POLICY ISSUES
This campaign launched March 11, 2025. Since the beginning, we’ve talked about taking a different path to achieve a different result. I intend to look at past, current, and future legislation through a lens of restore, reform, and repeal. What legislation has passed that negatively impacts our country and that needs to be repealed? What has been taken away that should be restored? And lastly, what in our political system needs to be reformed?
This isn’t your typical campaign, and this isn’t your typical issues section. Our intent wasn’t to tell people what to think, but rather to listen to their concerns. In response to what we heard, this is our plan to improve the lives of the people we seek to serve.
Environment
We only have one earth, and we have not been treating it with the respect it deserves. Every respected scientific body agrees that man-made climate change is a real and urgent crisis. Republicans have destroyed the authority of the EPA to enforce environmental regulations that keep our water and air clean. Our public lands are under threat of being sold to the highest bidder.
The Sierra Club has said of H.R.1 (the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill), “It is not an overstatement to say this is the most anti-environment bill in history.” H.R. 1 rolled back funding and tax incentives for the development and use of clean energy technology, encouraging companies to increase their reliance on nonrenewable, more toxic fossil fuels. Green tech like solar and wind farms is not not only the cleanest form of energy, but also the cheapest. Cutting back on these initiatives not only hurts the environment, but also your pocketbooks with rising power bills and job cuts for workers in the green energy industries.
H.R. 1 also opened up millions of acres of public land for potential coal mining and oil and gas drilling. This will contribute to further destruction and pollution closer to our backyards, in the sensitive ecosystems that we appreciate for their natural beauty and abundant resources. This is all done solely to profit the fossil fuel industries, which “are poised to receive $18 billion in new handouts over the next 10 years.” (Sierra Club)
Additionally, the Environmental Protection Agency is now rescinding the scientific and legal finding that it has relied on for nearly twenty years and stripping its own ability to regulate emissions from vehicles, oil refineries, and factories. This action will upend most U.S. policies aimed at curbing climate change and essentially speed up climate change.
We need to be multi-generational stewards of our air, water, and soil. As Minnesotans we are lucky to have so many beautiful, pristine places right in our backyard. The Boundary Waters is the prime example, and I would do all I can to protect this space. There aren’t enough of these places left on earth, and it is our responsibility to preserve them so future generations can experience their splendor as we have.
We should keep public lands public, for the enjoyment of all. Regulated, respected public lands ensure that all hikers, fishers, and hunters in Minnesota can enjoy the fruits of nature. Corporations that want to extract as much profit as possible from our forests and rivers have no reason to keep those ecosystems healthy and replenished season after season. Instead, they extract, pollute, and disrupt until our local communities can no longer enjoy the nature they always have loved and relied on for food and spiritual nourishment.
Instead of eliminating incentives and programs for clean energy like solar and wind power, we should be investing in these more efficient and sustainable forms of energy.
A conservationist approach doesn’t always mean a hands-off approach. Being a good steward sometimes means taking care of the land, like our farmers do. Environmental activists and agricultural workers are teammates, not enemies. It’s essential to think about sustainable agriculture so we can preserve our farmland and keep it productive for future generations. My wife’s grandfather has a farm down by Rochester. When they first got to the farm back in the horse and plow days, it was the last land anyone would want to farm. He worked to level it off, but left grass in the water runaways and left buffers, leaving a lot of the land untilled. He could have taken down every tree and had more room for growing in the short term, but he prioritized the long term health of the land.
I’m a fan of scalable regulations for agriculture. I support small farmers, and there are a lot of small farms where the cost to be compliant outweighs the benefits of being compliant.
