Bugs On The Menu? Biden's Climate And ESG Policies Threaten Food Supply, Think-Tank Warns

Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A new report from the right-leaning think-tank The Buckeye Institute sounded the alarm on the Biden administration’s net-zero climate-control policies and that agenda items threaten U.S. food production.

The report, released on Feb.7, found that the climate policies and mandates guided by the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) agenda that is being pushed by the Biden administration carries a hefty price tag for American farmers and consumers.

“To better appreciate the true costs that American farms and households will likely pay for the Biden administration’s net-zero policies and objectives, The Buckeye Institute’s Economic Research Center developed a model corn farm that must play by the government’s new carbon emission rules,” wrote report authors Trevor W. Lewis and M. Ankith Reddy, who are both economic research analysts at the think-tank.

“The farm’s operational costs, as expected, all rose significantly,” they added.

Crunching the numbers, the researchers found that U.S. farmers will see their operational costs rise by an estimated 34 percent as a result of the Biden administration’s net-zero emissions policies.

Not only did the model predict that the government’s carbon pricing policies would raise farm operating costs, consumers also face a hit to their wallets.

“Carbon pricing will increase the average U.S. grocery bill by $110 per month, $1,330 annually, or 15 percent,” the researchers estimated.

Threat to Food Supply

The government’s net-zero policies that the Buckeye report took into account in its analysis include the implications of rejoining the Paris Climate Accords, which targets greenhouse gas emissions.

In order to achieve the climate pact’s objectives, the Biden administration committed to cutting America’s greenhouse gas emissions by 50–52 percent by 2030 and to reach economy-wide net-zero emissions by 2050.

“Achieving the administration’s desired decarbonized economy will require aggressive climate-emission reduction policies that drain and replace fossil fuels from every sector of the U.S. economy,” the report’s authors wrote.

The Biden administration has already started implementing stringent regulatory policies meant to cut carbon emissions from America’s energy industry, while a looming final rule on ESG reporting, due to enter into force in April 2024, threatens to push carbon compliance onto other industries.

Many of these policies have been tested in Europe, with the researchers concluding that the results there have been an “unmitigated failure.”

“Despite these resounding warnings from European counterparts, U.S. policymakers have recommitted American industry to the same net-zero emissions standards and have imposed the same kinds of costly mandates on farms and businesses that will ultimately reduce food and energy supplies without achieving their intended benefits,” they argued.

“The results of Buckeye’s modeling were predictable and unsurprising, but many U.S. policymakers seem unwilling to address or even acknowledge them. That has to change, or the United States will face dire economic consequences,” concludes the report’s executive summary.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment on the report’s findings.

Will Hild, executive director of Consumers’ Research, commented on the report in a post on X.

“Farmers and ranchers lay out huge sums for everything from fertilizer, seeds, and feed to heavy machinery and pesticides to produce the food we eat. Yet, the climate cult and ESG elites are causing these costs to skyrocket,” he wrote.

“That puts a heavier financial burden on agricultural producers and imposes higher food costs on hardworking Americans,” he continued.

“America’s farmers and ranchers’ livelihoods shouldn’t be at risk because of inflated operating costs or loss of access to capital from woke banks. Nor should the American people be victim to a crushing tax put on their groceries by climate extremists.”

‘Agriculture Is National Security’

The Buckeye report comes a week or so after a dozen Republican state agriculture commissioners warned in a Jan. 29 letter to top bank executives that membership in the UN Net-Zero Banking Alliance would negatively impact farmers and threaten America’s food security.

Along with their membership in the alliance, banks like JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America have pledged that the loans they make will “align with pathways to net-zero by mid-century or sooner.”

Tyler Harper, Georgia agriculture commissioner and one of the letter’s signatories, told The Epoch Times in an earlier interview that committing to net-zero policies has a negative knock-on impact on national security.

“At the end of the day, agriculture is national security, and if we’re not able to feed ourselves as a nation, we’re not able to protect ourselves,” he said.

“When you look at Sri Lanka and the devastating impacts that [climate mandates] had there, you look at the Netherlands and what they did to implement some of these policies there and the devastating impact it had on their ag economy—we’ve seen the impacts that this had in other nations and we don’t want that to happen here,” Mr. Harper added.

In 2019, after the government of Sri Lanka implemented rules to cut down the use of nitrogen in fertilizer, crop yields collapsed, leading to violent protests that ultimately toppled the government.

In the Netherlands, regulatory attempts to impose net-zero policies led to widespread protests from farmers.

‘Will You Eat the Bugs?’

Meanwhile, a recent Epoch Original Documentary called “No Farmers No Food: Will You Eat the Bugs?” explores the climate-control policies pushed by governments around the world and how they’re forcing farmers out of business, threatening food supply.

“This is the next global crisis that is being ignored by media across the world,” Roman Balmakov, host of EpochTV’s “Facts Matter” and director of the documentary, told The Epoch Times during an interview on the sidelines of the world premiere of the film in September 2023.

The documentary delves into the history of the “climate crisis” and how it was conceived by world leaders during the United Nations Conferences on Environment and Development, also known as the Earth Summit, in June 1992, shortly after the Cold War ended.

The film also dives into Agenda 30, previously known as Agenda 21, laying out a case for how global policies set forth by the UN’s aim to end private farming and create dependence on a one-world government that will control the world’s food supply.

“People in charge of some of the most powerful organizations on the planet have determined that agriculture, specifically animal agriculture, is to blame for global warming and global warming is to blame for the high prices of food and food shortages,” Mr. Balmakov explained.

The documentary explores the impact of radical climate policies in Sri Lanka and the Netherlands, while also exploring the impact of net-zero and other regulations in the United States.

The solutions being proposed by governments around the world to solve climate change “might surprise you,” Mr. Balmakov says in the film.

“According to the United Nations, [bugs] might actually be your future dinner,” he says.

Kevin Stocklin and Jana Pruet contributed to this report.