Kris Kobach targets the Biden administration over climate, Kansas farmers be damned

He hasn’t taken the oath of office yet, but Kansas Attorney General-elect Kris Kobach already faces a defining decision: Will he defend ordinary Kansans — and their environment — or the interests of fossil fuel companies?

If you think you already know the answer, you’re probably right.

Earlier this month, journalists at environmental news site Climatewire examined Kobach’s record and declared that he is “poised to become a new headache for climate action.”

After all, the incoming attorney general spent the campaign season talking not about what he would do to make Kansas a safer and more law-abiding place. Instead, Kobach focused on Washington, D.C., and his plans to challenge the Biden administration’s plans at every opportunity.

Now, Climatewire’s reporters observed, “one of Biden’s signature priorities, climate policy, offers him a juicy target.”

They suggested that he’ll join other Republican attorneys general in opposing White House policies restricting carbon emissions and taking up the fight (led in part by outgoing Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt) against climate-friendly “environmental, social and governance” investing. And they pointed to a 2018 interview in which Kobach stated that “global warming alarmists have overstated their case” on the causes and harms of climate change.

Kobach’s response to the report? Pride.

“The liberal media got this one right,” Kobach wrote on Twitter. “We will stand and fight against the illegal and unconstitutional actions of the Biden administration regardless the policy objective.”

That seems like bad news. Some folks may still call it “global warming,” but climate change is a Kansas problem, too.

The western half of the state is already afflicted by drought, and struggling with the decline of the Ogallala Aquifer. The eastern half is in better shape, but researchers still expect temperatures to rise in coming decades — with implications for everything from crop productivity to the quality of the water we Kansans drink to our very health.

“Droughts and heat waves pose a particular risk to Kansas’ agricultural economy,” the federal government reported in its State Climate Summaries for 2022. “Projected increases in temperatures may increase the intensity of future droughts. The frequency and severity of wildfires are also projected to increase throughout the state.”

Another recent study even suggests that by 2053, some of the bigger cities in eastern Kansas — Kansas City, Topeka, Lawrence and the Johnson County suburbs — will be part of an “extreme heat belt” where residents annually experience days with a heat index of 125 degrees or higher.

Hot enough for you? It definitely will be.

Forget about the future. North-central Kansas is still cleaning up 14,000 barrels of crude oil that spilled last week from the Keystone Pipeline into Mill Creek. Who will defend the interests of Kansans affected by that disaster?

The new attorney general has so far been silent about that particular issue.

Kobach would have you believe that he wants only to ensure that powerful Democrats don’t overstep the limits of the Constitution. The fact that some of President Joe Biden’s policies might limit the profits of oil and gas companies — or that they could slightly slow down the rise of drought, wildfires, floods and disasters — doesn’t actually matter all that much. Kobach would rather be part of the problem than a procedurally flawed solution.

“It’s not a matter of what policy the Biden administration is advocating,” a Kobach spokeswoman told Climatewire. “It’s a matter of whether the Biden edict is a permissible exercise of federal executive power.”

If true, Kobach is unable to see the forest for the increasingly dry, brittle trees. The policy should matter, when so much is at stake.

The more likely explanation, though, is that challenging the Biden administration’s climate policies offers the next attorney general — a man whose eye has perpetually been on the national stage, the next rung up his political career ladder — an opportunity to burnish his right-wing credentials.

Let’s just hope Kansas doesn’t burn in order to pay the price of Kris Kobach’s ambitions.