The country’s Renewable Fuel Standard has done something few things in Washington can: bring together a diverse set of interests for a common cause.
Representatives from the oil and gas industry, consumer groups, taxpayers and the environment told reporters the Renewable Fuel Standard — an 8-year-old law that required refiners to produce alternative fuels from corn, soybeans and other products in an effort to reduce the country’s dependence on foreign oil — is hurting everyone from consumers to wildlife living in the country’s wetlands and grasslands.
The groups have called for the embattled RFS to end or be overhauled.
“All of the organizations represented on this call have different missions and interests but we can all agree that the RFS is not working and needs reform,” said Steve Ellis, a spokesman for Taxpayers for Common Sense.
The Renewable Fuel Standard has come under fire from a slew of groups who contend it is not working as Congress intended it to when it was put into place.
Charlie Drevna, president of the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, called the RFS “increasingly cost-prohibitive” and “unrealistic and impractical to the point where it should be repealed by Congress.”
Drevna lashed out at Environmental Protection Agency for its role in approving a new ethanol blend containing 15 percent of the corn-based fuel despite the fact that it could damage most automobiles and is both costly and dangerous to consumers. The “EPA continues to demonstrate, in our opinion, a bias preference of ideology and political science over reality and real science,” he said, calling the EPA spokespeople for the renewable fuels industry.
The EPA was widely criticized last week for almost doubling its 2013 quota for biofuels made from grasses, wood chips and other crop residue less than a week after a federal appeals court ruled the government had been too aggressive in setting production levels for the nascent industry for the prior year.
The EPA has called for 16.55 billion gallons of renewable fuels, including biodiesel and ethanol made from corn, to be purchased by refiners in 2013, an increase from 15.2 billion in 2012. The 2013 proposals are open to public comment for 45 days.
Other groups on the call said by siphoning off more land to produce ethanol it has hurt the environment and contributed to food insecurity and political instability around the world.
Scott Faber, a vice president of government affairs with the Environmental Working Group, said in just the last four years the corn ethanol mandate has contributed to the conversion of 23 million acres of wetlands and grasslands, about the size of the state of Indiana.
He said by encouraging farmers to plow up wetlands and grasslands the Renewable Fuel Standard is causing more carbon to be released in the air, leading more fertilizers and pesticides to wash off fields and destroying wildlife.
“For these reasons and others now is very clearly the time to Congress to reduce our dependence on corn ethanol and to make public health and the environment a priority,” said Faber.
Written by:Christopher Doering
Original Publication URL: http://blogs.desmoinesregister.com/dmr/index.php/2013/02/04/diverse-set-of-groups-gather-to-bash-rfs
Discussion
Weekly Email
