Ben Sindt:

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to From the Front Row, brought to you by the University of Iowa College of Public Health. My name is Ben Sindt and I’m joined today by Radha Velamuri. If this is your first time with us, welcome. We’re a student-run podcast that talks about major issues in public health and how they are relevant to anyone both in and out of the field of public health. Today, we’ll be chatting with David Osterberg about his work in environmental health and public policy. Mr. Osterberg used to serve as a Representative in the Iowa House of Representatives and is currently an Emeritus Professor here at the University of Iowa. He is also the Founder and past Executive Director of the Iowa Policy Project, which is now known as the Common Good Iowa, which works on people-centered policy.

Radha Velamuri:

Welcome to the podcast, Mr. Osterberg. Can you give us an overview of how the environment, health policy, and all of these factors work together and maybe just give a brief overview of yourself?

David Osterberg:

Okay. Well, I was at the university for, I think, 17 years. They hired me to do public policy and that’s because I’d been a state legislator in the past, I’d worked for the Department of Natural Resources, and starting a not-for-profit at the same time. This is back in 2001. And so, I always believe that work in a not-for-profit area and research going on at a place like the University of Iowa can be combined and it makes both of them better. In fact, I taught a class for a while, along with Cori Peek-Asa, and she and I put together a class that was predicated on the fact that researchers have information that policy makers want to have and there’s a great interconnection.

David Osterberg:

So, while I was at the University of Iowa, I was also a director of a not-for-profit. So I had two half-time jobs and always trying to make sure that I kept them separate. I always figured that some Republican Senator was going to come in and claim that I was misusing my two positions. So, since 2001, I know how every 15 minutes of my work time has gone to make sure that there was no overlap.

Ben Sindt:

If you can give us a brief overview of what type of environmental policy goals right now you’re trying to work towards, or what’s big picture things that are hot button right now.

David Osterberg:

The thing I just wrote yesterday was on taxes. Now, that may seem really far from public health. Of course, it isn’t because without taxes, we don’t have a Department of Public Health in the state of Iowa. There’s been a move to try to do more outdoor recreation and water quality improvement in the state. Periodically, they tie this to a tax bill. And so, that’s why taxes and outdoor recreation are tied together. What I tried to explain is what a terrible bill it is and why it doesn’t really do very much for outdoor recreation. The fact that environmentalists might be supporting it just helps them pass a very terrible bill. So, public policy.

Radha Velamuri:

Can you talk a little bit more about how policy works, how you come up with these ideas? I mean, you’ve served in the Iowa House. How does policy making in the state directly affect our environment?

David Osterberg:

That’s right. You got to get the votes. So you have to have support on different issues. Here’s another example. This is something I did for quite a while, while I was at both of these into institutions, what was called then the Iowa Policy Project and our department in College Public Health at the University of Iowa. I did a bunch of tours. The first one, 2002, I kind of used a grant that I had at the Iowa Policy Project from Joyce Foundation. They just told me, “Go out and try to make people aware of climate change.” So I took a bunch of my friends and we went to Europe and I paid for it. I paid their way. We had to stay in youth hostels because there wasn’t that much money. But we then rode around Europe, starting in Amsterdam and going up through Germany, up to the top of Denmark. We did that on bicycles and one of the bicycles was pulling a trailer on which was a giant solar panel.

David Osterberg:

The idea was climate change. What can you do about climate change? At the time, Germany was really pushing very hard on wind power in 2002. This is kind of when Iowa had just started its wind power development at the time. But we were doing it for the publicity. Every Wednesday morning for seven minutes, I was at NPR and lots of stuff in newspapers. But the point was climate change is real, renewable energy is a solution, and if you do it right, farmers make a lot of money because they get having those wind farms on their land, they get paid like $8,000 per turbine per year. There’s real money in this for land owners. Iowa can do this. We just kept pushing that idea. In about every two years, we’d go and do another one. Many of them were in the United States.

David Osterberg:

Tom Cook, another professor in my department, DHSRC … I mean, sorry, the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health, Tom went on a bunch of these and we’d always do the same kind of thing. We’d go to places where people were doing something good about the environment, generally about climate change. We’d then bring publicity to that organization, whatever they were doing. But because this was a tour that we were making around the Midwest or in Slovenia or someplace like that, we were getting a lot of press on that issue.

David Osterberg:

So I always believe that you can make a spectacle and that will help you move towards public policy. Now, the public policy stuff of writing a good law that has the right kind of incentives in it, make sure that red-blooded capitalists are going to go out and make some money on whatever the idea you’re trying to enhance, all of that is good. But you got to also find people being interested enough that they’re going to support through their votes. People who want to push that idea.

David Osterberg:

Another example is football hero at Iowa, Tim Dwight. This is before you guys. You may not have even heard him played in the NFL.

Ben Sindt:

He went to my high school. Yeah, I know Tim Dwight.

David Osterberg:

Yeah, Tim Dwight. My God, especially he’s taking kickoff returns and running them all the way back. I mean, he does that in a Super Bowl. I mean the guy who was in incredible, well known. So, we put Tim on a bus, we go get legislators to come with us on the bus, to go out and look at the solar panels that may be already in their area. The strength of that we did back in 2011. 2012, we got the Iowa legislature to pass a law enhancing solar power. Tim was interested on helping us do that because he had a firm that was doing that sort of thing. So, Tim Dwight is responsible for a lot of the solar panels on individual homes that exist around the state of Iowa. The reason? People like Tim Dwight; therefore, they would go right on a bus with him because it’s either they like it or they know their constituents like it, and they would like them being associated with something like this.

David Osterberg:

Public policy is really interesting stuff. If you get a job like I had in the department, I was able to have … the federal grants were just go out and make sure that people understand the research going on here, translate that research to people, or do something on outreach. Boy, those are wide open and you can do the things that I just described and get credit for it. Because remember, the model in the College Public Health is you have to bring in half your money from some grant, generally a federal grant someplace. That’s how we survive as a College of Public Health.

David Osterberg:

I had to do it, I could do it, and I could kind of do what I wanted to do. Also, believing as I do that people are going to respond to interesting ideas and they are going to do the right stuff. Right now, they seem not to be doing the right stuff with the crowd that are in the state legislature right now. It’s real possible that we’re going to move back in that area but you got to show people what’s going on and what could happen.

Radha Velamuri:

Who’d have thought that publicity is involved in public policy? Just that’s kind of funny.

David Osterberg:

Yeah, right. I know. I do lectures on becoming a spectacle and how that might even help public health.

Radha Velamuri:

I want to backtrack a little bit because you talked about solar energy and you talked about wind energy and all these. I want to know your opinions on renewable energy. Which one, maybe not even the science of it, but how you think it can be implemented or your opinions on it, and the work you’ve done for renewable energy?

David Osterberg:

Way back when I first became a legislator, 1983, I worked on a bill that said, if you are a producer of renewable energy, the law already said, well, the local utility has to buy it from you. Because they’re a monopoly and if they didn’t buy it, nobody would. But we set up a way that they had to pay a fair price for it. That was our law. That had a lot of problems. Utilities just hated it. But by battling and battling and battling, finally, we start a wind industry in the state of Iowa. The idea was not to require the companies to have that much in renewable energy. They just had to try it. Mid-American Energy, which serves Iowa City just took off. Right now in Iowa, we have a 11,000 megawatts of wind power. In 2020, it was almost 60% of all the kilowatt hours generated in the state of Iowa.

David Osterberg:

Texas is the leading state for the amount of wind power. It’s a very big state. Here we are second. But as a percentage, no one’s close to us. That idea is to try to get people to try something. When they tried it, they found it worked and wind power is a really, really good way of fighting climate change. Let me tell you how research fits into this. Then, the big environmental group in the state of Iowa, the Iowa Environmental Council and said, “What can we do about health and wind power?” Because people claim that they’re dying. President Boyd says it causes cancer. Wind turbines cause cancer. We need some firepower here. And so, when something like that happens, I go to somebody really smart. So I went to Peter Thorn.

David Osterberg:

And so, Peter and I wrote a paper on what we know about the effects of the noise coming out of those wind turbines and public health and found out that everybody finds out. You don’t know, but there just doesn’t seem to be any evidence. You always have to say, “We don’t know for sure,” because that’s science, but it sure doesn’t seem that it is the sound emanating from those turbines or what’s called infra-sound that you can’t preserve through your ears. You’re getting those waves. They’re hitting you. But we’ve used that all over to stop neighbors from saying, “We don’t want those wind turbines and we don’t want them because they look ugly.” I agree. That’s a legitimate argument. And they’re causing us to have health problems. I don’t know. Maybe not. Doesn’t seem to. Your neighbor doesn’t have any.

David Osterberg:

I mean, you always have to assume. Look, some people have symptoms. Public health scientists have to say, “Okay, we believe you. You’re having symptoms.” But does moving those turbines back another mile do anything, when actually you’re just so angry about them in the neighborhood that that’s what’s causing you not to sleep or to have whatever that you claim. Good research on this that you just cannot find any direct causation. And so, that paper was really important. Getting Peter to do that, he’s another one of these activist researchers. Serves on an EPA advisory board. Now, Peter Thorn is really quite a fine, still a professor in the College of Public Health. See, that’s an important piece. We needed that important piece to go to local county officials and say, “You’re hearing this, but it may not be right.”

Ben Sindt:

Do you think Iowa’s ever going to get fully on green power with wind? Or do you think there’s, sometimes you’re going to have to fill the gaps when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine?

David Osterberg:

Of course, of course. And what you have to do is storage. But the fact is storage, like big batteries to store the energy that got there at noon when the sun was shining and now it’s eight o’clock at night and you need that power. Sure, we’re moving that direction. I mean, the costs are coming down so much that right now, the cheapest kilowatt hour you can generate from a new plant in Iowa is wind turbine. No question. Or maybe a solar panel, but no coal and gas. They can’t even compete. Nukes, we already lost a nuclear power plant in Iowa because it couldn’t compete. I mean, I think we could have nursed that along a little longer because it was replaced by coal. But solar is really the place to push now.

David Osterberg:

I’m part of another really interesting coalition and that is called Blue Green. Blue for blue collar, green for us enviros. Having environmental groups work with trade unions, make sure that when you build those new plants, I mean, if you build a gas plant, it’s going to be union made because so many of the utility companies are organized. That’s organized labor, which means good workmanship, high wages, good safety. Safety, especially. And so, it wasn’t necessarily happening when you put in a big solar array. So, two solar arrays come to Linn County, just north of where you guys are talking to me, and one of them agreed to have, and in a sense local workers, union workers, to do the building of that solar plant. It was, by the way, at the same location of the old nuclear power plant. So, all the setup was there. It was a perfect location.

David Osterberg:

Another one was trying to set up also, another very big one, 100 megawatt. They said, “No, we’re not going to have union guys. We don’t need you.” They ran into trouble with their neighbors. Weren’t going to get approval. Finally, at the last minute they say, “All right, we’ll have union work.” All of a sudden, the enviros, and the unions, come in and say, “We’re in support of this.” They get approved. That just happened two months ago.

David Osterberg:

So, that is another way, and that’s what environmental has failed on. They just say, “We got to stop climate change. We got to have more renewable energy, no matter how it gets here.” I care how it gets here. I don’t want a bunch of people with all the license plates are from Tennessee. People are paid very, very badly. They all stay in motels for a while and are abused in the good, there’s not good safety standards. We want to make sure that when we build out more solar to go along with the lot of wind that we have in the state of Iowa to produce our power, we need to make sure that we have the support of the communities, and that means those jobs have to be good jobs. Got to think about the whole thing. So it goes back to saying, “We can do this if we all cooperate. Also, the other part is you know it’s cool to do this stuff too.

Ben Sindt:

Nice. Thank you for that. So you’ve done work with the Iowa Policy Project and the Common Good Iowa. Do you want to touch on what that group does?

David Osterberg:

Well, Iowa Policy Project and another not-for-profit merged recently. I mean, we were friends. We shared a grant together. In fact, because as we shared a grant, that’s why we merged. Because our funder, this is like $150,000 a year, this is a good, big funder for a little not-for-profit. They said, “Maybe you ought to merge.” We said, “Okay.” I mean, what could we say? This is our biggest funder. So we’re trying to figure out the two different tendencies of the group. The other one did mainly child and family work. They probably were actually more interested in public health than we were. We tend to build a taxed shop here, trying to make sure that taxes were fair. I guess I could figure out how that relates to public health, but not very much. But so it’s two organizations working together and hopefully making the world a little better. That’s why we call it Common Good. We worked for the common good in the state of Iowa.

Radha Velamuri:

So you said Common Good Iowa worked, it’s a nonprofit and it worked lot with taxes and policy. Then you said that you were affiliated with researchers in public health. But how do they work together? Could you go more into that?

David Osterberg:

Well, the wind power example, I think was. We want more wind and Peter Thorne knows lots about public health and we put together the good research that shows this. Other ways in which that is working is to, say, a social determinants of health. I mean, who lives in Iowa and what kind of healthcare are they going to get naturally? Can we make sure that we can expand some things that help families out? Daycare is a real public health issue and that is something that the other half of the Common Good Iowa, Child and Family Policy Center is what its previous name was. It works very hard to try to make sure her that we subsidize daycare so that the generally is a single parent trying to raise some kids can have a place for those kids to go so she, almost always she, can then go to community college or get a better job. That turns out to be public health. Income is public health. That’s what we believe. And so, when we work on taxes, we think we’re doing good public health too.

Ben Sindt:

So we’ve done a lot of discussion on like, as you just mentioned, childcare and overarching green energy topics. Is there any other pressing issues that you would like to see progress or significant strides be made here in the near future?

David Osterberg:

Well, I sure would like this legislature to stop attacking LGBT people. My golly, they just are going after everybody. I guess, we’re all looking at this guy Zelensky making incredible speeches to the Canadian Parliament or to our Congress. You look at that and compare it to the smallness of these people in our legislature, just looking for the weakest people and just deciding to punish them. Or deciding that we’re going to have a tax cut and make sure that tax cuts goes inordinately to the richest people in Iowa. That’s an issue that I’m pretty passionate about. Continue to try to figure this out, again I’m an emeritus professor so I’m no longer teaching on a regular basis or researching on a regular basis, but still trying to figure out how to bring ideas to a larger group of people so they support people who might be a whole lot better than this bunch.

Radha Velamuri:

You’re an Emeritus Professor. You just mentioned that. This is a question that we like to ask all of our guests on the show on the podcast if we have time. Since you’re an Emeritus Professor, you’ve lived a long life, you have a lot of experience, we were wondering what is one thing that you thought you knew going into a project going into working at the Iowa House of Representatives, or anything even, that you were later wrong about or that you had an enlightenment moment?

David Osterberg:

I was the Chair of the Agriculture Committee which really, I mean the Farm Bureau was the biggest farm group in Iowa. They hated it. God, they hated it. But I was the chair and I had a lot of control. And so, I knew that fertilizer companies, pesticide companies were going after Iowa State University and giving them so much money that the reason we, that Iowa State seemed to support big ag all the time was because of the money. It turned out not to be true. Money came from the US Department of Agriculture, from the state of Iowa to some extent. There was not much money, but these guys were clever. It was like every professor had one grad student was on some grant that came from Ciba-Geigy or Monsanto or somebody like that.

David Osterberg:

So we decided that we could set up our own organization with not very much money, like a million and a half a year, and actually start doing sustainable agriculture. Because I had to be disabused of the notion that we couldn’t possibly do this because they had way too much money. They didn’t. They were cheap, but they were really effective. Unfortunately, that Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture was terminated by the same bunch in the state legislature. This is why we’ve got to win some elections. That’s what has to happen in Iowa. That’s a piece of public policy. So, better people, newer people.

Ben Sindt:

So clearly you try to tell people to get involved in voting here, but as a final take home message for our listeners, what is your overarching way to like tell people to get involved in sustainability?

David Osterberg:

Well, the first thing is, speaking to students, damn it, vote. Because students are terrible at voting. And so, I mean, that’s one that is something to do. Vote.

David Osterberg:

Second, work in campaigns. Try to figure out that this might be a way to spend a few hours rather than going to the bars or whatever you want to do. It is really important. Climate change is fundamentally changing this world. If you do not respond, you are going to be responsible for whatever is coming. With the extra storms, the extra unusual ways in which the earth is meeting us. You have to do it. Public policy, first of all, happens only when you have people who actually believe in climate change. Unfortunately, there’s a whole bunch of people who don’t even believe that vaccines work in this state legislature. Look at the Gazette from this morning where we have a state Senator claiming, “Ah, they just don’t work. You have to have a booster so clearly it didn’t work.” My gosh, it’s we really interesting how bad these people are and we don’t know.

Ben Sindt:

All right. That’s all the questions we have for you today. Thank you for coming on David Osterberg, and thank you everyone for listening to today’s podcast episode.

David Osterberg:

I enjoyed this.