By Sonali Kolhatkar for YES! Media.
Broadcast version by Roz Brown for New Mexico News Connection reporting for the YES! Media-Public News Service Collaboration

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- The Conference of the Profiteers" is how some Black, Brown, and Indigenous environmental justice activists have described the 26th Conference of the Parties, or COP26, the United Nations Climate Change Conference. The conference, which convened in Glasgow, Scotland, earlier this month, has an ambitious-sounding goal of achieving "net-zero" emissions by 2030.

In a Nov. 1 speech in Glasgow, President Joe Biden explicitly cited net-zero emissions as a centerpiece of his approach to climate change, saying, "Our administration has been hard at work unlocking clean energy breakthroughs to drive down the cost of technologies that will require us ... to achieve net-zero emissions, and working with the private sector on the next generation of technologies that will power a clean economy of the future."

But several Black, Brown, and Indigenous activists who attended COP26 say the net-zero framework-and other "market-based solutions" that rely on technological fixes-is no panacea for the disproportionate harm being done to mostly Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities, known as front-line communities.

"What's being negotiated at COP26 is the making of another carbon market," says Ananda Lee Tan, strategy advisor to the Just Transition Alliance in San Diego, California.

"Grassroots movements and movements representing the voices of front-line communities have to take an oppositional stance to COP26 and its frameworks of net-zero emissions, its framework of carbon capture and storage, carbon trading and offsets, and the myriad subsidies they're hoping to provide dirty energy," Tan said frankly in a Zoom call from Glasgow.

Jonathan Alingu, co-director of Central Florida Jobs with Justice, who also attended COP26, agrees.

"Untested technologies brought up at COP26, they're all going to be placed in these Black, Brown, [and] Indigenous communities," says Alingu. "The picture looks really grand when you see it on TV, but the results of that will be at the expense of Black people's health, Brown people's health, Indigenous people's health."

Tan, Alingu, and their colleagues see racial justice as a central tenet of climate justice and offer solutions that are quite different from net-zero emissions, carbon capture, and other similar ideas championed by political and corporate elites at COP26. Those solutions include phasing out fossil fuels and following the lead of front-line communities.

Why Technological Fixes to Climate Change Could Harm People of Color

The idea behind net-zero is that if enough greenhouse-gas emissions are removed from the environment to balance out those emissions being generated to power the global economy, the net effect on the atmosphere will be effectively neutral.

But Alejandría Lyons, environmental justice organizer with the SouthWest Organizing Project, based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, says, "It's not a real solution, it's a false solution, and it's going to continue to affect our communities because we're the ones that these offsets are always put towards."

José Bravo, executive director of the Just Transition Alliance, concurs, and explains that "for communities of color in the United States and in the environmental justice movement, what 'net-zero' means is that in aggregate pollution, carbon emissions for much of the population will go down." But for communities at the "fenceline" of these industries, "carbon emissions will go up."

Such concerns are based on decades of disproportionately deadly impacts of extractive and polluting industries placed in low-income communities of color. A recent investigation on pollution in the U.S. by ProPublica concluded that areas "where the majority of residents are people of color experience about 40% more cancer-causing industrial air pollution on average than tracts where the residents are mostly white." Additionally, "In predominantly Black census tracts, the estimated cancer risk from toxic air pollution is more than double that of majority-white tracts."

If and when innovations such as carbon-capture plants become viable, there is a consensus among activists of color at COP26 that their communities will bear the disproportionate brunt of the technology's potential negative impact, as stated above by Alingu, who marched in the streets of Glasgow alongside Lyons and Bravo.

"In our communities, there is much of the production of carbon emissions and little of the reductions, because companies can buy pollution credits," says Bravo.

Conference of the Profiteers?

While offsetting greenhouse gases so the net result is zero emissions sounds like an elegant theoretical solution to climate change, the technology to achieve it-such as carbon capture-is, according to the BBC, "still emerging, very expensive and as yet unproven." Climate scientists are increasingly skeptical of the viability of such an approach.

But the world's largest private asset management firm, BlackRock, which climate activists have dubbed "the world's top investor in climate destruction," has backed the idea of net-zero emissions to address climate change, as have about 20% of the top multinational firms in the world. One reason may be that there are trillions of dollars in technology financing up for grabs.

Tan says a net-zero approach privileges "the industries that are most responsible for causing this crisis, the most carbon-intensive, the most polluting industries," and provides them "loopholes and ways in which they can continue to profiteer off causing harm."

A recent analysis of COP26 attendees by numerous watchdog groups concluded, "Fossil fuel lobbyists as a bloc outnumber the biggest country delegation." Echoing what has become a common refrain among activists, Bravo said the Conference of the Parties really represents a "Conference of the Profiteers."

What Would Real Climate Solutions Centered on Racial Justice Look Like?

Alingu, Bravo, Lyons, and Tan traveled to Glasgow for COP26 as part of It Takes Roots, a delegation of climate justice activists of color from the U.S. and Canada. Lyons says it is important for activists like her to be present at global climate meetings because historically the voices of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people have been "completely left out."

"And our communities are always the last at the table," Lyon says.

According to Tan, the COP26 negotiations are taking place within a "colonial framework," meaning wealthy nations are exercising their privilege to protect their own interests.

In response, Indigenous activists led a series of actions over a period of five days in late October in Washington, D.C., in preparation for the Glasgow convening. They dubbed the protests "People vs. Fossil Fuels" and demanded President Biden "Build Back Fossil Free," an obvious reference to the president's landmark Build Back Better legislation.

Then, in Glasgow on Nov. 6, many of those same activists marched alongside an estimated 100,000 people denouncing net-zero as a "smoke screen," and demanding that fossil fuels remain in the ground. Over the course of the global meeting, activists, including delegates from It Takes Roots, continued carrying out smaller-scale actions to bring attention to the false solutions of net-zero.

"We seek real solutions, not net-zero nonsense," says Tan.

The baseline demand many climate justice activists are making is the elimination of fossil fuels altogether, which they say would directly address the source of the problem. The fact that the phasing out of a fossil fuel such as coal was explicitly mentioned in a draft agreement circulating at COP26 for the first time was, according to the Washington Post, "a welcome breakthrough for most activists," and is likely the result of relentless pressure from grassroots groups that have demanded such language be inserted into COP agreements for years.

They posit that if industries continue to extract and burn fossil fuels, humanity will not survive, and no amount of technological fixes will suffice.

But even phasing out fossil fuels by keeping them in the ground is insufficient.

In order to not repeat the environmental racial injustices of the past, "There needs to be actual power for these communities to come to the table," says Lyons, "[because] historically folks that come from traditional and Indigenous communities, they have solutions and have learned to work with the land."

Tan agrees, saying that what is needed is a "just transition" away from fossil fuels. That transition must "center the voices of those most impacted," he adds. "[And it must include] deepening democracy and ... turning to the voices and the knowledge who have the longest living relationships with the land."

Sonali Kolhatkar wrote this article for YES! Magazine.

New Mexico farmers finding it more difficult to grow historic crops are taking up conservation techniques to meet the challenge.

Drought, water scarcity, and extreme weather events combine to require growers to adopt new methods and modern tools.

John Idowu, extension agronomist specialist at New Mexico State University, shows farmers how to improve soil health and help control wind erosion. For long term success, he said they need to focus on sustainable, regenerative practices.

"How can I optimize my system and make it more resilient to climate change, to weather changes?" Idowu explained. "Once we have all those things worked out, farmers will tend to stay in business for longer."

Earlier this year, a NOAA satellite captured an image of winds lifting vast amounts of dust and dirt from New Mexico's dry farmlands. Some forecasters compared it to images last seen in the 1930s Dust Bowl.

Plowing agricultural fields annually was a common practice until the Dust Bowl period but in recent decades no-till or low-till farming operations have gained traction.

Bonnie Hopkins Byers, program director for the San Juan County Extension Service, encouraged New Mexico farmers to get a soil analysis and consider adopting the less aggressive approach. She said it could mean they do not need to till every year.

"One of the biggest problems is that people do something because that's the way they've always done it, or because it's the way their parents have done it, or their grandparents," Hopkins Byers acknowledged. "My philosophy has always been if you're going to till something over, till something in."

Intense dust storms known as "haboobs" were originally thought to be confined to Africa's Sudan but are becoming more common in other arid regions such as the Southwest.

Idowu stressed it makes the adoption of regenerative practices more urgent, as topsoil on New Mexico farmland disappears due to drought, land use changes and wind, which he noted has been particularly strong this year.

"The wind has been a major force, especially in the spring, so many days where you couldn't do anything outside because of the wind," Idowu observed. "You have a lot of dust and that means a lot of erosion and that is exactly what you don't like when it comes to crop production."

The New Mexico Healthy Soil Working Group formed to help farmers improve their land and livelihoods.


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By Carolyn Beans for Lancaster Farming.
Broadcast version by Mark Richardson for Keystone State News Connection reporting for the Lancaster Farming-MIT Climate Change Engagement Program-Public News Service Collaboration

At Mountain View Holsteins in Bethel, Pennsylvania, owner Jeremy Martin is always working to make his dairy more efficient.

Currently, he has his sights set on a manure solid-liquid separator. He'd like to use the solid portion of his manure as bedding for his 140 cows and the liquid as fertilizer.

But the project is pricey - he expects the equipment alone will run around $100,000. So Martin hopes to defray the cost through grant funding for dairy projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Removing much of the solids from manure reduces the feed for the methane-producing microbes that thrive in the anaerobic conditions of liquid manure.

The approach is just one of many dairy practices now considered "climate-smart" because they could cut production of climate-warming gases.

For Martin, a manure separator wouldn't be possible without a grant.

"Once it's in place and going, I think some of these practices will pay for themselves, but the upfront cost is more than I can justify," he says. "If there's money out there to pay that upfront cost to get started, it makes sense to me to do it."

Across Pennsylvania, dairy farmers are learning more about climate-smart practices and funding opportunities, and weighing whether these changes are really sustainable for their businesses as well as the environment.

The Latest Buzzword

USDA has defined climate-smart agriculture as an approach that reduces or removes greenhouse gas emissions, builds resilience to the changing climate, and sustainably increases incomes and agricultural productivity.

"Before climate-smart was a thing, we called it conservation. We called it stewardship," says Jackie Klippenstein, a senior vice president at Dairy Farmers of America.

Indeed, long before the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations coined the term "climate-smart agriculture" in 2010, Pennsylvania dairy farmers had adopted many of the practices that now fall under the label.

For dairy, climate-smart practices largely include strategies that reduce greenhouse gases emitted from cows, manure or fields. Tried and true conservation practices like cover cropping and reduced tillage count.

So do newer practices like using the feed additive Bovaer to reduce methane production in a cow's rumen, or precision nitrogen management to reduce nitrous oxide emissions from fields.

Paying for Climate-Smart

"Margins are very tight on the dairy farm," says Jayne Sebright, the executive director of the Center for Dairy Excellence, a public-private partnership to strengthen Pennsylvania's dairy industry. "Some of these (climate-smart practices) are good for the climate, but they don't make good economic sense until they're subsidized."

In 2022, the center joined a Penn State-run program called "Climate-smart Agriculture that is profitable, Regenerative, Actionable and Trustworthy" to provide dairy farmers with funds for switching to climate-smart practices.

CARAT was launched with a $25 million USDA Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities grant, but the future of the Pennsylvania project is in doubt. In April, USDA canceled the partnership program, suggesting that recipients reapply to a new USDA initiative called Advancing Markets for Producers.

Over 60 dairy farmers across Pennsylvania, including Martin, had already applied and been accepted into the first phase of CARAT. This initial phase was intended to help farmers identify the best climate-smart practices for their operations. In the second phase, farmers would have applied for funding to implement those practices. One farmer was already paid for his project before the USDA canceled the partnership program.

"There are fewer funding sources for climate-smart projects than in the last administration. However, private organizations and other entities are funding climate-smart projects," Sebright says. "Depending on what the practice is, (climate-smart) could also be conservation projects. It could be water quality projects."

Sebright suggests that dairy farmers also look for support through state-level funding, such as Pennsylvania's Resource Enhancement and Protection program, which offers tax credits for implementing practices that benefit farms and protect water quality.

Pennsylvania dairy farmers can also contact their county conservation districts to ask about funding opportunities for climate-smart projects, says Amy Welker, a project manager and grant writer for Pennsylvania-based Jones Harvesting, which operates Maystone Dairy in Newville and Molly Pitcher Milk in Shippensburg.

In the next year, Jones Harvesting plans to install a methane digester and solid-liquid separator at a site near Maystone Dairy. The digester is funded with an Agricultural Innovation Grant from the state and an Environmental Quality Incentives Program grant from USDA, along with private funds.

There's money out there for farmers who implement climate-smart practices, says Welker. But "you can't just look at one source."

Long-Term Payoffs

Ultimately, for climate-smart projects to make economic sense, they must continue paying for themselves long after the initial investment. One major goal of the USDA's Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program was to develop markets where farmers adopting these practices could earn a premium.

Some dairy farmers might see that return in the carbon market. National checkoff organization Dairy Management Inc. and its partners have pledged to shrink the industry's net greenhouse gas production to zero by 2050. There are growing opportunities for companies working toward that goal in the dairy supply chain to pay farmers for their contributions.

Early last year, Texas dairy farmer Jasper DeVos became the first to earn credits through the livestock carbon insetting marketplace. DeVos earned carbon credits by reducing methane emissions with a feed protocol that included the feed additive Rumensin. Dairy Farmers of America then purchased those credits through Athian, a carbon marketplace for the livestock industry.

Increased Efficiency

Even without direct monetary payoff, many farmers who adopt climate-smart practices reap rewards in improved efficiency and productivity.

"When you look at climate-smart, you also have to look at what's farm smart," Sebright says. She suggests that farmers choose practices that benefit their farms, not just the climate.

A farmer might decide to put a cover and flare system on a manure pit, not only because it reduces methane emissions but also because it keeps rainwater out of the pit and reduces the number of times each year the pit must be emptied.

Andy Bollinger of Meadow Spring Farm in Lancaster County has been running a manure separator since 2009. The liquid fertilizes his fields, and a portion of the solids becomes bedding for his cows.

He estimates the system saves him at least $20,000 a year in bedding costs.

"We put a fresh coating of it onto the stalls that our cows lay in every day and scrape the old stuff out," says Bollinger, who is also the vice president of the Professional Dairy Managers of Pennsylvania. "It seems to work quite well, and it saves us from buying other bedding products."

No-till farming is also a cost saver because it reduces field passes with equipment, says James Thiele of Thiele Dairy Farm in Cabot, which has been 100% no-till for at least six years. The practice saves him money on fuel and herbicides.

"You're saving your environment, and you're also saving green," he says.

But Thiele questions whether some other climate-smart practices like methane digesters would be practical for his farm, which has 75 to 80 cows.

"I don't know if it'd be worth it for somebody as small as I am," he says.

"I think over the next few years, we'll rapidly see (climate-smart) tools become more available, and we'll see more organizations like DFA talking to our small to mid-sized farmers to make sure they understand they've got a place in this, they can benefit from it, and the practices and tools are affordable to them as well," Klippenstein says.

Weighing Climate-Smart

Many dairy farmers wonder whether some of the practices championed as climate-smart will really support their businesses.

Donny Bartch of Merrimart Farms in Loysville has adopted environmental practices from cover cropping to a manure management plan.

"I want to protect the environment. I want to keep my nutrients here on the farm and be sustainable for another five generations," Bartch says. "But we have to make sure that we're making the right decisions to keep the business going. And to do some of these (climate-smart) practices, the only way they pencil out is to have those subsidies."

There is also frustration with a system that rewards climate-smart improvements made today without acknowledging the contributions of farmers who were climate-smart before anyone put a name on it.

"You come around and want to start rewarding people for doing these things. You really need to start with the ones that have been doing it for a long time, but that's really not what happens," says Jim Harbach of Schrack Farms in Loganton, whose farm has been no-till for 50 years.

Climate-smart grant money and carbon credits are typically awarded for the implementation of new practices.

"It's just the unfortunate way that all of the policies and regulations were written," Sebright says. "What I would say is, if you do a climate-smart plan, maybe there are practices or things you can do to enhance or support or take what you're doing a step further."

Scientific Measurements on Real Farms

Some dairy farmers also want to know more about how climate-smart practices will affect their farms before jumping in.

Steve Paxton remembers participating in a government program to improve timber over 50 years ago on his family dairy, Irishtown Acres in Grove City. His family members were paid to climb up into their white pines and saw off many of the bottom branches.

The goal was to create a cleaner log. Instead, more sunlight shown through, which caused grape vines to climb up and topple the trees.

"The bottom line is, there was research done, it looked good, but it hadn't had enough time to follow through and see just really what the end results would be," Paxton says.

When Paxton sees estimates of how some practices might reduce greenhouse gases emitted from cows, he wonders how much of that research has been tested on actual dairies.

"I think some of it now is just kind of a textbook estimate of what's happening," he says.

More meaningful data is needed to show how climate-smart practices reduce greenhouse gases on individual dairies, Sebright says.

As part of the CARAT program, Penn State researchers planned to place greenhouse gas sensors on a dozen dairies and test how much greenhouse gas production falls as farmers experiment with different practices. The researchers intended to then use that data to build models that predict how those practices may affect emissions on other farms. They will still measure emissions this spring on one farm that is experimenting with a new approach for spreading manure in fields of feed crops.

"The real goal of (CARAT) is to have research that says, if you put a cover and flare (manure storage system) on a 500-cow dairy, this is how greenhouse gas emissions will change," Sebright says. "Or if you use Bovaer on a 90-cow herd, here's how this will affect greenhouse gas emissions."

Martin of Mountain View Holsteins has his own personal beliefs about where a dairy farmer's responsibilities to the planet begin and end. But from a business perspective, he feels compelled to adopt climate-smart practices because he expects the industry will eventually require them.

"Climate concerns are coming whether I'd like it or not," he says. "So my thought is, I might as well get started on it while there's funding to do it."


Carolyn Beans wrote this article for Lancaster Farming.


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Oregon's new state budget cuts funding for programs intended to protect residents from extreme weather and make renewable energy more accessible.

Climate justice advocates said it is a major setback after years of progressive climate policies.

Ben Brint, senior climate program director for the Oregon Environmental Council, is disappointed to lose funding for the Community Renewable Energy Grant Program, which supports a variety of projects tailored to communities, including microgrids and solar storage.

"We felt legislators didn't fund climate resilience programs while fires are raging, people's houses are burning down and the state has already experienced record heat waves in June," Brint pointed out. "Legislators don't see we are in an actual climate emergency and chose inaction."

Brint said the grant program aimed to help low-income, rural and communities of color, those most impacted by climate disasters. Lawmakers attributed the cuts to budget shortfalls and uncertainty over federal funding.

Joel Iboa, executive director of the Oregon Just Transition Alliance, said the Community Resilience Hub program, which creates networks as well as physical places to protect people from extreme cold, heat and smoke also lost funding this session. He argued the hubs are effective because communities design them to meet their unique needs.

"Whether it be a place to plug in your phone or a place to go get diapers or get an air conditioner or whatever your community may need," Iboa outlined. "Depending on what's going on."

A heat pump program for rental housing, aimed at making energy-efficient heating and cooling more affordable, was also cut this session.

Brint added he realizes legislators have to make tough decisions about how to fund health care and housing but emphasized climate change is connected to those issues.

"When we're talking about heat pumps or the C-REP program, we're talking about people's health and livelihoods and saving lives in the face of climate fueled disaster," Brint stressed.

Brint added since climate change is not going away, the movement to push for climate resilience will not either.


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