For a while, it looked like Iowa’s favorite corn subsidy might be in jeopardy. But even the newly green Democrats are lining up in favor.
Every four years, presidential candidates make pilgrimages to Iowa and preach the gospel of ethanol, the corn-based fuel that pours nearly $5 billion into the state’s economy every year.In 2016, Ted Cruz won Iowa's Republican caucus as a heretic, arguing that the Renewable Fuels Standard—the federal policy that requires billions of gallons of ethanol to be mixed into American gasoline—was a boondoggle.
Some of the Democrats were never going to buck King Corn. Farm-state candidates like Senators Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Sherrod Brown of Ohio have touted their longstanding support for the Renewable Fuel Standard. Vice President Joe Biden also supported a robust RFS before and during his time in Barack Obama’s administration, and he’s given no indication that would change if he runs.
Even in Iowa, ethanol is not nearly as important an energy source as wind, which now provides more than a third of the state’s electricity. But politically, supporting it has become a way to pledge allegiance to the struggling rural towns that have abandoned the Democratic Party in recent years.
In recent Iowa cycles, Democrats have been even more eager to please. As a farm-state senator touting his pro-biofuel voting record, Obama portrayed Hillary Clinton’s embrace of ethanol in 2008 as an election-year conversion of convenience. Clinton then made similar comments after Sanders discovered the upside of ethanol in 2016.
Tim Searchinger, a Princeton research scholar whose biofuels analyses have been published in journals like, says the basic problem is that land is very good at growing corn and storing carbon, but very inefficient at producing energy; solar cells can produce 100 times as much energy from the same acreage as corn ethanol.
“The tendency will be to try to avoid that conversation unless you absolutely have to have it,” Carlock says. “If ethanol is as bad as the science is telling us, we’ve got to get off it or start doing it sustainably. And that’s hard for Iowans to hear.”
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