The nation’s farmers got a big boost Wednesday when the Obama administration issued new biofuels guidelines that could open the way for large increases in the production of corn-based ethanol.
The Environmental Protection Agency said new data showed that, even after taking into account increased fertilizer and land use, corn-based ethanol can yield significant climate benefits by displacing conventional gasoline or diesel fuel.
The new renewable-fuel standard issued by the EPA drew criticism from some environmentalists as well as oil industry representatives, who accused the Obama administration of catering to farm interests. In an earlier draft of the standard, the administration had said that corn-based ethanol output should be limited because its direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions exceeded renewable fuel standards.
“The numbers are inconsistent with the great bulk of analyses by others, which consistently find that emissions from indirect land-use change for crops grown on productive land cancel out the bulk or all of the greenhouse gas reductions, but I will have to study the results,” said Tim Searchinger, a research scholar at Princeton University and an author of articles critical of corn-based ethanol.
EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson defended the new guidelines, saying that she was “confident” that “we weren’t dumbing down the standard to favor any particular industry or . . . outcome.” She said revised projections about crop yields and land productivity helped drive the new guidelines.
The biofuels announcement added to growing tension in the coalition of environmental, climate and renewable-energy groups that has supported President Obama’s push for a comprehensive climate bill. On Wednesday, Obama again tried to promote such a bill and discourage lawmakers who favor simpler energy legislation instead.
“I don’t want us to just say the easy way out is for us to just give a bunch of tax credits to clean-energy companies,” Obama said. “The market works best when it responds to price. And if they start seeing that, you know what, dirty energy is a little pricier, clean energy is a little cheaper, they will . . . think things through in all kinds of innovative ways.”
With the climate legislation stalled in Congress, however, many of Obama’s allies find themselves divided by the president’s push for new offshore drilling, his budget’s tripling of loan guarantees for nuclear power plants, and his repeated use of the phrase “clean coal,” which the coal industry uses as shorthand for still unproven and uneconomic technologies that could limit carbon-dioxide emissions from coal-burning power plants.
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