60 Time September 23, 2019
importance. In the long run, that may be
inevitable. The question is whether the
politics change radically enough before
the climate does.Jim Lykam knows Davenport like the
back of his hand. The Democratic state
senator has lived in this city on Iowa’s
eastern border his entire life, and as he
drives me down Davenport’s empty back
roads he recalls how it has been defined
by its most powerful resident, the Mis-
sissippi River. Lykam, 69, points to the
little adaptations that have sprouted over
the decades, designed to make life on the
river bearable: a dirt barrier one business
owner constructed to prevent flooding;storefronts have flooded, mothers con-
cerned about contaminated drinking
water, and farmers who have lost
harvests to a cycle of flooding and
drought in the state. “There is deep
concern about climate change across
Iowa,” says Michael Bennet, a U.S. Sena-
tor from Colorado currently running for the
Democratic nomination. Survey after survey of Iowa Dem-
ocrats have identified global warming as one of voters’ top
two issues, right after health care and ahead of immigration
and the economy, among others.
In previous elections, climate change was essentially a
nonissue. A Pew Research poll released three weeks after the
2008 Iowa caucuses found that just 1% of Americans ranked
the issue as the nation’s most important problem. Eight years
later, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump debated three times
without facing a single question about climate change.
In the early stages of the 2020 campaign, things looked
much the same: many Democratic campaigns offered little
more than boilerplate support for a Green New Deal or an
endorsement of the Paris Agreement. But over the course of
the race, climate change has emerged for the first time as a
top-tier presidential campaign issue. A slew of factors have
contributed to the spike in national interest, from the activ-
ists pushing for a Green New Deal to the warning for urgent
action embedded in the landmark Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC) report released last year by the
U.N. to Washington Governor Jay Inslee’s climate-focused
presidential campaign, which raised the bar for other can-
didates. But climate’s growing political clout is also due to
the reality of daily life in Iowa, whose outsize importance in
the presidential primaries has forced candidates to finally
pay attention.
Since late April, all the major Democratic candidates have
released comprehensive climate plans, addressing everything
from the details of new research-and- development funding
to how they would support other countries’ climate efforts to
how they would change permitting rules for new oil-and-gas
pipelines. Several presidential hopefuls have proposed ideas
tailored for Iowa, including new climate- insurance programs
for farmers and new agricultural- research agencies. At mul-
tiple Iowa campaign stops in August, Ryan spoke at length
about how farmers might one day receive government funding
for capturing carbon dioxide in soil. New Jersey Senator Cory
Booker has proposed funding programs to give farmers ex-
panded access to renewable energy. “At every event, the candi-
dates will talk about climate change,” says Rob Hogg, an Iowa
state senator from Cedar Rapids who has hosted town halls.
This is a glimpse of what’s to come in U.S. politics, as
the country contends with the creeping menace of climate
change, from rising seas in Florida to wildfires in Califor-
nia. “Extreme weather events are waking people up,” says
Steve Shivvers, a retired agricultural equipment company
CEO from Des Moines, who is active in local climate groups.
The climate challenges Iowa faces today help explain why
scientists and advocates are so eager for the issue’s polit-
ical salience to catch up to its ecological and economic