From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Lee Harding

Fall harvest is in the storehouse. Now, let’s put away all proposals to cap fertilizer inputs to save the earth. Canadian farmers are ensuring food security, not fueling the droughts, fires, or storms that critics unfairly attribute to them.

The Saskatoon-based Global Institute for Food Security (GIFS) did as fulsome an analysis as possible on carbon emissions in Saskatchewan, Western Canada, Canada, and international peers. Transportation, seed, fertilizer and manure, crop inputs, field activities, energy emissions, and post-harvest work were all in view.

The studies, published last year, had very reassuring results. Canadian crop production was less carbon intensive than other places, and Western Canada was a little better yet. This proved true crop by crop.

Carbon emissions per tonne of canola production were more than twice as high in France and Germany as in Canada. Australia was slightly less carbon intensive than Canada, but still trailed Western Canada.

For non-durum wheat, Canada blew Australia, France, Germany, and the U.S. away with roughly half the carbon intensity of those countries. For durum wheat, the U.S. had twice the carbon intensity of Canada, and Italy almost five times as much.

Canada was remarkably better with lentil production. Producers in Australia had 5.5 times the carbon emissions per tonne produced as Canada, while the U.S. had 8 times as much. In some parts of Canada, lentil production was a net carbon sink.

Canadian field peas have one-tenth the carbon emissions per tonne of production as is found in Germany, and one-sixth that of France or the United States.

According to GIFS, Canada succeeds by “regenerative agriculture, including minimal soil disturbance, robust crop rotation, covering the land, integrating livestock and the effective management of crop inputs.”

The implementation of zero-till farming is especially key. If the land isn’t worked up, most nutrients and gases stay in the soil–greenhouse gases included.

Western Canada has been especially keen to adopt the zero-till approach, in contrast to the United States, where only 30 percent of cropland is zero-till.

The adoption of optimal methods has already lowered Canadian carbon emissions substantially. Despite all of this, some net zero schemers aim to cut carbon emissions by fertilizer by 30 percent, just as it does in other sectors.

This target is undeserved for Canadian agriculture because the industry has already made drastic, near-maximum progress. Nitrates help crops grow, so the farmer is already vitally motivated to keep nitrates in the soil and out of the skies–alleged global warming or not. Fewer nutrients mean fewer yields and lower proteins.

The farmer’s personal and economic interests already motivate the best fertilizer use that is practically possible. Universal adoption of optimal techniques could lower emissions a bit more, but Canada is so far ahead in this game that a hard cap on fertilizer emissions could only be detrimental.

In 2021, Fertilizer Canada commissioned a study by MNP to estimate the costs of a 20 percent drop in fertilizer use to achieve a 30 percent reduction in emissions. The study suggested that by 2030, bushels of production per acre would drop significantly for canola (23.6), corn (67.9), and spring wheat (36.1). By 2030, the annual value of lost production for those crops alone would reach $10.4 billion.

If every animal and human in Canada died, leaving the country an unused wasteland, the drop in world greenhouse gas emissions would be only 1.4 percent. Any talk of reducing capping fertilizer inputs for the greater good is nonsense.

Lee Harding is a Research Fellow for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Nick Pope

The Texas billionaire owner of a major pipeline company is on the precipice of potentially bankrupting Greenpeace USA, The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday.

Kelcy Warren’s company, Energy Transfer, is seeking legal recourse against Greenpeace’s American arm in court, alleging that several Greenpeace USA entities paid for attacks against the company’s Dakota Access Pipeline and proliferated misinformation about the firm and its project in 2016, according to the WSJ. At the time, the project was a flashpoint in the environmental movement’s crusade against major fossil fuel infrastructure developments, and it was ultimately completed in 2017.

“Everybody is afraid of these environmental groups and the fear that it may look wrong if you fight back with these people,” Warren said in a televised interview in 2017, according to the WSJ. “But what they did to us is wrong, and they’re gonna pay for it.”

Eco-activists flocked to the construction site of the pipeline in North Dakota in 2016 to try to stop the $3.8 billion project from being built, and clashes between the protesters and law enforcement occasionally turned violent, according to the WSJ. The lawsuit, which seeks $300 million in damages, would probably crush Greenpeace USA, though it does not pose such a threat to Greenpeace’s international operations because the organization’s main organizing body based in the Netherlands does not own assets in the U.S.

The company tried to sue in federal court first, and refiled the suit in a state court after a federal judge threw out the original litigation, according to the WSJ. Energy Transfer is pursuing the lawsuit under a law that was originally created to go after the mafia.

As Warren — who once said that climate activists should be “removed from the gene pool” — sees it, Greenpeace USA was principally responsible for delaying the project’s construction and imposing millions of dollars of added costs on Energy Transfer, according to the WSJ. Greenpeace, meanwhile, maintains that the lawsuit could stifle free speech and that it only ever played a supporting role in the protests against the pipeline.

Moreover, Greenpeace USA is also preparing for a range of possible outcomes, including bankruptcy, while some of its leaders and members of the board have fought over what kind of settlement could be palatable, according to the WSJ.

“You’re not going to wear Kelcy Warren out, I can promise you that,” Matthew Ramsey, a director on Energy Transfer’s board, told the WSJ. “He will fight to the bitter end.”

Greenpeace USA did not respond immediately to a request for comment.