Corn prices too high? EPA says too bad.
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 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.
- National security claim: bullshit
- Helping farmer claim: obviously true, the government is subsidizing the manufacturing of the ethanol and forcing gas companies to include it into their fuel.
- Helping the environment claim: From Wikipedia “Combustion of ethanol in an internal combustion engine yields many of the products of incomplete combustion that are produced by gasoline and significantly larger amounts of formaldehyde and related species such as formalin, acetaldehyde, etc..[40] This leads to a significantly larger photochemical reactivity that generates much more ground level ozone.[41]” At an 34% energy yield it’s far less efficient too when compared to sugar cane ethanol with an 800% yield.
