Grassley touches on energy, GOP race in Tabor visit

A crowd of more than 40 gathered at the Tabor Community Center last Wednesday for a townhall meeting with Iowa Senator Charles Grassley.

For more than an hour, Grassley took questions on everything from renewable energy policy and income discrepancy to international trade, tax reform and the upcoming Iowa Caucuses.

The stop in Tabor was one of a half dozen on the day for the 81-year-old senator who also made stops in Mills, Adams, Taylor, Shelby, Cass and Audubon counties. With the senate on recess until after Labor Day, Grassley was using this week to catch up on his promise to visit all 99 Iowa counties every year.

Grassley said the townhall meeting is the best way he has to reach constituents and for them to reach him, saying “you can’t represent people if you don’t know what the people are thinking.”

“I think representative government is a two way street,” he said. “If you’re going to have representative government, you have to talk to each other. I think I have a responsibility to promote that process. Townhall meetings are the best way to do it, but they aren’t the only way. So I come  out and talk to people and encourage them to call me or email and I try to answer every letter.”

Renewable energy and the Clean Power Plan, unveiled by the Environmental Protection Agency Aug. 3, were a hot topic at the meeting. The plan calls for reducing carbon pollution with strong but achievable standards for power plants, and customized goals for states to cut the carbon pollution that is driving climate change. Grassley, a longtime supporter of alternative energy sources, authored and won passage of the first-ever wind energy production tax credit in 1992.  The incentive was designed to give wind energy the ability to compete against coal-fired energy, helping to helped to propel the wind energy industry.

“Today I heard feelings there’s not a good comprehensive energy plan so we should just get out of coal as fast as we can,” he said. “But my approach is we should let the market place make that decision.”

Grassley said he thinks there is still a market for fossil fuels but that continued development of alternative forms of energy, whether it be biodiesel, ethanol, wind, nuclear or solar is a necessary step.
“I think we need a broad energy base to grow the economy,” he said.

Tax incentives for renewable energy projects are a popular punching bag, and always under attack, Grassley said.

“If we continue down that road I think we’ll be okay but (incentives) are under attack from those new to congress who don’t know 30 years ago the popular thought was we were going to run out of oil and natural gas and coal so fast we were going to be importing everything,” he said.

The fact is today, Grassley said, the U.S. imports a third less oil than it did three decades ago and the alternative energy business is booming.

“So my plea to the people who don’t understand what the environment was back 30 years ago about energy independence is lets let these alternative forms of energy mature on their own and we can stand on their own,” Grassley said. “Lets not stop it in the middle.”

When asked about presidential hopeful Donald Trump’s leading in Iowa’s Republican polls heading into February’s caucuses, the senator called the billionaire a great businessman that has gotten voter’s attention by speaking directly to voters concerns.

On the crowded Republican presidential field, Grassley was just as direct.

“There’s too many people,” he said. “But Iowa’s an inviting state. We’re not going to tell anybody not to come here. In fact, we want everybody to come here and come here often. I think it will be December before you have any idea who is going to win Iowa.”

Grassley has no plans to endorse a presidential candidate. In his 40 years in congress, Grassley has publicly thrown his support behind just two candidates: George W. Bush in 2000 and Bob Dole in 1996.

“I’m going to stay out of it,” he said.