By Gene Hall

The Obama Administration is again making noises on regulating climate change and, as usual, some are selling it as a crisis.

 In talking with farmers and ranchers who have been on the land for multiple generations, I’ve seen a reluctance to agree that droughts should be blamed on manmade activity. Their family history reports many droughts, some more severe than the current batch. Farmers are also suspicious that they will be the first to feel the pinch of aggressive efforts to regulate carbon emissions. There is something to that. Great strides have been made with conservation tillage and no-till, but very few have found a way to produce a crop without driving across a field.

By Gene Hall

 We’ve all heard it. We’re only a few short years from climate change devastating agriculture. We’ll have food riots as soccer moms fight to the death over a can of beans. 

We used to call this global warming until the earth actually cooled a bit over the last decade. Now we call it climate change, but I won’t get into that disagreement. I’ll just concede for now that Mother Earth has warmed a bit over the last few decades. For growing food, it doesn’t seem to matter, because there is exactly zero evidence of a climate driven calamity for agriculture.

By Mike Barnett

I’ve been accused of preaching a lot of doom and gloom lately. Seems both Gene Hall and I have been detailing the negatives on how the climate changers, animal rightists, “industrial agriculture” critics, the anti-GMO crowd and others are adversely affecting agriculture.

Hope for agriculture, I’m here to tell you, is not lost. The bad news is these activist groups are strong, well funded, very vocal and successful in promoting their agenda. The good news is they’re ultimately doomed to fail.

Here’s why:

By Gene Hall

Okay, all of you get it by now. I’m not in favor of the cap and trade climate legislation that passed the U.S. House and stalled in the Senate, despite enthusiastic support from the Obama Administration. Please let it stall forever. This is more than opposition to a minor inconvenience. This thing, folks, is a pending disaster. Wall Street loves it because it would give them a new market to manipulate, but our current economic situation is no time to impose the largest tax increase in the history of the planet. But while they happily trade carbon credits, the rest of us—including Texas consumers and Texas farmers and ranchers, are going to suffer.

Cold temperatures have gripped much of the Lone Star State this past week and in fact, much of the nation. A low of 8 degrees was recorded in Waco Saturday morning, where temperatures were below freezing for three days. The jury is still out on the hard freeze effects on sugar cane and citrus in the Rio Grande Valley. Miami, Florida suffered a freeze; Tampa, Florida had ice. A cold front that paralyzed this nation swept all the way through Cuba.
 
My niece in Nebraska reported the snow plows had quit running when temperatures plummeted with wind chill temps at -45 degrees. A friend in New Jersey is considering hibernation. Another friend in Iowa mentioned moving back to Texas where it is warm. I told him never mind. I reverse migrated and flew to Seattle, Washington this week, where it was a balmy 50 degrees, to miss the vicious chill in the Lone Star State.