The climate crisis is no excuse to make corporations richer

For decades, corporations have grown rich at the expense of the public and to the detriment of our climate. Fossil fuel-reliant agriculture and energy industries have created a political system reliant on environmental destruction, paid for by taxpayers. As we approach a climate tipping point, the same corporations that got us into this mess are holding climate action hostage to their increased pollution.

The federal Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), signed into law last month, masquerades as historic climate action while hiding corporate giveaways in plain sight. Critical investments in wind, solar and electrification are tethered to fossil fuel extraction, and billions of taxpayer dollars are funneled away from clean energy to industry boondoggles like factory farm biogas and carbon capture. These expensive pie-in-the-sky technologies will not make a dent in the climate crisis, but they will keep corporations profitable. And much of that profiteering will take place in Iowa.

Iowa is the nation’s largest pork producing state, where an increasingly consolidated industry profits off a skyrocketing number of hogs. Factory farms produce far more waste than we can handle — two and a half times the weight of human sewage produced by the NYC metropolitan area. That waste emits greenhouse gasses, fouls rural areas with noxious odors and destroys water quality, landing the Racoon River on the nation’s Most Endangered Rivers list last year.

When you’re in a hole, stop digging. The climate-friendly solution to Iowa’s manure problem is to stop the growth of new and expanding factory farms. Instead, we’re paying these corporate farms to keep polluting. The IRA put aside $8.45 billion for the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), a federal initiative that is regularly hijacked by corporate agribusiness to finance schemes like biogas digesters on factory farms. Digesters concentrate waste to extract a gas indistinguishable from fracked gas that is burned for energy, releasing climate-warming pollution. The leftover waste remains to pollute our rivers, air and communities. Biogas is expanding in Iowa — the IRA only enables this trend.

IRA carbon capture provisions are much the same. Rather than stop emitting carbon dioxide, Congress is gambling on a faulty scheme to capture the gas and transport it to injection sites. Under the IRA, investors and corporations behind Iowa’s three hotly contested carbon capture pipelines are eligible for $3.3 billion a year out of your pocket and mine. Food & Water Watch research shows that billions invested in carbon capture to date have utterly failed to reduce pollution.

ADM, behind one of the three pipelines, already knows this. For five years, it raked in hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars from its Decatur carbon capture facility despite consistently capturing half its yearly target (and actually increasing net emissions). Assured of profits, ADM is partnering with Canadian Wolf Carbon Solutions to join Navigator and Summit in the race to build thousands of miles of hazardous pipelines across the Midwest. It’s all reward for corporations, all risk for Iowans facing private property condemnation, crop loss and serious health and safety threats from pipeline ruptures capable of mass asphyxiation.

Corporate polluters got us into this mess, and now they expect the American people to pay them to fix it. But let’s be clear — the climate crisis is no excuse to make rich corporations richer. Regardless of action in Washington, Gov. Kim Reynolds must act at home to ensure fiscal responsibility and safeguard a livable future for all.

Reynolds must reject in-state biogas development and tell her Iowa Utilities Board to deny permits for the carbon pipelines threatening Iowa — before we dig ourselves into an even deeper hole.

John Aspray is a senior Iowa organizer with Food & Water Watch. He is based in Des Moines.