I have been watching videos lately from a young woman who travels around Russia.
She goes to places I would like to see myself someday: Siberia, Lake Baikal, the Ural Mountains. Her videos are quiet and beautiful. There are trains, snowy roads, apartments, forests, meals, conversations, long stretches of landscape.
What struck me most recently, though, was something almost completely unrelated to the scenery.
She cannot monetize the videos.
Google deactivated Russia-based AdSense accounts in August 2024, and YouTube still says that creators with Russia-based AdSense accounts cannot monetize their channels. The restriction is one of a long series of measures connected to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
That makes sense at the level where we usually discuss international affairs.
Russia invaded Ukraine. Other countries and international companies responded. Sanctions and restrictions followed.
But then the abstraction travels downward.
Eventually it reaches somebody filming Lake Baikal.
That is where the situation starts to feel different.
It is easy to talk about countries as though they were people.
Russia invaded.
America threatened.
China wants.
France objects.
Iran retaliates.
We do this because it is useful shorthand. Governments really do act on behalf of states, and those actions have consequences.
But nations contain millions of people who may have had almost nothing to do with those decisions.
Drive across northern or western Iowa and one feature of the landscape becomes hard to miss.
There are cornfields, grain elevators, small towns, long straight roads, and, increasingly, enormous white wind turbines turning above all of it.
That would not be especially surprising in a state known for aggressive climate politics.
Iowa is not such a state.
Donald Trump won 55.7 percent of Iowa's presidential vote in 2024. Republicans currently hold large majorities in both chambers of the state legislature. Iowa has moved decisively toward the Republican Party over the past decade. (Iowa Secretary of State)
And yet, in 2024, 62.84 percent of all electricity generated in Iowa came from wind.
Coal supplied about 21 percent. Natural gas supplied about 14 percent.
Wind was not a boutique supplement to Iowa's electrical system. It was the system's dominant source of generation. (Iowa Utilities Commission)
At first glance, there seems to be a political contradiction here.
Renewable energy has become entangled with climate politics in the United States, and climate politics has become sharply partisan. One might therefore expect the country's most wind-dependent states to resemble the country's most environmentally progressive states.
But Iowa suggests that this is the wrong way to think about it.
The more interesting question is not why a Republican state somehow tolerates wind power.
It is how wind power became useful enough that tolerating it ceased to be the point.
