Build Back What? Sounds Pretty Expensive.

By ART CULLEN

Semis full of grain rumble into Marathon and Albert City with the harvest fully engaged. Everyone wonders how the drought will reckon on yields. Prices have been strong, although off from their highs. Politics probably is not top of mind. Grain quality is.

Governor Kim Reynolds announced a $1.2 billion budget surplus. Her approval rating in the Iowa Poll is 55%. Sen. Chuck Grassley appears poised to vanquish yet another challenger en route to an eighth term at age 89. President Joe Biden’s Iowa approval rating is below 40%.

Most Iowans have no idea what Build Back Better is about. Go ahead, blame the media. What they recall is a $3.5 trillion reconciliation something-or-other that sounds gargantuan and must raise my taxes. They know that Democrats are fighting among themselves in Congress, and that Biden had to trudge up the Hill and declare it will be done in six hours or six weeks.

What will be done?

We’re not sure about that. They were talking free community college, child care aid, making the child tax credit permanent, increasing Pell Grants (huge for Buena Vista University). But it’s all up for grabs in the Democratic cloak room in the Capitol.

Included in that uncertainty is important legislation to jump-start a clean energy economy that could spark a complete transformation of rural Iowa’s economy.

We’re already the leader in wind, with Texas, and biofuels. We could lead in solar with the right incentives. Biden’s plan, so poorly sold so far, would set clean electricity standards, expand tax credits for electric vehicles, and lay down enough seed capital to help attract the massive capital it will take to get to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

Based on models by Princeton University economists and engineers, the Upper Midwest will explode with jobs over the next decade in a transition to clean electricity and transportation. It will be a center for hydrogen generation through biomass production (switchgrass, in the model), which Princeton estimates could fetch farmers five times more per acre than corn.

It took a modest wind energy portfolio from the Iowa Legislature to create the turbines on our horizon today. Likewise, it will take federal clean energy standards and investments to steer us toward a sustainable future with good jobs in rural areas. With California burning, and freak weather wreaking havoc on the Great Plains, we need the climate provisions in this bill to pass.

Fiddle with the child tax credit lifespan. Mess around with community college costs. Promise Sen. Joe Manchin three solar jobs for every coal miner in West Virginia, plus battery manufacturing centers up and down Appalachia. Do what it takes. We don’t have much time. Any step forward is a step in the right direction.

The change is occurring, albeit slowly. Iowa farmers are expanding their use of cover crops that help battle climate change and surface water pollution. But it’s still under 5% of acreage. They need profit incentives. Two pipelines already are scheduled to capture CO2 from Northwest Iowa ethanol plants and shoot it for burial deep under Southern Illinois. When Democratic presidential candidate John Delaney told me about this three years ago I thought he had been to a Rube Goldberg convention. But here it is.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack last week launched a pilot program to use the Commodity Credit Corporation to eventually pay farmers for conservation services. Cover crops, for example, will be quantified for their conservation benefits (presumably beyond carbon capture) and paid accordingly by new carbon markets. It’s not much, but it’s a start to amassing the capital into carbon markets to make a difference. The contours of the next farm bill are taking shape to embrace “climate-smart” practices that lead the way to a sustainable food and energy supply. The foundation first must be laid in an overall clean energy strategy, that could be sacrificed in the zeal to get off that $3.5 trillion mark.

Iowa has a lot at stake as the framework is built. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi expected a vote on a companion infrastructure bill, already passed by the Senate, by Oct. 31. Taken together, with a new farm bill layered over them, the Midwest can be set on a growth trajectory not seen since we broke the sod. Few Iowans appreciate the implications. They remember $3.5 trillion, even if it turns out to be a third as much and doesn’t raise taxes. That rap rests with Biden alone.

Art Cullen, managing editor of The Progressive Populist, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in his day job as editor of The Storm Lake Times in northwest Iowa (stormlake.com). He is author of the book “Storm Lake: Change, Resilience, and Hope from America’s Heartland.” A documentary film, “Storm Lake,” on the challenges of running a rural biweekly paper during a pandemic, will appear Nov. 15 on the Independent Lens series on PBS. Email times@stormlake.com.

From The Progressive Populist, November 1, 2021

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