Use surplus to reduce emissions

On Sept. 27, “Gov. Kim Reynolds announced the State of Iowa will end Fiscal Year 2023 with a balance of $1.83 billion in the General Fund.” She has proposed “returning this surplus back to where it belongs – the people of Iowa.”

Why not do this in a way that would reduce Iowa’s greenhouse gas emissions, which are contributing to climate change and global warming?

The Iowa Department of Natural Resources has acknowledged that the state’s greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture are greater than any other sector. Also, Iowa’s greenhouse gas emissions from crop production are second only to Texas. Energy News Network reports, “Producing ethanol also causes emissions, but that carbon dioxide is not counted under agricultural emissions data. Neither are greenhouse gases from fertilizer production.” In other words, Iowa’s greenhouse gas emissions are greater than the total usually reported.

Iowa City and Cedar Rapids, as well as Johnson and Linn Counties, have greenhouse gas reduction goals. The state of Iowa, however, “has no greenhouse gas reduction goals, for agriculture or any other sector,” the Iowa Department of Natural Resources confirmed.

Charles Stanier, a University of Iowa engineering professor who served on the Iowa Carbon Sequestration Task Force in 2021, observed that Iowa’s “direction is to monetize the agricultural reductions we can achieve either by having the consumer pay into the agricultural sector for the reductions, or to have the federal government pay.”

Iowa’s annual inventory of greenhouse gas emissions, “which uses the trend of inventory numbers back to 1990 to project future emissions, shows emissions from the agricultural sector would increase 83 percent by 2040, if the state stays on the same trajectory as the past 30 years.”

Why not set a goal, like the state of Illinois, to reduce greenhouse gases by at least 26 percent below 2005 levels by 2025? And why not invest the $1.83 billion surplus in Iowa’s future by providing incentives to agricultural industries and livestock confinement operators that invest in ways that would actually reduce Iowa’s greenhouse gas emissions?

Robert Traer is a retired ethics professor, the author of the university textbook, "Doing Environmental Ethics,“ and a climate ambassador for Iowa City.