With the Senate considering energy legislation this week, Congress must seize this chance to pass a strong national Renewable Energy Standard (RES). An RES is a regulation that requires the increased production of energy from renewable energy sources, such as wind, solar, biomass, and geothermal.
A robust RES will bolster the farm economy, help curb climate change and drive America towards energy independence.
Because of this, AFT has joined the National Farmers Union, the National Association of Wheat Growers, and the International Biochar Initiative in calling on Senators Reid (D-NV), McConnell (R-KY), Bingaman (D-NM), and Murkowski (R-AK) to support a 25% by 2025 RES.
Based on research by the American Council on Renewable Energy, the 25% by 2025 RES measure could lead to more than $15 billion in income to farmers, ranchers, and rural communities, create more than 30,000 rural jobs and reduce hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide emissions.
Furthermore, analysis conducted by Informa Economics, Inc., for AFT and the National Association of Wheat Growers on the benefits of clean energy legislation, found that 94 percent of the demand increase in renewable electricity under a similar House RES proposal is expected to come from biomass (agricultural residues, energy crops, forest residues, and urban waste/mill residues).
These economic benefits to America’s farms and ranches are in addition to the energy security benefits our nation will receive from expanding the diversification of our energy supply as well as lowering our nation’s greenhouse gas emissions. As noted, the job creation and rural development effects of such a policy are also considerable. American agriculture stands ready to help meet the country’s clean energy needs and the RES is the mechanism that will turn our readiness to action.
With more than a third of all Senators having either voted for, or signed a letter of support for an RES, we encourage the Senate to build on their previous efforts in the Senate Energy Committee’s American Clean Energy Leadership Act, and include a 25% by 2025 RES in the energy bill under consideration now.
As we stated in our letter to the aforementioned senators,
“Inclusion of these provisions will help America’s drive toward energy independence, re-invigorate rural communities through job growth and income generation for agriculture, and significantly improve the environment and the air we breathe.”
Let’s make it happen.
About the Author: Jon Scholl is President of American Farmland Trust. Prior to AFT, he served as Counselor to the Administrator for Agriculture Policy at the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Jon and his family operate a corn and soybean farm in McLean County, Illinois.
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While I am for renewable energy, and getting our country off of foreign fuels, having our landscape covered with windmill’s, and solar panels, would be awful. It would ruin, rural America. Our country has enough fossil fuels, for the next several centuries, if not longer. We should not abandon fossil fuels, but develop ways to make them cleaner burning, where they produce less carbon emissions into the environment.
On the grounds that we do.
Although renewable energy is beneficial to some it is destroying farms and ranches all over Texas! Currently we are losing ranchland and farmland to 345kv transmission lines and I anticipate that there will be many more to come with the construction of additional wind farms in our county and with the future development of the Tres Amigas Super Substation in Clovis, NM (National Geographic) The easements are a lifetime invasion of our property and we are being offered little compensation for the land they may condemn if we do not succumb to their final offer!! Ablsolutely the cities will benefit. Many elderly landowners are unable to intervene in the process and others cannot afford the time or expense!! Who is willing to step up and assist the farmers in Texas who are being sacrificed for the sake of Renewable Energy???