Iowa was first.
In 1983, before climate anxiety became injected into the American bloodstream by Washington, D.C. consultants, Iowa passed the nation’s first Renewable Portfolio Standard. It wasn’t driven by ideology — it was pro-agriculture and smart market-hedging behavior. A farming state hedged against energy price volatility the way farmers hedge against weather: practically, locally, without waiting for permission from the federal government.
The result is that Iowa today generates more than 60% of its electricity from wind and still pays roughly 13.5 cents per kilowatt-hour, well below the national average of about 18 cents. When energy policy is written by people who pay energy bills, good things happen.
Christina Bohannan has a different model in mind, and it’s a model invented by people who know a lot more about making lattes in Brooklyn than bringing in the corn in Clinton County.
The Democratic candidate for Iowa’s 1st Congressional District carries the endorsement of the League of Conservation Voters; the same national figures who have spent a decade-plus promising the American public a painless energy transition that was all pain and no transition.
States like Massachusetts, Connecticut, and California have followed the League’s lead most faithfully. The result is that all three states now pay the highest electricity rates in the continental United States. Bohannan’s own platform calls for turning Iowa into an energy basket case under the same progressive orthodoxy that has driven costs skyward elsewhere. The voters of the 1st District are being asked to ignore the reality of the Democrat Party’s dystopian energy policy.
It is worth being clear about what is at stake locally. Iowa’s average residential electricity bill sits around $110–$120 a month, industrial rates hover near 6.5 cents per kilowatt-hour, and agricultural operations — the lifeblood of the 1st District — depend on affordable, reliable power for irrigation, drying, refrigeration, and processing. When electricity prices rise, family farms get squeezed, manufacturers stop expanding, and co-ops pass higher costs straight to America’s grocery stores.
Bohannan and her ilk will likely argue that more renewables are always better, and that Iowa should move from 60% renewables toward 100%. But it’s the 40% from coal and natural gas that keeps electricity from spiking when the wind isn’t blowing, and that’s the rub.
In states like California still smitten with net-zero mandates, regulations are blocking dispatchable carbon generation before sufficient replacement capacity is available; tight supplies can produce wholesale prices as high as $2,000 per megawatt-hour—enough to cause a farm manager to dream of a new career.
Mariannette Miller-Meeks supports policies similar to those expressed in the Affordable, Reliable, Clean Energy Security Act (ARC-ES) that will stop this risk to Iowa voters in its tracks. Bohannan’s donors, on the other hand, have misled and gaslit the country’s electorate for years regarding energy policies. They think that ‘watch the world burn’ policies will advantage them in the end, even in the face of rising utility bills in every state where they have had their way.
Miller-Meeks has a record that mirrors Iowa’s practical success and common sense:
- She opposed President Biden’s attacks on American energy like the ban on LNG exports and the slashing of onshore drilling permits.
- She stood against Biden’s electric-vehicle mandate that would force Americans to ditch gasoline-powered vehicles.
- She led efforts to protect hydraulic fracturing from federal bans, recognizing that affordable energy and national security start with American hands-on American resources.
- She sponsored the Rural and Municipal Utility Cybersecurity Act to harden the grid that rural cooperatives and municipal utilities rely on. This is the critical infrastructure that keeps Iowa farms and small towns powered when the wind dies, or the sun sets.
Bohannan, by contrast, opposed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s push for American energy production. She has pledged to “fight” for the same green expansion that her League of Conservation Voters backers define as rejecting fossil fuels entirely. Iowa already leads the nation in wind without that ideology.
Iowa built the template for affordable renewable energy before renewable energy was a virtue signal. The question in the 1st District on Nov. 3rd is not complicated: do you want a representative who protects the energy economy and every citizen affected by it, or someone who will buckle every time a coastal donor knocks on their office door?
Farmers understand hedging because they invented it. They understand that wind works only when it blows and solar works only when the sun shines. When grid purchases are forced regardless of the weather, prices start to skyrocket. ARC-ES codifies the common-sense test Iowa has already passed: Is it affordable? Is it reliable? Is it clean? Those are the only metrics that matter when the dryer is running, the tractor needs diesel, and the plant needs steady power at 3 a.m.
Iowa has not yet been corrupted by 21st-century green cultism. Send a representative back to Washington, D.C., who knows how to win a fight and will always fight for energy abundance instead of energy rationing.
William Murray is a former speechwriter for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the former editor of RealClearEnergy.
