Iowa Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) was first elected to the United States Senate in 2014. After she graduated from Iowa State University, she served in the U.S. military for 23 years, making her the first female combat veteran to serve in the Senate. Currently, she sits on the Committee for the Armed Services, the Committee on Agriculture, Committee on Nutrition and Forestry, Committee on Environment and Public Works; Judiciary Committee, and the Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship.
Joni Ernst on Climate Change
Sen. Ernst faced criticism from Iowa citizens in the wake of extreme flooding events in early 2019, after she refused to acknowledge climate change as the primary force behind the rising intensity of these natural disasters. The total damage of the Iowa flooding events, in terms of crop losses, totaled $2 billion. Instead of acknowledging that climate change is the root cause of increasing global flooding, instead Joni Ernst blamed the flooding on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that manage the Missouri River Basin for failure to adequately communicate before and during the disaster. She states, “We’ve got to figure out, were they releasing as much as they could have released early on? Were they holding it?”
In 2018, Senator Joni Ernst said to CNN’s Dana Bash that “Our climate always changes and we see those ebb and flows through time”. Her voting record for the Senate supports this outlook on climate change; in late 2019, she voted to uphold the Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule, a policy that repealed emissions caps of the Clean Power Plan. Joni Ernst has a 1% Lifetime Score on the League of Conservation Scorecard, displaying her true lack of support for pro-environmental policies over the course of her career.
Joni Ernst will be running for reelection in 2020.
Joni Ernst and Friends
In March 2014, Joni Ernst’s campaign for the Senate was endorsed by former Governors Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin. During his presidential campaign against President Barack Obama, Mitt Romney claimed that “we don’t know what’s causing climate change”. In 2014, Sarah Palin compared the “hysteria” of climate change to the 20th century eugenics movement.
Ernst’s senate campaign was also endorsed by former Iowa Lieutenant Governor Kim Reynolds, who called climate-change an “over-stated” issue in 2018.
See Also
Sen. David Perdue
Sen. Cory Gardner
Sen. Dan Sullivan
Climate of Denial