Iowa’s congressional delegation mustered a goal-line defense of biofuel subsidies as the last stand in the House passing a debt-ceiling bill that slashes government spending and sets up a showdown with President Joe Biden.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy won all four of Iowa’s votes early last week in exchange for a promise to keep ethanol and biodiesel tax credits harmless for now. The House passed by two votes a bill that raises the debt ceiling so the government can pay its bills and cuts spending by $133 billion next year.
The bill includes tax credits in existing biofuel contracts, but phases them out after 2024. The bill would repeal most of the climate provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act and pave the way for more biofuel production fossils It would also cut spending for food programs, Medicaid, and other “discretionary” programs (presumably while keeping limits on military spending).
Meanwhile, back in Des Moines, the Legislature eliminated funding for statewide water quality monitoring in the final days of the session.
The Iowa monitoring network was considered a regional, if not national, model for comprehensive flow data from hundreds of points across the state.
The problem is that the network was reminding us that our surface water is horrible. Nitrate and phosphorus levels in the Raccoon and Des Moines rivers, among others, are not falling. Monitors report that the problem is generally getting worse.
So, if you don’t have the monitors you don’t have a water quality problem. Or at least you can’t describe where the problem originates. Certainly not with corn, nor with ethanol.
The state eliminated funding for Iowa State University’s Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture. When the state livestock confinement coordinator advised counties how they could use the law to strengthen local control, the legislature eliminated his position. Now, water quality monitoring is going well, and the impact of industrial row crop production and processing is being clarified.
All this will not protect the ethanol in the end.
President Trump tried to get rid of biofuel tax credits. The House Republican caucus was in favor of the idea until Midwesterners called out and put their hurdle game at risk for the nation’s good faith in paying their bills.
Oilfield Republicans said the guzzlers will have their moment, but not for long. Ultimately, those credits have to go, they said after the vote.
Automakers apparently agree, quickly abandoning the internal combustion engine. You can defend the horse and buggy, but I wouldn’t want to invest in the whip business or bet on the oats when GM goes all-electric, and the hottest vehicle on the market is the Ford F-150 Lightning going from scratch. to 60 in rush hour.
You can’t pull the plug on the ethanol and corn markets. It would be an economic disaster. But we also shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking we can pin our prosperity around the corn ethanol burned by the ground transportation fleet. Our biofuels infrastructure needs help moving to its next phase, not spending all our political capital defending the old structure.
There are ethanol plants in Kansas that rely on these tax credits when they barely have enough water to grow corn, let alone distill it.
If we didn’t grow corn where it doesn’t belong, we wouldn’t need an ethanol market to suck up the excess. Nature takes care of this, along with our help. The more soil we send downstream and the more we raise the temperature by burning fuel, the fewer bushels we will give.
If you believe in markets, you believe that markets will find an equilibrium. Iowa Republicans obviously don’t believe it. They’d rather deny that a problem exists (as, for example, American Rivers has listed both the Raccoon and Mississippi rivers among its “most threatened”).
The attacks on ethanol will not stop. The forces are aligned: left and right, environmentalists and oil companies. And nature itself. Climate change is causing unmitigated suffering in Africa and Latin America due to extreme heat and drought. The way we grow corn and what we do with it is part of the problem.
But if you don’t have the data, you don’t have a problem until you can grow corn. The Mayans thought they could get it too. I would like them to send me a postcard to tell me how everything went.
