For farmers, but denying global warming

Yes, Texas has had drought before. But, it's not been this serious, this long, over this much of the state.

Now, computer modeling is not at the point where we can say that "X percent of the drought is due to climate change," or anything similar.

However, out in West Texas, we can say — and climate researchers do say — that such droughts are more likely, more likely to be longer, and more likely to be more intense with climate change.

So, the PR director of the Texas Farm Bureau, Gene Hall, is pretty irresponsible to his own "constitutency" to have a blog post like this.

Problem 1:

I’m not seeing how unilateral surrender of our own economic fortune does any good whatsoever in the climate change grand scheme of things.

The reality is that, with food one of the few things we still generally import (although off and on, annually, in the last decade, we've been a net importer, which few people know), it's unilateral surrender to add to global warming while knowing its hurting agriculture.

Problem 2:

All this comes up at a time when the U.S. has reduced its carbon emissions to early 1990s levels. 

Not quite true. We're well above 1990 on total emissions. We're roughly the same on per-capita emissions, but that doesn't count. And, as for "economic fortune," part of the decline is due to economic struggle. 

Anyway, there's more in this vein.

Given that most of the proposed changes would but have small and indirect impact on farmers, and some, like biofeedstocks for cellulosic ethanol, etc., could be to the good, this piece appears to be little more than anti-Obama mongering.