The Minnesota Legislature convened in early January and has been busy advancing major spending and policy bills. The main work of the Minnesota legislative session in odd years is to finalize a two-year state budget. The Bioeconomy Coalition has been working to ensure that funding for the advanced biofuels, biobased chemicals, and biomass thermal energy production incentive programs are included in the two-year budget. The budget currently under debate at the legislature would cover fiscal years 2018 and 2019. Continue reading »
Since the signage of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton and the Swedish Ministry for Enterprise and Innovation on bioenergy cooperation, a Swedish Delegation has worked with the Great Plains Institute to help convene interested parties in the exchange of ideas and to build long-term relationships for potential bioenergy project collaboration.
A problem that is often raised during Minnesota public policy discussions is that state government is not truly representative of Minnesota’s population, especially as the makeup of the state is rapidly changing. The Great Plains Institute (GPI) is serving as a host organization for a new public policy internship program that aims to begin to address this challenge. The
Last year witnessed significant achievements toward the transition to a lower-carbon economy. A historic agreement among over 180 countries to collectively reduce greenhouse gas emissions was reached in
Northern Minnesota has several elements – a strong natural resource base, existing supply chain infrastructure, history of industrial manufacturing – in place to help develop a robust bioeconomy cluster, but there is much more work to do to fully capture available opportunities. 