One of the more bizarre coalitions ever to form in Washington is trying to kill a creature of Washington: corn ethanol.
The oil industry, environmentalists, taxpayer groups, livestock growers and foreign aid groups all want Congress to repeal the mandate requiring a 15 percent blend of ethanol in gasoline.
More than 40 percent of the U.S. corn crop goes to ethanol, combining with a continuing Midwest drought to drive up corn prices. In a conference call Monday, refiners said it wrecks everything from car engines to outboard motors to chain saws .
Scott Faber, a lobbyist for Environmental Working Group, said ethanol has destroyed more wetlands and grasslands in the last four years than were wrecked in the last 40 and as far as greenhouse gasses go, it is “worse than the Canadian tar sands.”
By driving up prices, the ethanol mandate induces farmers to plow marginal virgin land, releasing stored carbon into the atmosphere, while the fertilizer and pesticides used to grow the corn washes into rivers.
“The American public should be outraged this thing is still on the books,” said Charlie Drevna of the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers group. The powerhouse American Petroleum Institute is also waging all-out war on the ethanol mandate.
California Democrat Dianne Feinstein teamed with Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn in a successful Senate vote to kill off ethanol subsidies a year and a half ago. But that still left massive federal assistance in the mandated blending of ethanol into gasoline, which the Obama Environmental Protection Agency increased from 10 percent to 15 percent.
In addition, the EPA mandates that some of the ethanol come from agricultural wastes, so-called cellulosic ethanol. Former President George W. Switchgrass Bush predicted in 2006 that cellulosic ethanol would be competitive by last year. It is still not commercially viable, even though some Silicon Valley investors seem to hold out hope. Apparently the cost of growing huge quantities of waste straw and transporting it to an ethanol plant doesn’t pan out.
Drevna said refiners are forced to pay fines for not using a product that doesn’t exist, and the D.C. Court of Appeals agreed last week, even as the court upheld the 15 percent blend mandate. See the decision here.
Poultry and other livestock farmers say they are getting crushed by higher feed costs. Tom Elam of FarmEcon,representing poultry producers, said feed costs have more than doubled, raising the price of chicken and driving poultry farmers to bankruptcy.
The ethanol industry says this is all bunk, insisting that ethanol is “is the most successful renewable fuel in history.”
