Iowans Push 2020 Candidates to Focus on Climate Change

January 29, 2020

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by Rebecca Beitsch (The Hill) ... While climate change has been given short shrift on the debate stages, it’s been widely discussed as the state races toward its first-in-the-nation caucuses on Monday. Record-setting flooding devastated nearly every corner of the state in 2019 as heavy rains swelled the Mississippi River at Iowa’s eastern border and the Missouri River at its west.

More extreme weather kept farmers from planting and harvesting, costing an estimated $2 billion in damages and heightening nerves in a state dominated by agriculture

The importance of climate as a campaign theme in Iowa signals how the issue is starting to become more prominent at a time when environmental groups are pressing lawmakers for strong action.

“I think that is a dramatic change from conversations that were happening in Iowa just four years ago,” said Aaron Lehman, president of the Iowa Farmers Union, which has hosted events with a number of the Democratic candidates in the race.

Climate change was rated as the second most important issue in Iowa ahead of the caucuses, according to polling by the Des Moines Register, which showed 90 percent of respondents calling it “extremely important” or “important,” second only to health care.

That marks a change, according to Lehman, who said candidates previously had been “much more reluctant to engage farmers on this for fear of a backlash.”

What’s changed is that farmers are increasingly raising climate change as a threat to their livelihoods — and seeking measures to address it.

“What’s been exciting this caucus cycle is just about every Democrat has talked about how farmers and agriculture need to be part of the solution,” said Tim Gannon, a Democrat who ran for Iowa agricultural commissioner in 2018 and farms corn and soybeans outside the town of Mingo.

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Sen. Elizabeth Warren(D-Mass.) released a plan to combat climate change through agriculture just a day before the release of a United Nations report that advocated rethinking land use, including transitioning farming toward no-till practices and planting cover crops, both of which can help sequester carbon.

“Climate change threatens every living thing on this planet. And the urgency of the moment cannot be overstated,” Warren said during an event in January. “Farmers can be part of the climate solution.”

Meanwhile, former Vice President Joe Biden introduced a plan for rural America that focuses heavily on connecting agriculture to manufacturing.

“We’re not bringing back old jobs. We’re going to create entirely new bio-based manufacturing jobs that are going to deal farmers into the benefits of a new low-carbon economy,” Biden said over the summer.

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Ethanol has also featured prominently in the climate change discussion between candidates and Iowans, as corn growers and ethanol manufacturers are a huge mainstay of the Iowa economy.

“Everybody from Bernie on one side to Sen. [Amy] Klobuchar on that side is talking about a low carbon future in some way, shape or form,” said Monte Shaw, executive director of the Iowa Renewable Fuels Association, which represents ethanol producers.

“Every candidate I know of has used biofuels as a way to bridge that discussion into rural America,” he said.

The biofuel discussion is closely linked with dissatisfaction with President Trump’s trade wars as well as the rising number of waivers that exempt refineries from blending ethanol into their products.

Klobuchar (D-Minn.) blasted the administration during a fall trip to the state, saying the president has done “irreversible damage” to the ethanol industry.

“Discontent with some Trump administration action as it relates to farming has opened up the door for them to come and talk to farmers,” Shaw said. “Linking farms and rural prosperity to a low-carbon future with climate changes is at the center of what I’ve seen.”

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Nonetheless, state Sen. Rob Hogg (D), who organized climate change events across the state, hopes it will end up having an impact on Iowa caucusgoers.

“Climate change is important in Iowa for the same reason it’s important to lots of people across the country which is, basically, we’re seeing the consequences of it on a daily basis,” he said. READ MORE

As Caucuses Approach, Iowa Dems Focused On Climate Change (Our Daily Planet)

Bernie Sanders' $16.3T climate plan would phase out fossil fuels (Politico)

The Iowa Results Are In: On the Issues, Climate Change Is Second Only To Healthcare (Our Daily Planet)

The Iowa caucus debacle could lead to better energy policy (Quartz)

The Iowa Caucuses Have Always Been Terrible (Reason)

Editorial: A corny way to pick a president (San Francisco Chronicle)

Excerpt from Quartz: “I think the Iowa caucuses are dead, dead, dead,” says Democratic political operative David Axelrod, who helped manage Barack Obama’s break-out 2008 primary victory in Iowa. “This fiasco means the end of the caucuses as a significant American political event,” opined David Yepsen, the dean of Iowa political reporters.

That’s good news for those who criticize the months-long focus on Iowa as elevating an unrepresentative electorate ill-suited to choosing the right candidate for a nation more urban and diverse than the farm state. It’s also good news for those critical of how Iowa’s outsized electoral importance tips the scale on public policy, specifically the way it makes ethanol central to US energy policy.

Iowa and corn are synonymous, and one thing that’s good for corn farmers is a federal rule called the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) that requires gasoline refiners to blend some 15 billion gallons of biofuels—mostly ethanol, an alcohol made from corn—into their products each year as a way, the government says, to promote renewable energy and fight climate change.

The RFS has been successful at boosting demand for corn and supporting employment in rural states like Iowa. But despite arguments from biofuels advocates, many scientists who study climate change say that it isn’t doing much to reduce the emissions that are warming the planet. That’s because industrial agriculture has its own impact on the Earth, particularly when farmers decide to clear more forest or grasslands to plant corn.

The Government Accountability Office released a report last year explaining that “the RFS has likely had a limited effect, if any, on greenhouse gas emissions. According to the experts and GAO’s prior work, the effect has likely been limited for reasons including: (1) the reliance of the RFS to date on conventional corn-starch ethanol, which has a smaller potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions compared with advanced biofuels, and (2) that most corn-starch ethanol has been produced in plants exempt from emissions reduction requirements.”

Nonetheless, when politicians are asking for votes, they endorse the rules that keep money flowing to voters—which means Democrats have been swarming Iowa to back a biofuels policy without much evidence in its favor. That’s especially true after president Donald Trump granted more waivers to refiners to exempt them from the RFS—a favor to the oil industry that has Iowa farmers upset.

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If the Iowa caucus is diminished in power in the next primary election, the ethanol lobby might be as well. That won’t remove all the reasons politicians have to endorse the RFS—they still need to be competitive in the farm states during the general election—but it might give them more space to carve out a more effective biofuels policy. READ MORE