Storing the Carbon
Your recent article about carbon sequestration reflects excellent reporting about the critical issue of carbon sequestration and how it can provide new economic opportunities to North American farmers and ranchers.
As your article points out, agriculture covers 40 percent of the world’s land and is responsible for 17 percent of global emissions.
Today, the climate emergency, nature loss, and social inequity have created a new sense of urgency to accelerate and reward agricultural practices that could greatly reduce the amount of carbon being emitted into the atmosphere adding to global warming, and better prepare us for more frequent and severe weather events.
Read Also
Late season rainfall creates concern about Prairie crop quality
Praying for rain is being replaced with the hope that rain can stop for harvest. Rainfall in July and early August has been much greater than normal.
Farming practices like planting off-season cover crops, tilling the ground less, and using fertilizer more efficiently could reduce global emissions substantially. According to the EPA, agriculture accounts for about 10 percent of the 2019 U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, which is nearly twice as high as energy use in homes.
That said, changes in Canadian and U.S. farming practices could sequester more than 250 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere each year.
That’s why farmers, WBCSD-member companies like Bayer, Nutrien, Cargill, and others are working to build the right systems to incentivize and reward those who are willing to adopt new agricultural practices to reduce carbon emissions.
Thanks for your insightful news article.
Amy Senter
World Business Council for Sustainable Development,
New York, NY
Sask Politics
As I look across the political landscape in Saskatchewan, I am deeply saddened.
Our government under the leadership of Premier (Scott) Moe has not just lost the moral authority to govern – they have thrown it away.
This administration in general and Premier Moe in particular are in serious conflict with the citizens of Saskatchewan on a range of issues from crown grasslands to health care.
On this last point, premier Moe has driven Saskatchewan health-care services into chaos.
The Premier has said that “vaccination is the way out of this pandemic” and yet he has put into place policies that have pushed our health services into a crisis and have failed to educate, encourage and empower our people to navigate the maze of misinformation and to find “the way out”.
Instead, Premier Moe has victimized the vaccinated by allowing COVID to hijack our healthcare system so that the doors to many other services are closed.
To whom can citizens turn for help?
Unfortunately, the Official Opposition has been incapable of really holding the government accountable, partly because they accept being mired in a legacy of distrust among the half of our population living outside of Regina and Saskatoon.
Or perhaps the Opposition leader thinks that one can sit in the weeds, so to speak, and then slide into power after the Moe government disintegrates?
Who speaks for the overwhelming majority in Saskatchewan? Who speaks for those who are distressed, fearful and angry as an ineffective government provides no leadership or sense of security in these times?
Maybe it is time for people across Saskatchewan to think about building a new political party from the ground up – a party to make government that has the betterment of the province as its only objective; and to make a government that will balance interests and look for elegant solutions to difficult issues.
This would be a huge change from the government under Premier Moe, which panders to the few, prefers some interests to the exclusion of others and has put us all into danger on several levels.
Roderick E. MacDonald
Radville, Sask.
