Last week a man in Canberra told a press conference that the rules keeping companies from polluting for free had outlived their usefulness. The EPA in Washington made the same move in September, rolling back every greenhouse gas standard for power plants. One was Australian federal politics. The other was our EPA. The effect where I live is the same.
Here is what you can see if you drive the back roads south of Friendship in August. The corn is either jaw-high or it is not. The difference is water, and the water comes from the sky or it does not. Twelve years of notebook entries track the ice-out dates on Petenwell and the first-hard-frost dates on my property and the spring when the mosquitoes showed up three weeks ahead of the calendar. The trend is not ambiguous. The wet years are wetter. The dry years come faster. The storm windows I put on in October sometimes need to come off in February because a chinook pushes fifty degrees through central Wisconsin in the middle of winter.
Those are observations. Here is what happens when a legislature repeals the rules designed to slow the damage.
Pete Holding is a sheep and crop farmer near Harden in New South Wales. He belongs to Farmers for Climate Action, a group representing more than eight thousand Australian farmers. When Angus Taylor announced he would repeal emissions standards, vehicle fuel rules, offshore wind permits, and the national net-zero target — several of them policies his own party originally introduced — Holding did not write a policy paper. He said something any dairy farmer in Adams County would recognize: more pollution means more fires, more droughts, and higher insurance premiums.
That sentence contains the entire argument. It is arithmetic, not ideology. Adams County farmers already know the arithmetic. Crop yields swing harder year to year than they did a decade ago. The well-water nitrate numbers on the south side of the county trend upward in wet years because the manure runs off faster. Hail insurance on potatoes — the crop Heartland Farms grows by the thousands of acres — costs what it costs because the weather does what the weather does, and the weather is doing more of it.
Now imagine a government promising to make all of that cheaper. The word Taylor used in Canberra was “affordability.” Dan Tehan, his energy spokesperson, introduced a bill to redirect the Australian Energy Regulator toward “affordability and reliability” while gutting the renewable energy build-out that every independent analysis in the country has identified as the cheapest path to lower wholesale electricity. This is like telling a mechanic the problem with the truck is that it runs too clean.
The political play is the same one the EPA just ran here. The September repeal of greenhouse gas standards for power plants is the domestic version of the same strategy: tell people the rules cost too much, promise relief, and deliver it to the companies that profit from the pollution. Here in Adams County, that means Dairyland Power Cooperative — which serves the central Wisconsin sand counties and has already committed to retirement of its aging fossil capacity — operating in a policy environment where the federal government is stripping the incentive structure that made those retirements economical. The new rule is: you can emit what you want because no one in Washington will stop you. The bill arrives in Adams County in the form of higher wholesale power costs passed through to the membership of Adams-Columbia Electric Cooperative, which is the utility my shop is wired to and the one Sara pays each month from the school district paraprofessional salary that keeps our family insured.
Abolishing the 2050 net-zero target sounds abstract until you look at what it actually anchors. In Australia it is the floor under which international investment, trade agreements, and defence partnerships are being rebuilt. In the United States, the analogous structure is the clean energy tax credits — the 45X manufacturing credits, the IRA farm conservation provisions — that Republicans in Congress are already trying to claw back. Adams County does not have a solar panel manufacturer. But Adams County has farmers who could sign up for Conservation Stewardship Program contracts paid for by that money, and Adams County has a rural electric cooperative that was selected for the IRA’s New ERA program funding alongside Dairyland Power. That is the connection between a press conference in Canberra and the Co-op bill on Sara’s kitchen counter. The money is real. The programs are real. The repeal is real.
Taylor said “Australia has done its bit.” The line is doing political work: it flatters a country into believing the problem is solved so it can stop paying attention to the cost of solving it. We have heard that line in Wisconsin too. We have heard it every time a legislature has pre-empted local water-quality standards, every time a state has weakened the rules on concentrated animal feeding operations, every time a federal administration has told farmers the conservation money is coming but never arrives at the scale the land requires. The line is always the same. The people who say it do not live on the land it describes.
When he says Australia has done its bit, the farmers near Harden hear something different than what Taylor intends. They hear: the fires that burned your neighbors’ properties last summer were a one-time event. The drought that dried your paddock is not coming back. The insurance premium that doubled in three years has nothing to do with policy choices. Pete Holding hears that and calls it what it is.
Here is what doing your bit actually looks like. A family in Adams County that installs a home battery on the solar panels — the kind of investment the IRA’s 30% tax credit was designed to make affordable — pays off the system in seven years and runs its meter backward for the next fifteen. A community that keeps its wind farms and solar arrays built under policy certainty attracts a factory that assembles the battery casings or the inverter components. A cooperative that can plan on thirty years of clean-energy investment, not four-year political cycles, keeps its rates competitive with the investor-owned utilities that serve the Fox Valley and Milwaukee suburbs.
Repeal does not freeze time. It picks a direction. Taylor’s plan does not leave Australia where it is. It sends capital, skilled workers, and supply chains to the countries that kept their policies in place — China, which manufactures the majority of the world’s solar panels; the EU, whose carbon border adjustment makes carbon-intensive imports progressively more expensive in its market; even the United States, where despite the EPA’s September repeal the 45X manufacturing credits and IRA tax infrastructure remain in place and companies are building battery plants in states that did not flip-flop on their energy policy. Adams County does not compete with Shenzhen for solar-panel contracts. But Adams County competes with every other rural county in this country for the investment that stable energy policy attracts, and repealing the rules that made that investment pencil out is a way of telling every factory and every co-op and every farmer that Wisconsin is not serious about the next twenty years.
Wendell Berry wrote that the question is not whether we love the land, but whether we will act on what the land is telling us. The notebook says the ice goes out earlier. The well data says the nitrates go up. The insurance premiums say the storms get worse. The farm income statement says the margins get tighter. Angus Taylor says Australia has done its bit. The EPA says the power plants can emit what they want. Here in Adams County the corn is either jaw-high or it is not, and the difference keeps getting wider every year.
The people who propose these repeals will not pay the cost. Pete Holding in Harden will pay it in sheep and insurance. The family on County G with the private well will pay it in nitrate tests. Sara and I will pay it on the Co-op bill. The school district will pay it when the heating budget climbs again. That is who “done its bit” means — not the politicians, but the people who live where the policy lands.