Sen. Grassley Honored for Lifetime Achievement in Bioenergy

by Cindy Zimmerman (AgWired.com) Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) was honored at the Advanced Bioeconomy Leadership Conference (ABLC) in Washington DC this week with the Holmberg Award for Lifetime Achievement in Bioenergy. Accepting the award, Grassley said he was honored, but noted that his “work’s not done yet.”

The Iowa senator, who has been a champion of renewable energy for decades, gave a fiery address to the conference culminating in a challenge to the fossil fuel industry to support the “all of the above” energy strategy. “If there’s anybody here, particularly from the oil industry, that disagrees with me, I’d like to remind you that I have supported your industry – all of the above!”

The ABLC program started Thursday morning with a bioeconomy policy forum featuring many of those “all of the above” choices for transportation fuel, including advanced biofuels, ethanol, biodiesel and renewable natural gas (RNG). READ MORE includes AUDIO

Excerpts from Politico's Morning Energy: "I have no idea what he's talking about. None. I've never heard any such thing." Grassley earlier this week called Trump's comment (that windmills cause cancer) "idiotic." READ MORE

Excerpts from The Daily Reporter: He is the president of the Senate and chairman of the Finance Committee which gives him much power in Congress. He has been in the Senate since 1981 and is 85 years old. He is called a farmer but I doubt that he has driven a tractor with auto-steer. He has held state or federal elected office since 1959, so has been around a lot of blocks. He does represent Iowa values, independent agriculture producers and has been a fighter for the U.S. agriculture and renewable fuels sectors. That doesn't mean that he always wins.

When I hear arguments for term limits, I always think of Grassley as the example of why sometimes that would not be good.

I noted that Grassley doesn't always win. One example is his long-running fight against concentration in the agriculture sector. He fought to bar meat-packers from owning livestock and he has fought mergers of large agribusiness seed, chemical and fertilizer companies. He frankly hasn't got much to show for any of it. Even when Dow-Dupont or Bayer-Monsanto mergers produced high Herfindahl-Hirschman industry concentration numbers, Grassley cannot get the feds to intercede.

He has pushed back against Trump with little success as well. He told him to declare a win, drop steel-aluminum tariffs on Canada and Mexico and finish the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. Trump hasn't listened.

Grassley has worked with the top officials at the Homeland Security Department and declared that they were good public servants and that Trump should not purge them. Trump did not listen. The reason that they are being fired is that they were good public servants. When given an immoral or illegal order they would not follow it, so had to go. You know what that will eventually leave us with in charge at Homeland Security?

Grassley is a strong proponent of renewable energy. He is the father of the wind energy industry, authoring the federal wind energy tax credit. Trump's recent denigration of wind energy was more than Grassley could take prompting a "he is an idiot" comment, referring to the president. Grassley has joined a long line of government servants who have uttered that comment about Trump. Again, noting that while a fighter, Grassley doesn't always win ... you have to define what is winning in Washington. He went head to head over Renewable Fuel Standard RIN waivers with Ted Cruz and lost the argument as Trump allowed them to be approved, significantly damaging the enforcement mechanism of the RFS. This resulted in a collapse of RIN values making it easier for petroleum interests to buy a RIN rather than blend ethanol. Petroleum prices have gone up while ethanol prices diverged by falling. Ethanol margins turned bad despite cheap corn and U.S. Department of Agriculture has revised the corn crush for ethanol lower in three supply and demand reports inflating the corn carryover. That carried right through to corn farmers bottom lines.

Trump's buddy, Carl Icahn's refinery, saved $189 million in RIN costs which means they didn't blend ethanol. The approval of E15 may have long term potential but the way they have drug out the regulatory process it will be of long-term benefit rather than immediate. So, Grassley and ethanol interests lost right? The easy answerer is “yes” but Ted Cruz was also pushing to tack RINs on to ethanol exports which would have enlarged the supply of RINs further making them even less incentive to blend biofuel. Grassley pushed back hard enough to at least stop that. Without Grassley, the push to attach RINs to ethanol exports would resurface quickly.

The $1 a gallon biodiesel tax credit is always off and on but it would be off permanently without the persistent push from Grassley to reinstate it. Chairmen of the Finance Committee can wield great power over such things.

When he lost on the RIN waivers, which was a really big thing, he protected Trump by blaming it on Scott Pruitt. That way Trump did not get the attribution and retribution for damaging the ethanol industry that was deserved. He continued to play along by voting to confirm Andrew Wheeler to head EPA without any commitment that the RIN waivers would stop. One could say that Grassley is playing the long game, but if they kill the RFS short term, there is no long term. The flaw is in his partisanship. READ MORE