Other Ag News: NSAC Counters DOE Claim: Climate Change is Harming, Not Helping, US Agriculture

On September 22, 2025, the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) submitted comments opposing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s proposal to rescind the 2009 Endangerment Finding – one of the United States’ most critical tools in the fight against climate change. The Endangerment Finding established the scientific and legal basis requiring Clean Air Act regulation of greenhouse gas emissions to protect public health and welfare, and it underpins most US climate rules. Depending on EPA’s final approach, the rescission could impact regulations far beyond motor vehicle emissions.

The EPA proposal ignores decades of comprehensive, peer-reviewed science and relies almost exclusively on a draft report from the Department of Energy’s ‘Climate Working Group’, a since-disbanded group of five climate skeptics who do not represent scientific consensus. In their chapter on agriculture, the report’s authors go so far as to claim that “there is reason to conclude that on balance climate change has been and will continue to be neutral or beneficial for most US agriculture.”

The reality of farming in the United States tells a different story. Climate change is already disrupting agricultural production across most major crops and regions.

Due to climate change and depending on the region, farmers and farmworkers nationwide face:

• Unprecedented heat and drought that have led to crop and livestock stresses, yield losses, and depleted surface and groundwater resources;
• More intense weather and changing precipitation patterns, heavy rains, hurricane winds, and floods, as well as increasing pest pressures;
• Decrease in quality and availability of forage; and
• Rising hospitalizations and fatalities from heat and more airborne pollution (including wildfire smoke). These hazards disproportionately affect the 3 million farmworkers who do two-thirds of the labor to put food on American tables.

The EPA’s rationale contradicts both established science and farmers’ on-the-ground reality. As NSAC details further in its comment – joining tens of thousands of others highlighting the proposal’s departure from evidence – the Endangerment Finding should remain in place and the rescission proposal should be withdrawn. 

Read NSAC’s full comment here.

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