This post is by Nat Keohane, Ph.D., director of economic policy and analysis at Environmental Defense Fund.

Last Friday, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce sponsored a panel discussion on the economic impact of climate change legislation. I was on the panel, along with Bob Shackleton of Congressional Budget Office, Francisco de la Chesnaye of Environmental Protection Agency, Margo Thorning of American Council for Capital Formation, and Anne Smith of CRA International.

In responding to questions about my recent study of how climate legislation will impact the economy, I made two key points:

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This post is by Robert Bonnie, Co-Director of the Land, Water and Wildlife Program at Environmental Defense Fund.

The New York Times recently reported that thousands of farmers are dropping out of the federal government's Conservation Reserve Program. The prices for corn and other crops are so high that conservation subsidies can't compete with what farmers can make by planting the land. One reason for the high prices is the ethanol mandate in the energy bill Congress passed last year.

Shifts in land use from diverting food-producing land to grow crops for energy - called "indirect land-use change" - can potentially negate the environmental benefits of corn ethanol. There is still much debate on how to measure it, but no question it's important to consider. One recent study published in Science (Searchinger et. al.) found that using croplands for biofuels causes a significant increase in greenhouse gas emissions relative to gasoline when indirect land use change is taken into account.

Unintended consequences such as these highlight the danger of mandating a specific clean energy technology, and the importance of relying on performance standards instead.

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This post is by Britt Lundgren, an agricultural policy specialist at Environmental Defense Fund.

You may have heard about the gridlock over the 2008 Farm Bill, which was supposed to have been signed into law already, but hasn't yet. Versions of the bill have passed both the House and the Senate. Now the bill is "in conference" to resolve differences over new spending and offsets to pay for the bill.

It's unclear whether the conference will produce a bill that the President will sign. The President has repeatedly threatened a veto, saying he wants more reform of our antiquated system of crop subsidies (a point on which we strongly concur - see my guest post on Grist).

Still, there is much we stand to lose if Congress and the President can't agree on a good a new Farm Bill. The 2008 bill includes significant new funding for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's voluntary conservation incentives programs and renewable energy programs.

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This post is by Sheryl Canter, an online writer and editorial manager at Environmental Defense Fund.

Today, at noon Eastern Time, Environmental Defense Fund President Fred Krupp will participate in a live online discussion on the Washington Post Web site.

The discussion, on Fred's new book Earth: The Sequel, will last for one hour. You can go to the site before the discussion starts to read about the book and submit questions or comments.

If you participate, tell us how it went!

This post is by Catherine Malina, an associate in the Health Sciences Program at Environmental Defense Fund and a survey interviewer for the "Are We Ready?" report.

Environmental Defense Fund released a new report [PDF] today on the U.S. public health system's state of preparedness for global climate change. It's based on a survey of local health department directors from across the country. I was one of the survey interviewers.

Is our nation ready to address the public health challenges of a warming planet? Our survey found there's much work still to be done.

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This post is by Nat Keohane, Ph.D., Director of Economic Policy and Analysis at Environmental Defense Fund.

We just released a new report on how climate change legislation will impact the economy [PDF]. There have been many recent cost estimates, but ours provides something unique. To put the numbers in perspective, we looked at model projections in the context of government data on jobs, consumer expenditures, electricity consumption, and so on.

The models - all from highly respected, independent sources - don't agree on much. But they do agree on one thing: the overall impact on the economy will be very small.  All the models project that, over the next twenty years, the cost of climate policy will be just a few months of economic growth.

The good news coming out of this study is that we can afford ambitious cuts in global warming pollution.

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This post is by Elizabeth Thompson, Legislative Director at Environmental Defense Fund.

Operation Climate Vote

This post is part of a series on the work of the Environmental Defense Action Fund to enact an effective climate law. You can help by writing to Congress.

A bill has to pass both the House and the Senate to become law (see our previous post on how a bill moves through Congress). A climate change bill hasn't yet been introduced in the House, but the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act already has passed out of committee in the Senate.

Whether the bill is brought to the Senate floor for discussion and vote is up to majority leader Harry Reid (D-Nev), and Reid has taken this step. The bill will be considered by the full Senate in the first week of June.

Will it pass? It's possible, but we need your support!

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This post is by Sheryl Canter, an online writer and editorial manager at Environmental Defense Fund.

Climate 411 has great content. But you may have noticed that - until today - it's been hard to find things in our archive. Our topic categories evolved organically as we posted, and what we ended up with wasn't very useful.

No more! Check out our new, improved, and actually useful "Posts by Topic" list. Click on EPA and Tailpipe Emissions or Climate Change Legislation to learn what's going on in those quarters. Our Science category is now broken into subtopics like Arctic and Antarctic, Basic Science, and Plants and Animals. Plus you'll find posts on Health, Green Living, and much more.

Check it out and let us know what you think.

This post is by Lisa Moore, Ph.D., a scientist in the Climate and Air program at Environmental Defense Fund.

There's an email making the rounds lately - an invitation to take a Global Warming Test. It starts off reasonably enough (yes, global warming is real), but then quickly devolves into ridiculousness - ridiculousness presented in a way that looks misleadingly "scientific".

For those interested in truth, here are the real answers to the Global Warming Test.

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This post is by Sheryl Canter, an online writer and editorial manager at Environmental Defense Fund.

Time magazine's cover story in their latest issue is "How to Win the War on Global Warming". It starts this way:

Americans don't like to lose wars - which makes sense, since we have so little practice with it. Of course, a lot depends on how you define just what a war is. There are shooting wars—the kind that test our mettle and our patriotism and our resourcefulness and our courage—and those are the kind at which we excel. But other struggles test those qualities too. What else was the Great Depression or the space race or the construction of the railroads or the eradication of polio but a massive, often frightening challenge that we decided as a culture we ought to rise up and face? If we indulge in a bit of chest-thumping and flag-waving when the job is done, well, we earned it.

We are now faced with a similarly momentous challenge: global warming. The steady deterioration of the very climate of our very planet is becoming a war of the first order, and by any measure, the U.S. is losing. Indeed, if we're fighting at all—and by most accounts, we're not—we're fighting on the wrong side.

Take a look and tell us what you think!