 But there’s a new Congress in Washington, D.C. Does that mean the ethanol
mandate may be eliminated?
“It’s possible,” said one of the mandate’s harshest critics, Patrick Michaels,
director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute, a
libertarian think tank based in D.C. “Don’t give up on hope and change.”
The fiscal impact of the ethanol mandate is huge — Michaels estimated it totals
“billions, easily” in direct and indirect money — but it has come under attack
by liberals as well as conservatives and appears to have lost some of its clout
on Capitol Hill.
For example, the Environmental Protection Agency — which administers the
Renewable Fuel Standard — is considering a cut to the amount of ethanol blended
into the nation’s gasoline supply.
But that doesn’t mean the mandate is in the legislative intensive care unit,
either.
Last year, two of the most well-known and influential members of the Senate
didn’t get anywhere. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Sen. Tom Coburn,
R-Okla., introduced a bill that would strike the ethanol mandate from the
Renewable Fuel Standard, known as the RFS. But the legislation died in
committee.
Through the first week of the current congressional session, no one in the
Senate or House has introduced anything similar.
“We think the voters sent a clear message to Washington last November. They want
action,” Carlton Carroll, spokesman for the American Petroleum Institute, told
Watchdog.org. “The RFS is a flawed policy that needs to be fixed. There’s
support for RFS repeal on both sides of the aisle. We think the votes are
there.”
“We think the RFS is a groundbreaking and very successful public policy,” said
Bob Dineen, president and CEO for the Renewable Fuels Association. He accused
the petroleum industry of ginning up opposition. “At its core, this is a dispute
over market share. The oil guys have lost 10 percent on the barrel to a bunch of
farmers in the Midwest. It galls them.”
But a growing number of environmentalists want the ethanol requirement
eliminated, too.
Craig Cox, senior vice president at the Environmental Working Group, has called
ethanol an “ecological disaster.” Friends of the Earth has called the mandate
“senseless” and “rather than giving us clean energy, it’s incentivizing biofuels
like corn ethanol that are exacerbating our economic and environmental
problems.”
The Renewable Fuel Standard came into existence in 2005 as a way to reduce
greenhouse gases.
In 2007, Congress passed and President George W. Bush signed into law an updated
version of the RFS, requiring an increasing amount of biofuels mixed into
gasoline — starting at 9 billion gallons in 2008 and increasing to 36 billion
gallons by 2022.
Ethanol was part of the mix and, in 2013, the EPA required fuel companies to mix
in 14 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol. The RFS is supposed to increase
that to 15 billion gallons this year, but the EPA has debated reducing the
number, which some observers described as a potential death blow to the
industry.
The requirements have had a huge effect on farming in the nation’s heartland.
It’s estimated 40 percent of the corn raised in the U.S. goes to ethanol.
“If we took all the corn that was diverted to ethanol and used it for its other
normal uses for feed grains and foods, etc., the price of corn would be much,
much lower than it is now,” Michaels said.
[to top of second column] |
 Monte Shaw, executive director at the Iowa
Renewable Fuel Association, disputes that.
“There’s this little thing called a hundred year historic drought
that happened in 2012 and, lo and behold, corn prices today are
below the price of the day the 2007 RFS was enacted,” Shaw said in a
telephone interview.
Ethanol mandates — not only in the U.S. but also in the European
Union — have also come under fire by activists who say they
complicates efforts to reduce world hunger.
“The mandates have proven an awful way to help the planet,” Charles
Kenny, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, wrote
last year in a column for BusinessWeek. “To produce ethanol you have
to farm corn using fertilizers and tractors, then transport the crop
and process it into fuel. That all takes energy. And in some cases
the land used for farming had been forest that was burned down to
cultivate biofuel crops.”
Ethanol is knocked by critics who say the fuel can hurt car
engines — particularly those built before the RFS went into effect —
as well as smaller gasoline-powered engines, such as lawnmowers and
weed trimmers.
The fuel’s defenders point to their own studies, refuting those
claims.
Last month, the Renewable Fuels Association, released a report
challenging conclusions made by researchers at the University of
Minnesota that ethanol is more harmful to humans and the environment
than gasoline.
“The modeling that those folks in Minnesota had done was just not
borne by the facts,” said Dineen. “You can put anything you want to
into a model.”
Corn ethanol has its defenders on Capitol Hill — especially members
of Congress from where corn grows in abundance. In Iowa, for
example, 90 percent of the land is farm acreage.
Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, has developed a reputation in his 34
years in the Senate as being a fiscal hawk. But he’s a rock-ribbed
supporter of the ethanol mandate.
“Pure and simple, the policy is good for America’s energy supply, as
well as its environmental and economic stability,” Grassley said on
his Senate website.
Iowa also happens to be the home of the Iowa caucus, the first test
for potential candidates for president.
In 2010, Al Gore told a green energy business conference he
regretted his earlier support for ethanol subsidies and tied it to
his presidential ambitions at the time.
“It’s hard once such a program is put in place to deal with the
lobbies that keep it going,” Reuters quoted Gore saying, adding,
“One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular
attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had a
certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was
about to run for president.”
“There are so many constituencies that do not like ethanol in their
gasoline,” said Michaels. “I would think it would be smart politics
for someone, perhaps without presidential aspirations, or even
someone who has presidential aspirations like Rand Paul, to
introduce a bill … to get rid of the ethanol mandate.”
But ethanol supporters say they’re confident the mandate will
remain.
“I think there are lots of concerns out there, but if you really
looked at it, those concerns are unfounded,” Dineen said, adding,
“Only since the adoption of the RFS has there been an opportunity
for consumers to have some choice.”
Rob Nikolewski is the National Energy Correspondent for
Watchdog.org. He is based in Santa Fe, N.M. Contact him at
rnikolewski@watchdog.org and follow him on Twitter @NMWatchdog.
[This
article courtesy of
Watchdog.]
Click here to respond to the editor about this
article. |
