Washington, D.C. – Rio Tinto, a mining giant that provides coal for utilities in the United States, is a major producer of the greenhouse gas emissions the Obama administration wants to cap.
But the Australian company is counting on farmers in Iowa and around the globe to help the business avoid making some costly changes in its operations.
Rio Tinto, together with utilities and other polluters, wants to reduce the cost of complying with proposed emission controls by being allowed to purchase “offsets” from farmers and other landowners who have undertaken carbon-saving practices, such as planting trees on their property or reducing their tillage of crop land.
Those credits are a key issue as Congress shapes legislation to reduce U.S. carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050. The House passed a bill in June; the Senate is working on similar legislation.
The polluters are pushing lawmakers to make the terms of the credit-earning programs as liberal as possible, to keep the value of the credits relatively low.
But some environmentalists say that will let the polluters off the hook for making real reductions in their own emissions.
Read the rest of the Des Moines Register article here.
