Iowa’s carbon pipeline wizard would rather stay behind the curtain.
Opponents of Summit Carbon Solution’s 700-mile carbon pipeline through Iowa want the company’s co-founder, Bruce Rastetter, to testify at an ongoing Iowa Utilities Board public hearing on the project. But according to reporting by Jared Strong of the Iowa Capital Dispatch, Rastetter and his company have dubbed the request an effort to “create an irrelevant sideshow.”
Rastetter is clearly not an irrelevant player in Iowa’s carbon pipeline drama. Summit Carbon is seeking permission to build a pipeline that would carry liquid carbon from ethanol plants in Iowa to North Dakota for deep underground storage. The project would benefit from billions of dollars in federal tax credits aimed at addressing climate change.
Summit also wants the utilities board to grant it permission to use eminent domain powers to take land easements for the project from reluctant landowners.
Naturally, opponents of the project have questions for Rastetter, Strong reports. They want to know how Summit Carbon will interact with Rastetter’s Summit Agricultural Group, which partners with farmers to raise 800,000 hogs annually, farms 14,000 acres and has assets of $3 billion. Critics want to know how Summit Ag’s foreign investment in Brazilian ethanol might affect the ethanol market here.
They also want to know who is profiting from the project. Good question.
As of this writing, the utilities board has not decided whether Rastetter must testify.
But Rastetter usually lets his money do the talking. Since 2009, according to campaign finance records, Rastetter has donated nearly $370,000 in direct and in-kind contributions to the Branstad-Reynolds campaign and to Gov. Kim Reynolds. That doesn’t count all the large contributions to state legislative leaders, lawmakers and the Republican Party of Iowa.
Reynolds appoints the utilities board. She appointed former Republican lawmaker Erik Helland as board chair earlier this year. Terry Branstad is now a senior policy adviser with Summit Carbon.
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But influence only goes so far. Regulators in North Dakota and South Dakota have rejected Summit’s initial pipeline application. Summit has also faced opposition in North Dakota from counties where it hoped to store the carbon underground.
But those developments don’t seem to matter to the Iowa Utilities Board, which has put the hearing process on the fast track. They must be eager to sequester carbon and save the planet.
“Summit does not take a position on climate change,” said Summit Carbon COO Jimmy Powell, according to state Rep. Chuck Isenhart, who was live tweeting the hearings.
So they want climate change tax credits. But are they concerned about the warming planet and its dire implications for agriculture? Meh.
This is really all about using more government bucks to prop up the ethanol industry and make its product look more environmentally friendly at a time when cutting carbon emissions is a priority. More than half of Iowa’s corn crop goes into ethanol. And we’ve got to produce lots of corn to keep up with demand.
Speaking of corn, the Des Moines Register’s Donnelle Eller obtained data from a new research project showing Iowa is losing 12 million tons of organic carbon from its soil annually. The model used to draw this conclusion, Eller reports, considers factors such as “tillage and an undisrupted rotation of nutrient-hungry corn and soybeans.”
The loss of organic carbon means farmers must use more fertilizer. Carbon loss also reduces the soil’s ability to absorb water, leading to more runoff, fouling waterways, lakes and private wells. It also feeds flooding.
So any benefit from sequestering carbon from ethanol is being washed away by the environmental price we pay for worshipping King Corn. But when your Legislature, governor and regulatory structure are controlled by large agricultural interests and big donors, it’s hardly any surprise.
Voters, it seems, don’t care about the degradation of Iowa’s natural resources for massive profit. We keep putting the usual suspects in charge. We don’t want to look behind the curtain, but we need to.
(319) 398-8262; todd.dorman@thegazette.com
www.thegazette.com
Opponents of Summit Carbon Solution’s 700-mile carbon pipeline through Iowa want the company’s co-founder, Bruce Rastetter, to testify at an ongoing Iowa Utilities Board public hearing on the project. But according to reporting by Jared Strong of the Iowa Capital Dispatch, Rastetter and his company have dubbed the request an effort to “create an irrelevant sideshow.”
Rastetter is clearly not an irrelevant player in Iowa’s carbon pipeline drama. Summit Carbon is seeking permission to build a pipeline that would carry liquid carbon from ethanol plants in Iowa to North Dakota for deep underground storage. The project would benefit from billions of dollars in federal tax credits aimed at addressing climate change.
Summit also wants the utilities board to grant it permission to use eminent domain powers to take land easements for the project from reluctant landowners.
Naturally, opponents of the project have questions for Rastetter, Strong reports. They want to know how Summit Carbon will interact with Rastetter’s Summit Agricultural Group, which partners with farmers to raise 800,000 hogs annually, farms 14,000 acres and has assets of $3 billion. Critics want to know how Summit Ag’s foreign investment in Brazilian ethanol might affect the ethanol market here.
They also want to know who is profiting from the project. Good question.
As of this writing, the utilities board has not decided whether Rastetter must testify.
But Rastetter usually lets his money do the talking. Since 2009, according to campaign finance records, Rastetter has donated nearly $370,000 in direct and in-kind contributions to the Branstad-Reynolds campaign and to Gov. Kim Reynolds. That doesn’t count all the large contributions to state legislative leaders, lawmakers and the Republican Party of Iowa.
Reynolds appoints the utilities board. She appointed former Republican lawmaker Erik Helland as board chair earlier this year. Terry Branstad is now a senior policy adviser with Summit Carbon.
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But influence only goes so far. Regulators in North Dakota and South Dakota have rejected Summit’s initial pipeline application. Summit has also faced opposition in North Dakota from counties where it hoped to store the carbon underground.
But those developments don’t seem to matter to the Iowa Utilities Board, which has put the hearing process on the fast track. They must be eager to sequester carbon and save the planet.
“Summit does not take a position on climate change,” said Summit Carbon COO Jimmy Powell, according to state Rep. Chuck Isenhart, who was live tweeting the hearings.
So they want climate change tax credits. But are they concerned about the warming planet and its dire implications for agriculture? Meh.
This is really all about using more government bucks to prop up the ethanol industry and make its product look more environmentally friendly at a time when cutting carbon emissions is a priority. More than half of Iowa’s corn crop goes into ethanol. And we’ve got to produce lots of corn to keep up with demand.
Speaking of corn, the Des Moines Register’s Donnelle Eller obtained data from a new research project showing Iowa is losing 12 million tons of organic carbon from its soil annually. The model used to draw this conclusion, Eller reports, considers factors such as “tillage and an undisrupted rotation of nutrient-hungry corn and soybeans.”
The loss of organic carbon means farmers must use more fertilizer. Carbon loss also reduces the soil’s ability to absorb water, leading to more runoff, fouling waterways, lakes and private wells. It also feeds flooding.
So any benefit from sequestering carbon from ethanol is being washed away by the environmental price we pay for worshipping King Corn. But when your Legislature, governor and regulatory structure are controlled by large agricultural interests and big donors, it’s hardly any surprise.
Voters, it seems, don’t care about the degradation of Iowa’s natural resources for massive profit. We keep putting the usual suspects in charge. We don’t want to look behind the curtain, but we need to.
(319) 398-8262; todd.dorman@thegazette.com
Opinion: Money talks in Iowa’s carbon pipeline drama
We don’t want to look behind the curtain
www.thegazette.com
