Imagine a single policy change that could lower food prices, free up land for construction or conservation, improve the environment, cut greenhouse-gas emissions, and reduce fuel costs. [some emphasis, links added]
You’d think that it would be a no-brainer, especially now, when “affordability” has become the watchword for both parties. And it wouldn’t require a new tangle of regulations or an expanded federal bureaucracy.
To the contrary: it would simply mean ending the Environmental Protection Agency’s Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS)—the byzantine, two-decade-old program that forces refiners to blend plant-based biofuels into nearly every gallon of gasoline and diesel sold in the United States.
In this imaginary world of rational policy, the White House would order the EPA to roll back the RFS immediately, and Congress would vote to kill the program for good.
In the real world, though, such common-sense reform currently stands little chance. Despite two decades of criticism, the RFS persists because its political math is irresistible.
Included in the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (and expanded two years later), the RFS rules were meant to curb emissions and boost the supply of domestically produced fuel.
Instead of importing more oil, the logic went, we could pay farmers to grow more soybeans (for biodiesel) and corn (to be converted into ethanol and blended into gasoline).
But the RFS program fails on its own terms. For example, EPA rules effectively require that automotive gasoline sold in the U.S. contain 10 percent ethanol. But that addition doesn’t increase the nation’s gasoline supply by 10 percent.
The amount of energy contained in a gallon of ethanol, it turns out, is only slightly higher than the fossil-fuel energy needed to grow and process the corn that produces that ethanol.
In other words, rather than creating new domestic energy, the RFS merely converts fossil fuels—through a messy agricultural process—into a roughly equivalent quantity of biofuels. There’s only a modest net gain.
Worse, the program inflates wholesale corn and soybean prices by creating artificial demand for those crops. And because corn and soybeans are major food ingredients—including as feed for cattle, pigs, and chickens—that demand ultimately drives up grocery bills.
Most people use the word “renewable” as a synonym for “environmentally friendly.” But it’s now clear that renewable biofuels are an environmental disaster. More than 20 million acres of cropland are devoted to corn-ethanol production, for example, which increases fertilizer and pesticide runoff.
Without the mandated demand for ethanol, much of that land would remain as wild habitat or be available for other human needs.
Nor do biofuels reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. A 2022 Department of Energy report concludes that “the carbon intensity of corn ethanol produced under the RFS is no less than gasoline and likely at least 24 percent higher.”
On the other hand, the RFS program succeeds brilliantly in funneling billions of dollars from motor-vehicle drivers to farmers and agricultural processing giants such as Archer-Daniels-Midland.
Instapundit blogger and University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds was on the money when he dubbed corn-based ethanol “liquid pork” back in 2007.
According to the Renewable Fuel Association, a pro-biofuels trade group, roughly one-third of the corn grown in the U.S. is destined for gas tanks. Last year alone, the group said, ethanol refiners purchased $23 billion in American corn.
On top of this, nearly half the soybean oil produced in the U.S. gets converted into biodiesel. Combined, the ethanol and biodiesel industries had revenues of nearly $50 billion in 2024.
Read rest at City Journal
