Peterson, at the time, seemed pleased. “We have reached an agreement that works for agriculture and contributes to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States,” he said in a statement announcing the deal. Just days later, Peterson voted in favor of the bill. But that was then, and this is now.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported over the weekend that Peterson would no longer vote for the climate change bill — even if the concessions remain.

The Agriculture Committee chairman said he was “stuck voting” for the bill (which awaits Senate action) in June because House Speaker Nancy Pelosi granted his requests for broad agriculture concessions, but he won’t support it again if it remains unchanged….

“First of all, this isn’t going anyplace in the Senate,” Peterson said. “But if it did and we ended up with a bill that was similar to what came out of the House and that was going to become law, I would vote no.”

In an election year, with unemployment still hovering in double digits, it’ll be hard enough for Democratic leaders to pass legislation addressing global warming. Peterson’s defection — should it be indicative of a trend among moderate Democrats — only adds to the party’s headaches.

An ethanol production plant in South Dakota (iStockphoto)

Before the American Clean Energy and Security Act could reach the House floor for a vote on June 26, Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) took to the podium and launched an improvised filibuster in protest of last-minute additions to the bill by the Democratic leadership. For over an hour, he read passages from the more than 300 pages of amendments, lambasting provision after provision on behalf of his frustrated Republican colleagues who balk at the expansion of energy regulation.

Now, as the Senate takes up debate on the legislation, the objections to some of these late changes are coming from a very different camp: environmental advocacy groups.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

One of the most important amendments to the cap-and-trade bill, which seeks to lower the country’s greenhouse gas emissions and promote alternative energy sources, represents a compromise between the bill’s architects and House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson (D-Minn.), who threatened to block passage if concessions were not made to agricultural interests. The amendment significantly reduces the criteria that biofuels, such as ethanol and wood pellets, would have to meet in order to be considered “renewable” — a victory for farmers who grow these materials.

But a study by the National Resources Defense Council shows that these changes could reduce the emissions-cutting effects of the legislation by as much as a third, thereby undermining the bill’s central aim.

“The ACES bill is supposed to require a 17 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2020,” David Hawkins, director of climate programs at the NRDC, stated in his written testimony to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on Tuesday. “Because of the biomass loophole in the House-passed bill, the real reduction achieved could be far less — as little as 11 percent.”

In an ideal world, biofuels would produce no net emissions, since when plants grow, they take carbon out of the environment, and when they are burned, they release that carbon back into the air. However, there can be indirect contributions to greenhouse gas emissions — for example, if the land on which crops for biofuels are planted would otherwise have been used for carbon-reducing trees, or for food that is then instead planted on a freshly cleared rainforest in South America.

The version of the bill passed by the Energy and Commerce Committee tried to enforce biofuel carbon-neutrality by factoring in these indirect effects on emissions and restricting the conditions under which biofuels would be considered renewable. The Peterson amendment stripped the bill of several of these provisions and prevented the Environmental Protection Agency from accounting for indirect land use issues outside the United States for the next five years. According to Peterson and his backers, indirect land use is difficult to calculate, and the EPA will need some time to properly assess its impact.

The legislation establishes a national cap on greenhouse gas emissions and requires polluters to purchase allowances for each ton of carbon dioxide they emit. However, Hawkins charges that under the House bill, power plants could reduce their need to buy carbon allowances without actually cutting back on emissions.

“If a coal power plant replaces half of its coal with biomass, it has to hold carbon allowances for only half of its pollution,” he said in his statement to the Senate. “This makes sense only on the assumption that 100 percent of the carbon dioxide released when the biomass is burned was taken up from the atmosphere during its production.”

Nathanael Greene, director of renewable energy policy at the NRDC, concurred with his colleague. “In a worst-case scenario,” Greene said, “you’re going out to an old-growth forest that’s sequestered carbon over hundreds of years,” he said. “You take that, you chop that down, you burn that, and from the atmosphere perspective, it’s exactly the same as burning coal. In that case, it really doesn’t matter that you’re displacing coal. You’re adding just as much carbon to the landscape.”

The NRDC study on the effects of the lower biofuel restrictions was conducted about a month ago, but the figures were not released until Hawkins’ testimony on Tuesday before the Environment and Public Works Committee, according to Greene, who helped produce the study. Hawkins could not be reached for comment.

The 11-percent effective emissions reduction figure invoked by Hawkins represents the low end of the potential range calculated by NRDC; more likely, the number would be around 14 percent. Both figures are below the 17-percent target recommended by President Obama and prescribed by the legislation, which itself is too low for many scientists and environmental advocates.

Rolf Skar, a senior forest campaigner at Greenpeace, worries that additional support for biofuels could reduce the incentives for cleaner energy sources, such as wind and solar. “Putting them in the mix here just means that they’re going to substitute for windmills and other true sources of renewable energy,” he said, adding that the Peterson amendment “was clearly based on politics, and not science.”

On the other side of the debate, the farm lobby has cheered Peterson’s efforts. Farmers could derive substantial income from provisions that subsidize the production of biofuels.

“As a general proposition, we support what Mr. Peterson got in the House bill,” said Paul Schlegel, director of public policy at the American Farm Bureau. But he added that the Bureau opposes cap-and-trade legislation overall due to its costs for farmers and consumers of energy.

In a statement following the passage of the House bill, Peterson said, “This bill promotes homegrown, clean burning renewable fuels, which is one of the best things we can do for the economy and the environment.” Peterson’s office did not respond to a request for further comment.

Many environmentalists still hold out hope that the biofuels provision will be changed in the Senate.

Josh Dorner of the Sierra Club is optimistic that given the relatively liberal composition of the Senate Energy and Public Works Committee’s Democratic membership, the committee might be able to strengthen the biofuels language in ways the House could not. “If you look at the EPW Committee compared to the Energy and Commerce Committee in the House, it’s a much more hospitable environment,” he said.

Still, there is already evidence that the fight to maintain the farm-friendly biofuel provisions could be bipartisan. On Wednesday, Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) stated his intent to keep all of Peterson’s provisions in the Senate version of the bill, and to add “more allocations and allowances” for agriculture.

“Farm interests probably have a stronger hand in the Senate,” Dorner conceded, “given that people in nearly every state have some sort of agricultural interest.”

Observers of this debate might recall that Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.), both ardent environmentalists, have already diluted their bill considerably in order to win the support of House Democrats from states with powerful gas, coal and auto industries. In the latest episode, it was the Democrats representing the farm states who threw the fuss, threatening to kill the bill if two key provisions weren’t changed.

The first involved a program allowing polluting farmers and agricultural companies to offset their emissions by planting trees or investing in green technologies. The Waxman-Markey bill proposed that the Environmental Protection Agency would oversee the program, arguing that the agency would be the most reliable monitor of an initiative designed to protect the environment.

But farm-state Democrats, rallying behind Rep. Collin Peterson (D-Minn.), who chairs the House Agriculture Committee, insisted that the U.S. Department of Agriculture be given that responsibility — a scenario opposed by environmentalists, who fear the USDA will prioritize farm industry concerns above the effectiveness of the offset program.

Indeed, The New York Times reports today of USDA’s shoddy record when it comes to overseeing environmental programs under its jurisdiction.

In particular, the department’s conservation agency “routinely ignored” compliance standards when giving out wetlands and wildlife grants, an investigator for the House Agriculture Committee found. The Government Accountability Office said there is potential for duplicative payments with the conservation programs, allowing the agency to release billions of dollars in payments to landowners who do not deserve them.

Another assessment from the USDA inspector general found shoddy accounting at the Natural Resources Conservation Service. The agency was unable to provide sufficient information on transactions and account balances.

No matter. The result of the Waxman-Peterson negotiations was to give USDA the job.

The second sticking point revolved around a controversial EPA initiative — mandated by Congress — designed to ensure that the country’s shift to biofuels like ethanol doesn’t lead to a spike in greenhouse gas emissions elsewhere around the globe. This happened in Indonesia, for example, where there was a widespread clearing of rain forest a few years ago to make way for palm plantations to feed Europe’s emerging biofuels market. The EPA proposed to take such global events into account as it pertains to the U.S. shift to food-based fuels.

No matter. For Peterson and the other agriculture-friendly Democrats, the so-called indirect land-use plan was a non-starter. The result? Under the compromise, EPA won’t be allowed to account for indirect land-use when calculating ethanol-production emissions until the USDA has signed off of the methodology.

“We have reached an agreement that works for agriculture and contributes to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States,” Peterson said in a statement last night.

The House is planning to vote on the Waxman-Markey bill Friday.

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