USDA Secretary: From ‘Not A Scientist’ To Climate Change Advocate

First published on ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, which was recently named one of Time magazine’s Top 25 blogs of 2010.

Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack seems to have come a long way on climate change.

In a recent interview with the Detroit Free Press, Vilsack said that he hopes both climate change and genetically modified foods are topics of debate during the upcoming presidential election. Both topics are important to the campaign, he said, in part because they represent a larger issue: the treatment of science in conversations about policy.

“I hope there is a real meaningful opportunity to educate Americans about the important role that science needs to play and whether or not we will continue this war on science on both the right and on the left of the political spectrum,” Vilsack said. “On the right you have climate change deniers and on the left you have people raising issues about GMOs, and the science doesn’t support either one of those positions.”

The interview comes less than a week after the USDA announced a broad set of voluntary initiatives aimed at reducing the agricultural sector’s greenhouse gas emissions — a move that strengthens the department’s commitment to tackling agriculture’s role in climate change. The initiatives include installing some 500 biogas digester plants, meant to curb the livestock sector’s contribution to emissions, adding over 40 million acres of no-till farmland, and encouraging more sustainable grazing by adding 4 million more acres of rotational grazing. If all of the department’s 10 initiatives are implemented, it will mean a 120 million metric ton reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2025 — enough to offset the emissions created by powering 11 million homes in 2014.

“Farmers, ranchers and forest landowners … have seen firsthand on the ground the growing threat that climate change and increasingly severe weather presents to agricultural production, forestry sources and rural economies,” Vilsack said during the announcement.

But the USDA — and Vilsack — haven’t always been so willing to openly discuss climate change. In 2012, during a press conference about a drought that was impacting 61 percent of the country, Vilsack evaded questions on climate change, refusing to speak to its long-term impact on agriculture.

“I’m not a scientist, so I’m not going to opine as to the cause of this,” Vilsack said when asked about the drought’s connection to climate change, later saying that the USDA’s focus was on “the near term and the immediate,” and that in the long term, research programs and “seed companies” would be useful solutions to extreme weather.

This January, Vilsack again shied away from talking about climate change, telling reporters at the American Farm Bureau Federation’s annual convention that the USDA often refers to climate change as “weather variation” when speaking with farmers. According to Vilsack, farmers are often hesistant to discuss climate change, which can be seen as politically charged, but are more willing to discuss strategies for coping with things like drought, changing growing seasons, and flooding.

“If we try to force these conversations in territory that people are uncomfortable with, when we do that, we end up not having the conversation,” Vilsack said. “I like to find areas that people are comfortable talking about that; I think you advance the cause a bit more effectively that way.”

In a few short months, however, Vilsack seems to have adjusted his stance on forcing a conversation about climate change. His mission for the upcoming presidential election, he told the Detroit Free Press, is to “prompt candidates to talk about” both climate change and genetically modified foods.

“As we enter a presidential campaign,” Vilsack said, “I hope that there is a conversation about science in this debate.”

The post USDA Secretary: From ‘Not A Scientist’ To Climate Change Advocate appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Source: http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/04/29/3652537/usda-vilsack-climate-change-switch/