Wallowa County residents may be sharply divided about whether man is contributing to climate change, but the governor’s office and legislature are not. Neither is the federal government. The plans federal and state agencies are making to control greenhouse gas emissions may eventually provide Wallowa County landowners with a bizarre form of income – derived from maintaining their scenic landscape.

The potential money-maker is “carbon sequestering.”

Since Oregon Legislature established the Oregon Global Warming Commission with a 25-member advisory group in 2007, the governor’s office has been looking for good science to back up a Climate Change Agenda that will inform a package of “aggressive actions on global warming and climate change” to be presented during the 2009 legislative session.

In addition to continuing to develop Oregon’s green economy to bring new companies and jobs to the state, the governor intends to develop a cap-and-trade proposal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The “cap” is the upper limit of greenhouse gasses a business can emit. The “trade” comes about when a business cannot stay under the cap, so it “buys credits” from a farm or business that is more than meeting its goals or – and here is where counties like Wallowa come in – is actually “sequestering carbon” in a variety of ways.

Methods of sequestering carbon include:

? Carbon sequestration in the soil, plants, and plant roots through conservation tillage, perennial crops, and other practices.

? Management of fertilizer applications to reduce nitrous oxide emissions.

? Manure management to reduce methane emissions.

? Streamside vegetation establishment. Many growers are establishing permanent vegetation along streams to protect water quality, and are sequestering carbon through this practice.

The federal government is serious about this new trading endeavor and has demonstrated that by creating two new agencies to define the operations of the trading market.

One new agency is the USDA Office of Ecosystem Services and Markets, which was created late last year. Sally Collins, former associate chief of the USDA Forest Service, was named as director. The federal government also established the Conservation and Land Management Environmental Services Board to help establish values for “environmental services” such as clean water and air, wildlife habitat, carbon storage and scenic landscapes.

Once values are established, these “products” can be “carbon traded” not just statewide, not just nationwide, but internationally.

“Our nation’s farms, ranches and forests provide goods and services that are vital to society – natural assets we call ‘ecosystem services,'” said former USDA Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer. “The OESM will enable America’s agriculture producers to better compete, trade their services around the world, and make significant contributions to help improve the environment.”

Farmers, ranchers and forest landowners, who have not been compensated for providing these public benefits, will now have financial incentives to continue, according to Schafer.

The first ecosystem services to be examined will be industrial carbon sequestration – the storage of compressed carbon dioxide created by industrial plants in depleted oil and gas wells, and saline formations.

However, Oregon is not waiting for the federal government to grease the wheels of a carbon-trading program – it’s going with a regional plan. The state has joined the Western Climate Initiative (WCI), a coalition of governments on the west coast “working to inventory and reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help stakeholders adapt to climate change” in 2007. WCI covers an area from western Canada across the western U.S. and into Mexico. In addition to Oregon, WIC members include Arizona, California, Montana, New Mexico, Utah, Washington, and the Canadian provinces of British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec. WCI has already announced recommendations for the design of a regional market-based cap-and-trade program that they say will represent 20 percent of the U.S. economy and 90 percent of the Canadian economy.

The WCI partners have already agreed to begin reporting emissions in 2011 with the first phase of the cap-and-trade program beginning on Jan. 1, 2012.

The WCI published guidelines for its member governments to use when developing requirements to report greenhouse gas emissions. Members, including Oregon, are already moving forward to adopt reporting standards. The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) recently adopted rules for mandatory reporting of greenhouse gases by certain stationary, high output emitters.

Most agricultural operations will not be required to report greenhouse gas emissions, but rules adopted by the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) will affect some agricultural processors, including animal rendering facilities, beet sugar manufacturing facilities, grain elevators and animal feed manufacturers that have more than 10,000 tons per year throughput, and grain/flour mills and potato chip/snack facilities that have any of the above permits.