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Professor McCabe Co-Authors Piece Cautiously Praising Bipartisan Effort on Climate
08/21/2020
A bipartisan group of senators, including Indiana Sen. Mike Braun, recently introduced the “Growing Climate Solutions Act,” which could be an important step in America’s response to the public health and economic threats of our changing climate.
That’s according to a recent op-ed by IU McKinney Professor of Practice Janet McCabe and Stephen J. Jay, professor emeritus at the Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health and IU School of Medicine. Professor McCabe is director of the IU Environmental Resilience Institute
A bipartisan House version (five Republicans and five Democrats) was also recently introduced.
Agriculture contributes about 10 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and forestry adds more. The Senate bill would encourage farmers to adopt climate-friendly practices by increasing their ability to turn climate action into cash. It provides transparency, legitimacy and informal endorsement of third-party carbon credit verifiers and technical service providers with agriculture and forestry expertise to help farmers and foresters generate carbon credits they can sell on the market, the authors write.
“These practices improve soil health, reduce ground and surface water contamination, restore rangelands and riparian zones, reduce erosion, enhance biodiversity, and create local jobs,” according to McCabe and Jay.
The pandemic and economic shouldn’t slow down this effort to “recover forward with transformational changes to how we do business in this country, including how we grow our food and fiber,” they write.
