you would like to see push on to open this space up a little more I did a piece recently in Washington Monthly it actually just came out last week and it was on very similar issues and one of the things that covered in that article it really ties into this piece in slate is that in the 1930s this was during the New Deal there was a new approach to integrating the use of antitrust law and patent policy and this was something that was put into place by a man named Thurman Arnold who really kind of invented the modern antitrust enforcement system on his own with some friends back in the 30s and this was a system that was in place for essentially 50 years and they used the antitrust to essentially trump patent rights for large corporations you could remain large we're not going to break you up but you know what all those ideas that are inside your corporations you got to share them out between the late 1930s and into the early 1980s the United States government went after hundreds of large companies and said you will share out your technologies for free to any comer I mean that was the source that was actually if you go back that was the origins of Silicon Valley you know the in 1952 AT&T shared out this one little idea they had back in Bell Labs and you know it's hidden away this thing called the electronic transistor today we call that the semiconductor they were forced to share that out for free and they did that on day one with 35 different companies so people can understand it's because companies will often develop ideas they have labs they're doing research and development but oftentimes ideas will sort of come to the fore and then the decision will be made we don't really want to take this further we don't need to bring it to market so yeah especially when the company is very large you may not feel much incentive to bring new ideas to market this is actually one of the things that you know the debates that we have today you know this debate are monopolists more innovative than competitive competitive industries this was people had these same fights back in 100 years ago in the 1920s and one of the things that happened in the middle of the 1930s is the government actually went in to a bunch of the large corporations companies that made glass companies that made electronics and they forced them to show what was inside their vaults their patent vaults and they found this treasure trove of ideas that were not being used so that was the actual revelation that led people to say hey take this stuff out because in non-competitive industries you do not have often an incentive to bring forth a better idea actually your incentive is to keep using yesterday's technology as long as you can do we have any questions in the audience maybe a chance to open things up a little I'm just curious about what changed in the mid 1980s that led to sort of a shift in policy and a lot more protection for the patent rights of these big corporations the big shift that happened in the 1980s was actually in 1981 and just after Ronald Reagan took office there was a radical change in the way that we enforce antitrust our anti-monopoly law and if you go back it's sort of a simple way to understand the United States is going back to the original Tea Party 1773 that was a people standing up against the British East India Company it was a monopoly because they wanted free commerce and we did a pretty good job of saying well anti-monopoly the point of anti-monopoly is to create competition it's to distribute power and in 1981 they flipped this idea 180 degrees and they said the purpose of anti-monopoly law of antitrust should be to promote efficiency not the distribution of power so this is what we did for 200 years when we started to say we're going to concentrate power in the name of efficiency and that was basically the hard right working with the hard left kind of came together and pushed this radical change through but that basic idea remains in place today and it's called consumer welfare whenever you hear people talking about the consumer welfare test and antitrust it's just another way of saying we're going to promote efficiency and efficiency is pretty much over time a straight line path to monopoly this was actually, I mean he's gone on to be better known by the public for other things but Robert Bork's initial pioneering work was in this field it's how he sort of came to be known you had a question? Mark Hertzgaard Barry could you tell us how it's such a fascinating history you just mentioned about how they went in and shook this stuff out so as we think today about how to try to make that happen what were the political forces or the personalities or whatever that were able to do that and go into not just AT&T but corporations in general and force them to be more competitive it was a period, this really the policy was put into place in the mid to late 30s and it was this period in which the worst part of the depression was over but there was still this kind of built in unemployment and people were trying to figure out how do we get the economy really moving again and in the early part actually Franklin Roosevelt beginning in his second term said we're just going to take on the monopolies because we know they're choking the economy and that was at the point at which working with Congress and they said let's study the issue first let's go in and look and see what's inside of these vaults let's see how these companies have created their power so the point though there was this period kind of like today where you have a stagnant economy you have slow growth or no growth and people said hey we're going to change this and we're going to at that point there were a lot of people who said we can never take on the big companies you had a president who was willing to take on power you had people in Congress who were willing to stand up to power people talk about the effects of money there was money in politics back then it was worse than today in a lot of ways but it really is a matter of character do you have the character to take on power? Robin Harding has a great piece in the Financial Times today about the sort of delinking of corporate profits and corporate investment levels really sort of very relevant to that sort of question companies have money the resources to sort of invest but they're lacking perhaps the incentives to actually really kind of do so was the use of the vault two-way street could corporations go into some new company who only had one thing in their vault and take that and what prevented that? no and actually the need about using antitrust is that antitrust you're really only going to be using it against the largest companies so it left the patent system still in effect for the little guy the small company that comes up with a better idea and what you saw is suddenly it became safe to be small one of the things that we've seen in this country last 10 years 15 years whenever a new idea comes up some giant governing ruler of a system I mean it could be Oracle, it could be Google they'll come along and they'll buy it up now will they use that technology? they may but there's a good chance that they won't and for most of the 20th century one of the reasons that we had such a fantastic vibrant venture capital system in this country is because the big guys were really restricted in their ability to buy the little guys and then the little guys could kind of grow up they can go out and get capital they can prove their idea they can keep proving it stage after stage after stage so it was a system that worked really remarkably well I've been signaled that we are out of time so thank you everyone we want Monopolos