Blatant Reality

As you could probably tell from reading this blog, I am pretty vehemently against any kind of biofuel that comes from crops that take up agricultural land, requires freshwater, and receives obnoxiously large subsidies. This means that the only biofuel that I really support at the moment is algae based biofuels and that I’m a strong opponent of ethanol. So it saddened me to see that the EPA ruled against Texas Governor Rick Perry’s request to lower the ethanol mandate.

The Environmental Protection Agency today denied Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s request to reduce federal ethanol requirements this year.

 

The decision dealt a blow to Perry and a broad consortium of industry groups that claim rising U.S. ethanol output is inflating corn prices, hurting livestock and food producers and boosting grocery bills.

 

But in a noon conference call, EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson said the the federal Renewable Fuel Standard that sets the ethanol requirement isn’t causing “severe economic harm,” which would be required to justify a waiver, and is improving national security and benefiting farmers.

 

In a statement, Perry said he was “greatly disappointed with the EPA’s inability to look past the good intentions of this policy to see the significant harm it is doing to farmers, ranchers and American households.”

 

“For the EPA to assert that this federal mandate is not affecting food prices not only goes against common sense, but every American’s grocery bill,” he said.

Crop based ethanol is just a bad idea both environmentally and economically. I wouldn’t be against ethanol nearly as much as I am if the government wasn’t propping up the industry through subsidies and artificially creating a market for it through a mandate. There are other options out there, such as algae biofuels, that could potentially stand on their own in the free market and wouldn’t have the negative environmental effects associated with crop biofuels (clear cutting forests for new land, increased freshwater usage, etc.).