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<div class=""> </div></div><div id="opinionator"><div align="left"><span class="" title="2013-03-07T21:00:45+00:00">March 7, 2013, <span>9:00 pm</span></span><h3 class="">Hicks Nix Climate Fix</h3><address class="">By <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/author/timothy-egan/" class="" title="See all posts by TIMOTHY EGAN">TIMOTHY EGAN</a></address><div class="">
<p>Everybody
loves a farmer, judging by the popularity of this year’s hit Super Bowl
ad about the virtues of those who coax food from dirt. And yet nobody
wants to be one, with less than 1 percent of the population claiming it
as an occupation.</p><p>But somewhere among the 315 million Americans
is a farmer who is (rarer still) a Democrat willing to serve President
Obama. Should this person be found, he or she should be put in charge of
the daunting task of convincing food producers that nothing imperils
their future more than climate change.</p><p>I realize that summoning
images of wilted wheat, lizard-skin ground and scrawny cattle nosing
through drought-ravaged forage just a few days after a major winter
storm is not the most timely approach. Whenever it snows over a large
portion of the country, climate change-deniers point to the blanket of
white outside and cry “hoax!”</p><p>But with the announcement this week
of the usual suspects of city-bred, East Coast, well-credentialed types
to the cabinet-level team that Obama is assembling to fight climate
change, it’s time to consider a farmer as a leader of that cause.<br><br>Farmers
don’t care much for Obama, so why should he reach out to them? He lost
the rural vote by almost 20 points. And among big farmers (I’m talking
productivity here, not bib overall size), he lost by 50 points. No
surprise. Farmers haven’t had anything nice to say about a Democrat
since Franklin Roosevelt was touring cornfields in his open-air car.</p><p>The
people who grow grain for breakfast cereal and raise pigs for
prosciutto are also among the biggest deniers of the consensus
scientific view that humans have altered the earth’s climate. While
acknowledging that, yes, sir, the weather does appear to be changing for
the worse, most farmers don’t think it is human-caused, according to
several polls. You’d have to survey the leading talk-radio hosts to
find a higher percentage of disbelievers of the obvious.</p><p>At first
glance, this makes no sense, because farmers have the most to lose in a
world of weather havoc. Droughts, floods, searing high temperatures and
freakish storms that now appear with regularity pose more of a threat
to global food supply than the whims of the market. Weeds, pests and
fungi — agricultural nightmares in a bundle — thrive under warmer
temperatures and increased carbon dioxide levels. Heat waves are
livestock killers, increasing the prevalence of parasites and diseases.</p><p>These
horrors were highlighted in two recent government assessments of what
climate change will mean to the nation’s breadbasket. And since
American exports supply more than 30 percent of all wheat, corn and rice
on the global market, what’s bad for the fertile crest of the United
States is bad for a planet with seven billion people to feed.</p><p>So,
why the denial? Cost. Any fix in the sticks is likely to hit farmers
hard, because they use a disproportionate amount of the fertilizers,
chemicals and fossil fuels that power the American agricultural machine,
and are likely to come under increased regulation.</p><p>It’s one thing
to persuade hipsters in Portland, Ore., or Brooklyn to grow organic —
hey, how cool is an artisan radish — in their rooftop gardens. It’s a
much tougher push to get Big Ag, made up mostly of stubborn older men,
to change its ways.</p><p>But imagine if a farmer led the cause against
climate change. Franklin Roosevelt chose Hugh Bennett, a son of the
North Carolina soil, to rally Americans against the abusive farming
practices that led to the Dust Bowl. Big Hugh was blunt, smart and
convincing. “Of all the countries in the world, we Americans have been
the greatest destroyers of land of any race of people,” he said,
without apology.</p><p>Obama’s picks for energy secretary, the M.I.T.
scientist Ernest Moniz, and Environmental Protection Agency
administrator, the seasoned regulator Gina McCarthy, are cautious and
qualified insiders. The problem with those nominees is that they come
from the same general neighborhood. Just as every justice on the
Supreme Court is an Ivy Leaguer, top government posts are thick with
people from the same provinces of success, usually the Northeast and its
top schools.</p><p>Clay Pope, a rancher from Loyal, Okla., recently cut
a YouTube video urging President Obama to highlight the climate change
threat to agriculture. It was good to see Pope, who speaks with the kind
of vowel-crushing twang rarely heard in Washington policy circles, take
up the good fight, especially considering the risk he exposed himself
to from primitive politicians in his home state.</p><p>Either by push
from a regulator, or shove from the weather itself, or persuasion from a
person whose very livelihood depends on what comes from the sky,
agricultural life will be unrecognizable within a generation’s time. If
a farmer led the way to a better era, we might see this headline during
the transition, a rewrite of one of the most famous in newspaper
history: Hicks Fix Climate Tricks.</p></div></div></div><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)<br><a href="mailto:art.deco.studios@gmail.com" target="_blank">art.deco.studios@gmail.com</a><br><br><img src="http://users.moscow.com/waf/WP%20Fox%2001.jpg"><br>
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