Odd Bedfellows: Farmers And Greens Square Off Against Biden And GOP

"White House support for an “interstate CO2 highway system” is scrambling alliances in Iowa."

"HARDIN COUNTY, Iowa — Kathy Stockdale is no climate activist. The corn and soybean grower and conservative Christian says God controls the weather — “not the carbon dioxide.”

Until now, Stockdale and her husband Ray couldn’t imagine linking arms with the Sierra Club, a critic of the corn ethanol industry and an environmental ally of President Joe Biden.

But in this overwhelmingly Republican part of central Iowa, farmers who sell their crop to ethanol makers, like the Stockdales, have been thrust into Biden’s search for a climate policy that both slashes greenhouse gas emissions and satisfies crosscutting political interests.

At the center of the drama are three proposed carbon dioxide pipelines — greenhouse gas superhighways that would traverse the nation’s breadbasket, carrying emissions from ethanol refineries to storage in underground rock formations in North Dakota and Illinois."

Ariel Wittenberg reports for E&E News with photographs by Francis Chung May 29, 2022.

Source: E&E News, 05/30/2022