alt Hacker NewsUhhh I’m going to describe a specific case, but you can extrapolate this to just about every single sustainability initiative out there.
No-till farming has been significantly supported by the USDA’s programs like EQIP
During his first term, Trump pushed for a $325MM cut to EQIP. That's 20-25% of their funding and would have required cutting hundreds if not thousands of employees.
Even BEFORE these cuts (and whatever he does this time around), USDA already has to reject almost 75% of eligible EQIP applicants
Regarding CA’s water: Trump already signed an EO requiring more water be diverted from the San Joaquin Delta into the desert Central Valley to subsidize water-intensive crops. This water, by the way, is mostly sold to mega-corps at rates 98% below what nearby American consumers pay via their municipal water supplies, effectively eliminating the blaring sirens that say “don’t grow shit in the desert.”
Now copy-paste to every other mechanism by which we can increase our nation’s climate security and ta-da, you’ve discovered one of the major problems with Trumpism. It turns out politics do matter!
I certainly agree that EQIP should be funded!
But why are programs like this controversial, even though anything shaped like a farm subsidy is normally popular? It seems to me that things like your Central Valley analysis are precisely the reason. The Central Valley has been one of the nation's agricultural heartlands for a while, and for quite a few common food products represents 90%+ of domestic production. So if this "blaring siren" you describe is real, and we have to stop farming there, a realistic response plan would have to include an explanation of what all the farmers are going to do and where we'll get almonds and broccoli from.
Perhaps you know all this already, but a lot of people who advocate such policies don't seem to. This then feeds into skepticism about whether they're hearing the "blaring siren" correctly in the first place. Personally, I think nearly arbitrarily extreme water subsidies are worth it if that's what we need to keep olives and pomegranates and celery in stock at the grocery store.