Accelerating Decarbonization in the United States Technology, Policy, and Societal Dimensions (2024) / Chapter Skim
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Pages 325-360
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8 Land Use ABSTRACT Land used for agriculture and forestry plays a significant role in U.S. decarbonization strategies.
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CO2. 24 Carbon dioxide emissions are net negative whenever losses are smaller than gains, which causes a 122F net gain in ecosystem carbon stocks (a carbon sink)
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this chapter. However, these experiments are not particularly useful for safeguarding the public expenditures for carbon sinks in the IRA, because the information is proprietary.
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with the role of biofuels feedstock production. Last, the committee discusses the potential role of meat and dairy substitutes as a demand-side approach to reducing net greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector.
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BECCS, like in the right-most panel, taking more land from food production and biodiversity preservation. Most net-zero emissions budgets for the United States assume midcentury sinks totaling 1 GtCO2/y plus or minus several hundred MtCO2/y from a mix of forestry, agriculture and industrial carbon removal methods like BECCS and direct air capture (DAC)
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FIGURE 8-3 Sample net-zero scenario showing the role of negative emissions in climate change mitigation.
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FIGURE 8-5 Net-zero pathway for the United States. NOTE: CDR means carbon dioxide removal by BECCS and other technological methods like direct air capture.
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FIGURE 8-6 The net-zero emissions scenario modeled in the Net Zero America Project (NZAP)
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Potential Size of Safe Terrestrial Carbon Sinks in the United States National Academies (2019, p.
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≤20 $/tCO2 and an additional 100 MtCO2/y at 20–50 $/tCO2, based on published studies (Chambers et al. 2016; Robertson et al.
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of CH4 emissions. These programs could benefit from further assessment of environmental advantages and constraints to achieving a tighter coupling between rural and urban waste streams and potential carbon removals, such as producing compost from food and agricultural waste and then applying as a soil amendment.
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Agriculture The largest proportion of the IRA funds for agriculture are devoted to increased funding to USDA programs that incentivize farmers and ranchers to adopt more conservation-oriented management practices that increase soil organic C stocks and lower N2O and CH4 emissions, as well as providing cobenefits such as reduced soil loss, greater biodiversity, and improved water quality, with its associated positive impacts on human health in rural areas. Incentives for these programs come largely in the form of cost share or direct payments for conservation practice adoption as well as technical assistance.
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additions to agricultural systems used to boost plant productivity, including synthetic N fertilizers, manure additions and N2-fixing crops (e.g., legumes) , have greatly increased N2O emissions in agricultural soils compared to native ecosystems.
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https://www.edf.org/sites/default/files/documents/climate-mitigation-pathways-us-agriculture-forestry.pdf and EPA (2022)
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hence food production/food security issues would be minimally impacted in the short term and leakage owing to reduced agricultural production should not be a concern. Adding the expected forestry and agricultural carbon sinks plus N2O and CH4 reductions, the IRA could create a net 8-year net sink of 983 MtCO2e (138 + 845)
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from offset sales can help to overcome. Within the IRA, the major funding to forestry and agriculture is through increases in USDA programs to incentivize mitigation practice adoption through direct payments and cost-sharing.
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A substantial fraction of the funding in the IRA that could promote carbon storage can also be directed toward other ecosystem benefits like "resilience." Moreover, the IRA bill does not specify how landowners will be compensated or the length of contracts. The bill's funds must be spent within 8 years, which is shorter than the 20 years or more in most forestry offset contracts.
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and achievable per area rates vary by climate and soil type, the baseline management system, and other local factors. Thus, the results from providing subsidies to incentivize agricultural producers to adopt new practices will depend highly on the geographic distribution of the land area involved and the types of incentives.
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the potential for up-scaling of soil-based carbon removal and greenhouse gas reduction approaches as climate mitigation strategies. In addition, economic and behavioral research need to investigate approaches to improve policy design and address inequities in participation of disadvantaged communities in conservation incentive programs.
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the current U.S. forest total; similarly, croplands currently kept out of production by the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP)
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unavailable for joint use (i.e., the area actually occupied by the wind turbines and associated access roads) , and the area that could also be used for other purposes (i.e., croplands beneath a windfarm)
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Cheapest wind 2030 414 0.2 15.7 4 (14) Cheapest wind 2050 1479 0.6 55.1 12 (45)
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lands ranges from 0.75 GtCO2/y to just over 1 GtCO2/y. This implies that BECCS alone might fill the need for carbon dioxide removal from industrial (e.g., BECCS, DAC)
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Finding 8-3: The $6.5 billion of biofuels-related funding in the IRA and IIJA is sufficient for biofuels production in the 2020s and for R&D so that advanced land transport and aviation biofuels are ready after 2030. However, there is not currently a sufficient comprehensive plan to develop BECCS.
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Land Use Requirements and Emissions Related to Animal Agriculture Multiple indicators need to be considered in assessing dietary sustainability (e.g., overall nutritional quality, GHG emissions, water and land use, economic cost, health) , and most of these indicators are dependent on the type of food produced and the efficiency of production (Chen et al.
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percent of harvested soybean and grain is fed to animals each year; if soybeans and grains were directly fed to humans, farm acreage could be dramatically reduced, and land could be freed up for biofuels, sequestration, and other purposes (Cassidy et al.
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than 70 companies working on this technology (Bandoim 2022) , and prices have fallen precipitously over the past decade, similar to cost and performance advances in computing technologies governed by Moore's Law (Shigeta 2020)
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• Including sustainability in U.S. Department of Agriculture dietary guidelines, and supporting data collection and availability on the life-cycle environmental impacts of emerging food products.
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Actor(s) Overarching Responsible for Sector(s)
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BPC (Bipartisan Policy Center)
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DOE (U.S. Department of Energy)
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Fargione, J.E., S Bassett, T
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Sustainable Development, and Efforts to Eradicate Poverty. Edited by V
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Li, Y., C.K. Miskin, and R
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Rosegrant, M.W.
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Vergeer, R., Sinke, P., Odegard, I
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