Watch "Carbon Hunters" this week

Dwayne Beck, manager of Dakota Lakes Research Farm in South Dakota, alerted me to a CBC program that will air this Thursday and Friday evenings. The one-hour documentary is called "Carbon Hunters" and it's the work of Vancouver journalist Miro Cernetig. Times are Thursday at 8 p.m. on CBC-TV and repeating Friday at 10 p.m. on CBC News Network. If you miss those times, CBC often posts its programs online to view anytime after they've aired on the network.

Dwayne provided a lot of good information for my December Grainews column, which you'll receive in mailboxes in two weeks or so. He's been following the carbon issue for 20 years. Carbon trading and getting money to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will become part of your farm business. If you live in Alberta, the only regulated market in North America, it already is for many of you — and will become evermore so.

Dwayne's carbon colleagues recommended he watch the show. He passed this recommendation on to me. I'm passing it along to you. I expect it will answer some of the questions you have about carbon, and prime you to follow this issue more closely if you are not already. No matter your opinion on global warming, farmers are in a position to earn real cash through initiatives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. You'll want to pay attention to these programs as they roll out.

Here's an excerpt from the promo article at the CBC website:

Carbon Hunters delves into the controversial, little-understood, yet booming industry of carbon credit trading as a potentially workable mechanism towards solving what most people now acknowledge as the greatest crisis facing the planet: global warming.

This is a crisis with no easy solutions. Voters so far seem reluctant to accept carbon taxes so, while we wait for industry and governments to sign on to binding international agreements that will fix limits on air pollution, one possible solution is good to go right now: carbon trading.

Sometimes called emissions trading, carbon offset, or cap-and-trade, carbon trading is attractive to many because it is a market-driven solution that puts a fixed price on pollution, allowing those who pollute to pay and those do not pollute to profit from their position.