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We’re in trouble: biodiversity loss and climate change are reshaping the world as we know it. We are losing species at an unprecedented rate, and climate change is causing a myriad of harmful effects that impact everything from Wall Street to Main Street. We need an all of government response to these challenges, and Congress has a key role to play.

Though reauthorization of the farm bill has been significantly delayed, Congress has a window of opportunity right now to further empower and support our nation’s hardworking farmers, ranchers, and private foresters — many of whom care deeply about wildlife conservation and are taking proactive steps to combat climate change — to conserve the invaluable habitats that support productive agriculture operations. This critical opportunity to improve the farm bill only comes about every five years and cannot be missed.

While Congress is flailing—moving from one near government shutdown to another—crucial legislation that supports our communities lies in limbo.

That includes the Farm Bill, a vital legislative package responsible for funding everything from farm subsidies and SNAP benefits to international food aid, the urgency to assist war-torn countries, combat rising hunger, and protect our farmlands.

When Congress renegotiates the farm bill every five years, it doesn’t exactly grab headlines. But this year, as the sweeping trillion-dollar legislative package that deals with everything from manure lagoons to food stamps comes up for renewal, climate advocates say it could be momentous.

Typically passed with bipartisan support, the legislation, projected to cost $1.4 trillion over 10 years, encompasses relatively mundane things like crop insurance and money for rural broadband. Nutrition programs alone usually claim three-quarters of the bill’s funding. But environmental groups and some farmer advocacy organizations are lobbying Congress to turn this year’s bill — due for an update by October — into the next historic climate law. They say it could curb warming caused by agriculture, a key emitter of greenhouse gasses, in large part by converting the country’s vast farmlands into fields that suck carbon out of the air.

In this context, the reaction in the global climate community to Joe Biden’s election as U.S. president has been overwhelmingly positive. The world sees the importance of U.S. action to limit overall global temperature rise, and President Biden’s campaign, appointments — including former secretary of state John Kerry as special presidential envoy for climate — and early actions in office indicate his interest in a new approach to climate change. However, the Biden administration immediately faces a difficult challenge. Four years of U.S. absence from the global climate community — including global climate negotiations and international efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions — have left a big gap in international leadership and credibility. How does the new administration meet the moment? How does the United States regain its credibility on the world stage?

Since greenhouse gas emissions mix throughout the global atmosphere and oceans, emissions in one part of the world impact the climate everywhere. The Paris Agreement calls for all countries to reduce emissions in line with their own development goals and political realities. But science suggests that a goal of net-zero emissions from the largest emitting countries by mid-century is necessary. In this context, credible U.S. action is critical. As the world’s largest economy, second-largest greenhouse gas emitter, and superpower re-engaging on climate diplomacy, U.S. actions can either dampen or accelerate global action. If the United States fails to make commitments that the rest of the world views as serious, it will be harder to pressure other countries to take more serious action. Credible U.S. action could form the basis for genuine leadership, as the United States displayed preceding the Paris COP through its bilateral commitments with China.

The IPCC report estimates that agricultural and food system reforms to mitigate climate change are among the lowest cost and highest potential options, comparable to emissions reductions gained from switching to wind or solar energy. Increasing the sustainability and resilience of our food systems can ensure that communities in the United States and throughout the world are able to feed themselves while protecting natural ecosystems. This Farm Bill has the chance to protect the historic $40+ billion Inflation Reduction Act investments empowering farmers to turn agriculture into a climate solution and double down on transformative, economy-wide investments needed to scale up climate-smart agriculture & forestry. We are at a pivotal moment in the climate crisis where bold and coordinated action to set the U.S. food and farming sector on a new and much more sustainable course can make a significant impact for America’s farmers, ranchers and eaters, and set an example globally.

Economy-wide investments in our food systems can play a large role in both climate change mitigation and adaptation, but only if we move quickly and decisively, and choose wisely.

The time is now for the U.S. to follow the IPCC’s recommendations and make these economy-wide investments in our food system. This year, Congress will negotiate the most impactful piece of legislation related to agriculture, the 2023 Farm Bill, a nearly $1 trillion spending package that sets authorized funding levels for the next 5 years until the next Farm Bill is negotiated. NRDC’s Farm Bill priorities - advancing organic agriculture, increasing cover crop adoption, and reducing food waste – and the comprehensive Agriculture Resilience Act introduced this week by Congresswoman Chellie Pingree, who herself is a longtime organic farmer, closely align with the IPCC report’s recommended climate mitigation and adaptation options. The report outlines that to simultaneously reduce global GHG emissions by 60% before 2035 and adapt to changes that are already ongoing, we need to increase the ability of our agricultural systems to store carbon, effectively manage biodiversity, improve cropland management, and reduce food waste, all while preserving natural ecosystems.  

The massive overhaul that Booker was pushing for is not about poverty or sweeping financial change or racial justice, at least not directly. Booker’s focus is on the country’s food system and on farm policy, especially the massive, nearly half-trillion dollar legislation—esoteric to most Americans—known as the Farm Bill.

Every five years or so, the bill is re-upped after an increasingly lengthy and contentious battle that usually centers on the country’s nutrition support programs, which consume three quarters of the legislation’s funding. But this time around, as negotiations get under way and committee meetings take place on Capitol Hill, conversations are ramping up about American agriculture’s role in contributing to—and addressing—climate change.

You may not own a tractor or a single pair of overalls. And maybe the only thing you’ve had a hand in growing is a neglected, windowsill succulent. But if you think the farm bill has nothing to do with you, you’d be wrong.

“The farm bill is a massive omnibus authorization and spending bill that comes up every five years,” says Ben Thomas, who directs EDF’s agriculture policy work. “It sets all federal food, agriculture and nutrition support policy and touches almost every aspect of our lives.”

WASHINGTON, Jan 25 (Reuters) - An effort by Republican U.S. lawmakers to reallocate $18 billion in climate-friendly agriculture funding under President Joe Biden's signature climate law would shift money away from programs that primarily benefit farmers in Republican-leaning states, a Reuters analysis found.

The Inflation Reduction Act money, earmarked for U.S. Department of Agriculture-designated "climate-smart" farm practices, is intended to support Biden's agriculture climate agenda, which relies heavily on storing carbon in the soil and lowering emissions through sustainable farming techniques.

The paradox for Biden is that the more successful he is at addressing the pandemic and the economy, the more difficulty he could encounter in building bipartisan coalitions to address other problems. Political Science 101 would suggest that if Biden gets credit for ending the pandemic and restoring a strong economy, that popularity should translate into greater political capital for other problems in the queue.

Political Science 301 offers a cautionary warning: Solved problems fade from view. Biden is appropriately addressing the issues voters care about. But if the pandemic and the economy evolve as expected, voters will quickly bank those successes and focus on thornier problems — like immigration.

Despite the relief plan's popularity outside the Beltway, it is unlikely that momentum from its passage will hurtle Biden into future legislative wins, Howell said.

“The idea that a legislative win begets a subsequent legislative win in this environment is probably asking for too much,” he said, noting the prospect of passing COVID-19 relief was higher than more hot-button issues like immigration or health care.

He was the top-ranking Democrat on the highly influential Senate Judiciary and Senate Foreign Relations committees for decades. Then, in 2008, Biden served as a sounding board for Obama on national security and foreign policy, according to The New Yorker. And in the Obama White House, Biden subsequently took on a foreign policy-centric portfolio and served as the White House proxy in Congress during contentious moments, like passing the 2009 economic stimulus package and avoiding the fiscal cliff.

Biden’s reputation as a dealmaker throughout his time in the Senate and as vice president was forged by his unconventional partnerships across the aisle.

The concept of political capital captures many of the aspects of a president's political authority. Paul Light defines several components of political capital: party support of the president in Congress, public approval of the president's conduct of his job, the president's electoral margin, and patronage appointments (Light 1999, 15). Light derived this list from the observations of 126 White House staff members he interviewed (1999, 14). His indicators have two central uses. First, Light's research reveals that they are central to the “players' perspective” in Washington. That is, those “in the game” view these items as crucial for presidential effectiveness. Second, they relate to many central aspects of political authority as defined by Skowronek. So on both theoretical and practical levels, the components of political capital are central to the fate of presidencies. The data here will reveal that presidents over the last 70 years have suffered from a trend of declining levels of political capital, a trend that is at the heart of their political authority problem.

Third, agenda-setting offers the White House the opportunity to highlight its priorities, how they are distributed across various policy issues, and in which way policies should be packaged (Rudalevige 2005, 437ff; Wayne 2009b, 317ff). Because the resources of any administration to lobby Congress are not infinite and the multiple political arenas are usually heavily crowded with myriad policy items and problems striving to be solved, the White House needs to prioritize its policy agenda. This involves, among other things, to select some issues over others, decide about their sequencing, how to pursue them, and how much political capital it wants or needs to spend on any given item. Therefore, the administration will focus on certain policies with more attention, on others with less, depending on the prioritization by the president but also upon other considerations, such as the overall density of the policy agenda or imminent pressures of the time. The trick is to not overwhelm Congress with the president’s initiatives. As Lyndon B. Johnson famously quipped, “Congress is like a Whiskey drinker. You can put an awful lot of whiskey into a man if you just let him sip it. But if you try to force the whole bottle down his throat at one time, he’ll throw it up.” (cited in Rudalevige 2002, 113). Thus, the failure to prioritize easily leads to overload of Pennsylvania Avenue with Congress at the one end, and to excessive demands and exhaustion for the White House at the other end. The rocky start of the Clinton administration underlines this argument: since the White House did not pursue a ‘rifle-approach’ to define clear policy priorities for its initial months and then execute them, it got lost in numerous legislative battles and mine-fields early on in its first year. Instead it followed a ‘shotgun-approach’ by addressing as many issues as possible at once leading to an overkill and chaos (Rockman 1996; `Sinclair 2000b).

Food stamp legislation all but certainly had enough support to pass on a floor vote if the Ag Committee would have allowed it; President Johnson was even able to get a pilot “surplus commodities” program instituted administratively in 1962. Finally, to save the farm bill, the Southerners struck an agreement to build on the surplus commodities demonstration and include food stamps in the package. This arrangement was permanently enshrined in the 1977 farm bill.

“That historical contingency forever changed the politics of the farm and thus the direction of our country’s ag policy,” said Jonathan Coppess, the author of The Fault Lines of Farm Policy and the former administrator of the Farm Service Agency at the Department of Agriculture under President Barack Obama.

The top four farm bill writers and President Joe Biden will meet Thursday to discuss the legislation amid concerns that an impasse in debt ceiling negotiations between the White House and House Republicans could slow progress on the wide-ranging policy bill for agriculture.

Uncertainty over the debt ceiling led House Armed Services Chairman Mike D. Rogers, R-Ala., on Tuesday to indefinitely delay a markup of the fiscal 2024 defense authorization bill. Subcommittees had planned to mark up their sections of the bill Thursday and Friday.

President Biden invited a bipartisan group of lawmakers to the White House this afternoon to discuss the upcoming farm bill reauthorization. Invitees include Rep. G.T. Thompson (R-Pa.), Sen. John Boozman (R-Ark.), Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), Rep. David Scott (D-Ga.), and USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack.

Stabenow labeled the session as a chance to “have a broader discussion about the farm bill and all the implications for it,” and that it will show “we are working together in a bipartisan way.” She also noted it was a chance for both sides to share their priorities for the bill.

Artificial intelligence companies may have to become a lot more transparent about how they train their models, if a new bill from Rep. Adam Schiff passes in Congress. Schiff has proposed the Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act, which would require firms like OpenAI to list the copyrighted works they use to build generative-AI systems. The bill comes amid a growing outcry about the burgeoning industry using copyrighted materials to inform their large language models, and it’s the latest in a number of Congressional pushes to regulate the technology and protect human content creators.

“AI has the disruptive potential of changing our economy, our political system, and our day-to-day lives,” Schiff said in a statement. “We must balance the immense potential of AI with the crucial need for ethical guidelines and protections. . . . This is about respecting creativity in the age of AI and marrying technological progress with fairness.”

Levie’s remarks fly in the face of what has become a standard position among Silicon Valley’s AI elites like Sam Altman. “Yes, regulate us!” they say. But Levie notes that when it comes to exactly what the laws should say, the consensus falls apart. “We as a tech industry do not know what we're actually asking for,” Levie said, “I have not been to a dinner with more than five AI people where there's a single agreement on how you would regulate AI.” Not that it matters—Levie thinks that dreams of a sweeping AI bill are doomed. “The good news is there's no way the US would ever be coordinated in this kind of way. There simply will not be an AI Act in the US.”

Levie is known for his irreverent loquaciousness. But in this case he’s simply more candid than many of his colleagues, whose regulate-us-please position is a form of sophisticated rope-a-dope. The single public event of TechNet Day, at least as far as I could discern, was a livestreamed panel discussion about AI innovation that included Google’s president of global affairs Kent Walker and Michael Kratsios, the most recent US Chief Technology Officer and now an executive at Scale AI. The feeling among those panelists was that the government should focus on protecting US leadership in the field. While conceding that the technology has its risks, they argued that existing laws pretty much cover the potential nastiness.

WASHINGTON--With a new administration and a Democratic Congress, now is the time to overhaul copyright law, advocates for reform said Wednesday--but the complex nature of the issue makes copyright legislation nearly as unrealistic as ever.

Representatives of songwriters and the recording industry faced off against open Internet advocates at the Future of Music Coalition's Policy Day here in Washington, demonstrating the entrenched divisions that remain within Democratic constituencies over copyright issues.