Agriculture’s contribution to climate change is much more substantial than official figures suggest. We will not be able to achieve our overall mitigation goals unless agricultural emissions sharply decline. Farms and ranches can be a major part of the climate solution, while protecting biodiversity, strengthening rural communities, and improving the lives of the workers who cultivate our crops and rear our animals. Agriculture climate solutions are critical elements both in ensuring our food security and in limiting climate change. This Article, excerpted from Farming for Our Future: The Science, Law, and Policy of Climate-Neutral Agriculture (ELI Press 2021), provides the current state of emissions in the agriculture sector, and argues that we must transform agriculture from one of the world's largest emitters of greenhouse gases into a net sink.

The rapid transition of energy resources from fossil fuels toward renewables has been widely recognized as an essential tool in mitigating climate change. Yet, renewable energy development projects and facilities can be land use-intensive and have the potential to negatively impact conservation areas. To attempt to tackle these issues, President Joseph Biden signed Executive Order No. 14008, Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad, which (1) outlines a way forward for increasing both renewable energy production and acreage of conservation areas, and (2) pledges a target of conserving 30% of the nation's lands and waters by 2030. On September 28, 2021, the Environmental Law Institute hosted a panel of experts that explored the intersections of climate mitigation, renewable energy development, and biodiversity conservation. This Dialogue presents a transcript of that discussion, which has been edited for style, clarity, and space considerations.

Courts across the globe recognize that human-induced climate change leads to more frequent and severe extreme weather and other events, resulting in significant damages to persons and property. Although courts have therefore ordered countries and corporations to take more aggressive actions to limit their greenhouse gas emissions, no court has yet required any emitter to pay damages for injuries from a climate changerelated event. Causation issues remain a significant obstacle to such claims. To overcome this obstacle, this Article proposes using causal and liability standards that have long been applied in tort claims involving diffuse environmental pollution. Specifically, the “necessary element of a sufficient set” approach, when combined with proportional liability, may allow a plaintiff to establish an entity’s emissions as a legally relevant cause of a specific climate-related injury. The Article reviews the laws of five key jurisdictions, concluding that the proposed approach may successfully establish a legally relevant causal link in most, if not all, of them, with varying success depending on the climate change-related event in question.