Minnesota Governor Was a Climate Champion even before He Called Trump ‘Weird’

August 06, 2024

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by Adam Aton (Politico Pro Climatewire) Tim Walz has turned a slim majority in the state Legislature into a launchpad for bold climate policies. -- After Minnesota Democrats defied midterm expectations and won narrow control of state government, it took Gov. Tim Walz about a month to pass one of the country’s biggest climate laws.

Then, a few months later, he did it again.

“It’s not about banking political capital for the next election,” Walz said at the close of the 2023 Legislature, after wielding a one-vote majority to pass stronger climate policies than many solidly Democratic states. “It’s about burning political capital to improve lives.”

Now, as Vice President Kamala Harris, the likely Democratic nominee for president, considers Walz as a potential running mate, the governor’s supporters say his climate record shows what Walz could bring to the ticket. He is a former small-town teacher whose style of approachable progressivism resonates beyond the Democratic base — with the receipts, like his climate laws, to prove it.

“There’s just no other governor in the country who can point to a track record like that,” said Saul Levin, a national climate organizer from Michigan who sees Walz cracking the code for Democrats to campaign on climate with confidence. READ MORE

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Where Tim Walz stands on key issues: Abortion, climate, marijuana and more (Washington Post)
Harris Taps Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz As VP Pick, Can He Now Help Boost the Rural Vote? (AgWeb)
Greens groups, biofuels advocates praise Walz pick: The announcement drew widespread praise from environmental advocates for his climate policies in the state, as well as biofuels groups who praised his actions to support those fuels. (Politico Pro)
Climate Advocates Rally Behind Walz as Harris’ VP Pick: “He gets that climate action isn't about politics, it's about protecting our small towns and cities,” former EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy said of the Minnesota governor. (Inside Climate News)
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‘Climate smart’ farming’s fate hinges on election outcomes -- The fine print of the Inflation Reduction Act lays the road map for which farm policies thrive and which starve depending on November’s races. (Politico Pro Greenwire)
Why the Midwest Remains the Power Broker of American Politics -- The election could be decided in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania because their divisions and diversity match the country’s (Wall Street Journal)
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Excerpt from Politico: Walz, 60, led a progressive overhaul of Minnesota during his second term as governor, when Democrats took full control of state government in 2023 — a template for what Democrats hope to do nationally.

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Walz has deep ties to communities Democrats have been bleeding support from for years. He grew up in a small town in Nebraska. He served more than two decades with the Army National Guard. He won a rural, conservative-leaning chunk of southern Minnesota in his 2006 bid for the House and held that battleground seat for over a decade, running as a moderate and bipartisan reformer focused on veterans’ issues.

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But he’s also evolved with the Democratic Party, leaning into a progressive profile as governor and shifting his position on guns. When he first ran for Congress, Walz received an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association. But after the Parkland High School shooting in 2018, he denounced the NRA in an op-ed. As governor, he signed universal background checks and red-flag bills into law.

During his first term as governor, Walz confronted two major challenges: George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis and the coronavirus pandemic.

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He signed a bill codifying abortion access into state law, restored voting rights for the formerly incarcerated and funded universal free school meals. His efforts drew an approving tweet from former President Barack Obama, who told voters to “check out what’s happening in Minnesota” last May.

Walz turned his focus to the national party in 2024, when he took over as chair of the Democratic Governors Association, responsible for helping to elect and reelect the party’s state executives. Last December, he told POLITICO that the stars of the party are in the states, acknowledging that he’s “biased towards governors” because “they’re proven.” READ MORE

Excerpt from The Hill: Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas), who was the first House Democrat to call for Biden to step aside, called Walz a “solid, decent former colleague with good humor, a former teacher and veteran, who represented a Minnesota district usually represented by the GOP.”

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“From proposing his own carbon-free agenda, to suggesting stricter emission standards for gas-powered cars, and embracing policies to allow convicted felons to vote, Walz is obsessed with spreading California’s dangerously liberal agenda far and wide,” she (Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt) added.

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The two will travel later this week to Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona and Nevada. READ MORE

Excerpt from Washington Post: Minnesota must move to 100 percent clean energy by 2040, as required by a bill the Democratic governor signed in February 2023. He campaigned on the issue twice.

In July, the Environmental Protection Agency awarded Minnesota a $200 million grant to reduce emissions by restoring peatland, supporting electric-powered vehicles and reducing food waste. The EPA in its announcement thanked Walz “for his leadership and innovative plans.”

Walz has long advocated for climate reform and is often praised for being well spoken on the issue. READ MORE

Excerpt from Inside Climate News: Ultimately, climate advocates hope a Harris-Walz ticket will help mend the divisions within the Democratic party that worsened during Biden’s reelection campaign.

Partridge (Audrey Partridge, the policy director for the Center for Energy and Environment) thinks the Minnesota governor’s climate record offers a blueprint on how to pass progressive energy policies amid political gridlock and increasing polarization. “He came in with a split legislature and he worked across the aisle on some really practical, impactful energy policy changes, and got those through,” she said.

“He’s been making major progress on energy efficiency and helping low-income families reduce their utility bills, and looking to grow our state’s clean energy economy with high quality jobs,” Partridge added. “He’s been doing that in a bipartisan way for years. And so I think he can bring that to the national stage.” READ MORE

Excerpt from DTN Progressive Farmer: Gary Wertish, president of the Minnesota Farmers Union, has a long history of working with Walz through his time as both governor and a former congressman from southern Minnesota who served for six terms on the House Agriculture Committee.

"He does understand rural very well and he's got a rural background," Wertish said. "He's been a strong supporter of agriculture through his years as a congressman and working on farm bills and especially renewable fuels. Those are big issues in rural Minnesota."

Along with the focus on biofuels, Walz also has been championing more electric vehicles and lowering greenhouse gas emissions across the state's economy. Walz set up a biodiesel task force, which Wertish sits on, to help increase higher and higher blends of biodiesel fuels. "The governor has been very supportive of that," Wertish said. He added, "He's really been a strong supporter of trying to move away from fossil fuels as much as you can."

Wertish described Walz as "very personable" who is "definitely willing to listen and doesn't come into policy conversations with preconceived ideals.

"He really tried to listen to all sides and come up with a solution that fits the issue and helps the majority of people and I have to give him credit for that," Wertish said.

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Walz has worked with Republican Midwest governors to push EPA to allow those states to sell E15 year-round. That goes into effect in 2025. He had pushed for legislation in Minnesota for E15 as well. Walz also wrote President Joe Biden in February 2021 calling on his administration to consider executive orders that would encourage more biofuel use. One proposal Walz pitched was to tighten the Clean Air Act by replacing aromatics in gasoline with alternatives, which would force a shift to higher-octane ethanol.

In 2020, Walz also joined South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds and then-Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts -- all Republicans -- in asking Trump administration EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler to reject 52 petroleum refiner applications for retroactive small refinery exemptions from the Renewable Fuels Standard. READ MORE

Excerpt from Inside EVs: Walz vigorously pushed for Minnesota to adopt California’s strict tailpipe emissions standards back in 2021. His efforts spearheaded Minnesota to become the first Midwestern state, and one of 17 states overall, to implement the Golden State’s strict emissions standards.

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"Minnesotans certainly know that old adage, 'You need to skate where the puck is going to be,'" Walz told reporters at the time. "The puck is going to be in EVs. And that is irrefutable," he added.

Advocating for EVs has not been smooth for the 60-year-old governor. Walz faced strong opposition to his "clean car" rules, which encouraged increased EV and hybrid adoption, including a major legal challenge from auto dealers. The rules were signed in 2021 but came into effect from January this year. They require Minnesota to increase the share of electric cars to 20% by 2030, meaning one in five cars would have to be electric by the end of the decade.

The Minnesota Auto Dealers Association attempted to sue the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency for alleged regulatory overreach. The case escalated to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the EV regulations and declined the group's appeal. READ MORE

Excerpt from Politico: Walz and agriculture
By choosing Walz as her running mate, Harris draws on a politician whose stances on farm policy helped him repeatedly win reelection in a Republican-leaning district. Walz, who served six terms in the House, became a senior member of the Agriculture Committee and played a role in crafting three farm bills.

“He has a deep history on the Agriculture Committee,” said Michael Lavender, policy director for the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. Having someone with an extensive agriculture policy record on a presidential ticket is “pretty astonishing,” he said.

The Harris campaign is counting on Walz’s background to give the ticket more support in the Midwest and states such as Michigan — just as the Trump campaign touts running mate Sen. JD Vance of Ohio’s appeal in Midwest battleground states. READ MORE

Excerpt from Politico's Power Switch: It took Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz — who Kamala Harris tapped as her running mate today — all of a month after being sworn into a second term to sign a sweeping clean energy bill that put in place one of the Midwest’s most progressive climate policies.

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The law requires utilities to supply 100 percent carbon-free energy by 2040, and it is just one in a litany of clean energy bills he’s signed while in office.

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Still, the carbon-free energy standard was made possible by Democrats flipping the state Senate in November 2022 and giving the party a political trifecta for the first time in nearly a decade.

The vote to pass the measure was along straight party lines and fiercely opposed by Republicans. Critics outside the state included Walz’s GOP neighbor, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, who has emerged as a top energy adviser to former President Donald Trump and continues to threaten to sue Minnesota over its energy policies.

Before the November 2022 midterm election (one that similarly empowered Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) to get a carbon-free electricity law passed), Walz had to champion climate reforms on his own, via executive order.

It was something he did in 2021 when the state adopted California’s clean cars rule. The tailpipe rules were adopted partly in response to then-President Trump’s effort to revoke California’s right under federal law to establish tougher tailpipe emissions standards. The Minnesota standards survived a legal challenge from the Minnesota Auto Dealers Association.

Blazing a trail
Between the electricity standard and the clean car rules, Walz blazed a trail for more progressive energy policies in the Midwest. Similar to Illinois and Michigan, Minnesota has a mix of rural and urban voters. The states’ economies are broadly tethered to agriculture and manufacturing.

During the veepstakes, Walz emerged as the favorite of activists who liked that he signed a zero-carbon electricity bill, one of the strongest in the country — and for passing it with a one-vote majority in the Legislature, Timothy Cama and Adam Aton write.

When Walz signed the clean electricity bill, he did it at the St. Paul Labor Center flanked by union members, climate activists and even a utility executive, Chris Clark of Xcel Energy. READ MORE

Excerpt from Inside Climate News: Since Harris’ announcement, climate advocates have applauded her pick, pointing to Walz’s solid climate bona fides. Farm groups across the political spectrum, including those that work to shrink agriculture’s carbon footprint, have, too.

During his six terms in Congress, Walz was a member of the House Committee on Agriculture, where he was instrumental in ensuring that soil conservation measures made it into the 2018 farm bill. At the time, the farm bill—the massive piece of legislation that guides the country’s nutrition and farm policy—failed to acknowledge agriculture’s role in contributing to climate change, and barely hinted at its potential role in slowing it.

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Walz, who spent his early years working on his family’s farm in rural Nebraska, found a political work-around of sorts. That year he introduced the Strengthening Our Investment in Land (SOIL) Stewardship Act, which boosted existing farm conservation programs and incentivized farms to adopt certain practices that improve soil health, ultimately making soils better able to sequester carbon.

“Even as short a time ago as 2018, the word ‘climate’ does not appear in the farm bill,” said Ferd Hoefner, who was policy director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition at the time. “He made soil health, through the SOIL Act, the acceptable thing one could talk about when one was trying to talk about climate mitigation through agriculture.”

Hoefner noted that the last time the term climate change appeared in a farm bill was in 1990, an indication of just how polarized and partisan the issue has become in farm policy debates since then. After that, it “was verboten to even mention the word,” he added.

The provisions of the SOIL Stewardship Act were ultimately included in that year’s farm bill. Farm policy observers also point to one of Walz’s biggest farm-related accomplishments, which was introducing bills in 2014 and 2018 that help small-scale, veteran and beginning farmers access credit and funds for land, equipment and crop insurance. Provisions of these bills made it into the final versions of those years’ farm bills.

The Land Stewardship Council, based in Minnesota, has long pushed against the trend of increasing consolidation in agriculture, which has seen the rise of ever-larger farms, mostly run by large corporate entities. This week the council applauded Walz’s record of working against this ongoing shift.

“What we’ve seen through his time in Congress and his time in the governor’s office is that issues around the future of agriculture and rural communities aren’t partisan—they cut across political lines,” said Sean Carroll, policy director at Land Stewardship Action, the council’s political arm. “Many bills he’s co-sponsored or led are about creating a future for rural communities where we can keep more farmers on the land, where we can allow farmers who are stewarding the land to succeed and make money.”

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Walz has had to balance the economic interests of his farm-heavy state with the climate and environmental issues caused by the agriculture industry, which generates about $26 billion for the state annually. Much of that money comes from emissions-intensive forms of agriculture, including concentrated animal feeding operations that, in Minnesota, primarily raise hogs, or row crop farms that grow corn for ethanol. Minnesota is home to 19 ethanol refineries.

“Gov. Walz is the perfect choice to serve as Vice President Harris’ running mate,” said Geoff Cooper, CEO of the Renewable Fuels Association. “He brings Midwestern pragmatism and sensibilities to the ticket and would ensure rural America’s ‘flyover country’ has a strong voice in a potential Harris administration. Dating back to his days in Congress, Gov. Walz has always been a passionate and effective advocate for renewable fuels and agriculture. He has a deep understanding of the challenges and opportunities facing the ethanol industry.”

Ethanol is facing increased criticism from environmental groups that challenge the purported climate benefits of corn-based fuel. Some research says ethanol’s carbon footprint is greater than that of gasoline.

But in corn-producing states like Minnesota, questioning ethanol spells political death, and Walz has had to tread a bipartisan path. In 2020, Walz, along with three Midwestern Republican governors, appealed to the Trump administration to reject the oil industry’s attempts to exempt small refineries from being required to blend biofuels into their mixes. (One of those Republicans, Kristi Noem of South Dakota, said Walz was “no leader” and called him a “radical” on social media Tuesday.)

“On biofuels he’s indistinguishable from all the other Republicans and Democrats in Midwestern states,” Hoefner said, “which is bowing at the altar of almighty corn.” READ MORE

Excerpt from Wall Street Journal: While many other parts of the country have sorted into neat red and blue columns, the big upper Midwestern states continue to sit on the dividing line between the two parties.

This is no accident. The region is far more diverse—economically, racially and culturally—than popular stereotypes suggest. Indeed, the upper Midwest reflects the face of America better than any other region of the country. As a consequence, the region also accurately reflects the nation’s nearly even divide between the two parties. And it is populous enough to be decisive in the Electoral College, making it political ground zero.

The big Midwestern states “are microcosms of the U.S.: voters of color, urban, affluent suburbs, but also contain a good chunk of rural voters,” says Republican pollster Bill McInturff. “To win these states, you have to have successfully straddled the demographic divides and the issues of concern to various voter groups you will meet across the country.”

Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania are on the shortlist of just six states rated as pure tossups this year by the Cook Political Report. Minnesota is just behind in the highly competitive category, as is the area in and around Omaha, in Nebraska, which chooses electors in part by congressional district rather than statewide. Indeed, there are scenarios in which a single Nebraska electoral vote could tip the balance in the Electoral College.

In the latest Wall Street Journal poll, the Midwest overall was the most evenly balanced region of the country, with the two parties essentially tied there in both the presidential race and preferences for control of Congress. The East, South and West all leaned one way or the other.