American Biofuels Deserve Certainty
by Dan Kleiss (Morning Consult) … By all rights, that anti-biofuel campaign should have wrapped up in December 2016, when regulators dialed up conventional — typically corn-based — ethanol targets to 15 billion gallons, the legal maximum. Since then, gasoline consumption has continued to rise, while the ethanol requirement remains more or less flat.
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Yet, two years later, those same oil-backed lobbyists and advertising agencies are still waging a costly campaign with no clear goal beyond destroying regulatory certainty for U.S. farmers and biofuel producers who have invested billions into U.S. energy production, just as Congress intended.
Corn-based ethanol targets are capped at current levels — there are no big changes to fight — and even the most out-of-touch fossil fuel advocates must acknowledge that neither political party would be willing to destroy the rural economy just to claw back a few gallons of market share for wealthy refiners.
All that begs a simple question: Why has the anti-biofuel gang fabricated so much noise, and squandered so much political capital, in an effort to drive a wedge between this administration and farm families? The whole campaign seems divorced from any serious policy agenda.
The answer, it seems, is that after 13 years, the anti-biofuel lobby has taken on a sort of second life. All those ads, front groups, pay-for-play “science” and lobbying groups are big business, and the oil industry has deep pockets. So long as executives are willing to cut checks, the influence peddlers in Washington will keep selling one more big push against the competition. READ MORE
