| | Casper -When a torch-wielding mob somewhere, someday, finally chases a TV weatherman down the street, there will be farmers at the head of it. They'll be blaming the messenger, sure – and boosting the poor sap's ratings, besides. But anyone who's ever sat in a tractor cab dragging a cultivator will chuckle. | Growing up on a Midwestern row-crop farm, I quickly learned that a "normal" year starts too wet to plow or plant, with tractors sunk axle-deep in a badly drained field, and quarrels between brothers over rusty winches. Then the fields and skies dry up too much to grow the fragile new crop. Then, weeks of wind strip the precious topsoil, muddying the old wet towel my mother laid along the door jamb. Suffer through these indignities, hoping for a break in the drought, scanning the storm on the horizon like my dad through binoculars from the top of his south grain bin, and your reward will be: grim, sickly green hail clouds, ready to test the limits of your insurance policy. So the latest bad news on climate change – regarding the grim future of Wyoming’s crop, livestock and timber industries, somberly sketched in last week's U.S. Department of Agriculture report on climate change – felt as nostalgic and worrisome as a family reunion. "Normal" is about to get worse, maybe within 25 years, even if every smokestack, tailpipe and belching cow in the world were frozen in ice tomorrow. Here's a forecast for Wyoming in 2033, gleaned from the 227-page draft report, itself culled from more than 1,000 publications as part of 21 separate assessments of climate-change impacts reported by a federal government which has hardly struck an alarmist note on the issue for the last eight years: | Heat waves will be more frequent and last longer, killing feedlot cattle in alarming numbers. Drought will be punctuated by more intense storms, washing away more topsoil. Rangelands, staggering under increased temperatures and rampant exotic-species invasions, simply disappear, converted to woody plants and trees with astonishing loss of biological diversity. Forests, ravaged by insect plagues, die off and burn up, releasing more carbon and depriving winter mountain snowpack of the shade it needs to last until spring. Arid farmland, creeping further into drought, evolves into desert West-wide, causing "continental-scale impacts on downwind ecosystems, air quality and human populations" from increased wind erosion. |  | Folks, in that last bit there: the words they're trying not to use specifically are "dust bowl." This is certainly a devastating vision for Wyoming's $1.1 billion ag industry – and that's just the value of the commodities we produce every year, to say nothing of the vendors, bankers, laborers and everyone else who depends on a profitable production economy here. But it's also a full-scale assault on Wyoming's environment and way of life, as well. These are the grapes of wrath we are sowing here. We’ll need a new Steinbeck to help us get our minds around it. Yet the report produced at best a blip in the local media; Wyoming Agriculture Department Director John Etchepare told Wyoming Public Radio this is the "topic of the hour," bad news, and the subject of a conference in June. Ranchers might need to move calving season or turn out their stock at different times. Old habits may die hard, but it would be easy to imagine this as the kind of news that threatens the longstanding political cooperation between Wyoming's agriculture and energy industries, which largely since statehood (despite Populist flare-ups) has defended the economic status quo and turned back environmental policy advances. After all, we heard just last spring that Wyoming leads the nation in the size of its carbon footprint per capita. Our coal-fired power plants put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in an eight-hour shift than all the power generators in Vermont emit in a year. With 276,000 pounds a year of CO2 spewing forth for every man, woman and child in Wyoming, and two-thirds of it from utilities feeding other states’ demand, ag producers angry about the ultimate effect on their bottom line could certainly spark some soul-searching and averted glances at the next Rotary or Kiwanis meeting. But Wyoming agriculture itself could gaze inward in search of contributions to the climate crisis. Our singularly cattle-intensive ag production paradigm hasn’t helped the atmosphere much along the way. If the averages can be trusted, then the million-or-so cattle and calves Wyoming ranches sell every year produce about 200,000,000 pounds of methane annually, and methane is 20 or more times as effective as CO2 at trapping heat in our atmosphere. (We won't even get into the energy used to run a livestock operation, ship the beef or grill the steaks, but it's no trivial amount.) Beef producers will have to change feeding practices and resource use significantly if they are to survive the inevitable climate change crackdown.
Our crop producers play their part too, running irrigation systems, employing energy-intensive fertilizer, herbicide and pesticide, and turning out crops whose increasing conversion into ethanol arguably generates a larger carbon footprint per unit produced than the traditional fuels they're meant to clean up. The push toward cellulosic ethanol may offer a way for crop producers to invert this unfortunate math – if the local climate will allow production of switchgrass and other feedstocks, a dubious enough prospect in the dust-bowl scenario.
The USDA report offers no recommended solutions, only a sense of the scope of the challenge we’re facing. Other federal agencies are producing 20 more companion reports in this series, so people already grumbling about climate change "alarmism" are bound to get a lot more annoyed. The real question for ag producers and landscape stewards, for political and industrial leaders, and for every consumer in the state, is whether we stay coal-fired, cattle-fed and resigned to a climate scourge, or whether we love this place enough to uproot this looming bitter harvest.
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