Letter to Editor: Good Policy

Federal Regulation, Feedstocks, Field/Orchard/Plantation Crops/Residues, Kansas, Opinions, Policy, Sustainability

August 15, 2016

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by Mike Chisam (The Hays Daily News) A recent article in the Hays Daily News, titled “Subsidized madness,” makes erroneous claims about the Renewable Fuel Standard and ethanol. The article attacks the RFS by using the tired, false arguments that are often levied at the biofuels industry by opponents.

For starters, the article completely misses the mark with its headline, “Subsidized madness.” The RFS is not a subsidy. It is an energy policy that allows biofuels, like ethanol, access to the fuel marketplace that would otherwise be blocked by the oil industry. The oil industry has been heavily subsidized ever since President Woodrow Wilson signed the Revenue Act of 1913 into law. Over the period of 1918 to 2009, oil has received subsidies between $446 billion and $479 billion, and continue to receive subsidies to this day. That kind of government support spanning over a century provided the oil industry with a near monopoly of the transportation fuels marketplace. The RFS was signed into law simply to provide fair access for biofuels and create competition in a fair and open market.

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The oil industry, on the other hand, receives $4.8 billion in tax breaks each year, enjoying over a century of subsidies with no end in sight.

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Ethanol is a clean-burning fuel that emits 40 percent to 90 percent less carbon than the toxic additives it replaces in gasoline.

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Farmers today grow five times as much corn as they did in the 1930s while using 20 percent less land. And, according to EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Inventory, there is no indication that native grassland has been converted to cropland since 2005, the year the RFS was enacted. READ MORE and MORE (Lawrence Journal-World)

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