Energy & Environment

It’s time to face facts: the biofuels mandate Congress established in 2005 is creating too much bad biofuel and not enough good biofuel.

This year, that mandate requires American refiners to use 13.8 billion gallons of corn ethanol – more than they can actually blend into their gasoline.

By contrast, fuel makers are expected to generate only a little more than 5 million gallons of non-food-based biofuels that could reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Many doubt whether the industry can hit this target.

A growing chorus of congressional voices are calling for revisions to the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS). Proposals by Rep. Goodlatte (R-Va.) to limit or repeal the standard have been joined by bills from Sens. Wicker (R-Miss.) and Vitter (R-La.) and Rep. Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) that would cap the amount of ethanol blended into gasoline at ten percent.

These efforts come on the heels of pleas from 10 governors, nearly 200 members of Congress and diverse businesses groups from around the country calling for administrative waivers of ethanol requirements. However, these appeals have been largely denied by the EPA, which is holding to a strict interpretation of the stringent and expansive RFS mandate that Congress enacted in the Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA) of 2007.

As a Canadian energy and climate economist, I have first-hand experience with the magician-like techniques of the Canadian government and petroleum industry as they try to double the output of our highly polluting tar sands. Politicians in Washington should be wary, especially if they are sincere in wanting to spare us and our children from an increasing barrage of Katrinas, Sandys and droughts.
 
Magicians use slight-of-hand to distract us from what they are really doing. The fossil fuel industry and its allies have spent a lot of money to bombard us with messages about the jobs and tax benefits of increasing carbon pollution via this or that fossil fuel project. Count how many times they explain how this carbon pollution is consistent with what scientists say and politicians promise in terms of avoiding devastating climate change. Of course, they don’t explain. That is the art of deception on which magic is based: to get you looking the wrong way.

As ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Energy and Power I have worked closely with the Department of Energy (DOE) on issues of energy policy, telecommunications, consumer protection, food and commerce. On Monday, President Obama nominated MIT physicist Ernest Moniz to head the Department of Energy.

A project with bipartisan support that would create more than 15,000 jobs and reduce our dependence on oil from unstable countries may sound too good to be true, but it’s not. According to a recent poll conducted by Fox News, 70 percent of Americans say they support building the Keystone XL pipeline — including 57 percent of Democrats. Despite administration delays, last week, the State Department released its review of the Keystone XL project. The review raised no major objections to the pipeline and said any of the alternative options to get oil from Canada could be more harmful to the environment than the pipeline.

Being nominated as administrator of the EPA is quite an achievement for Gina McCarthy, and in all of the pomp and circumstance surrounding this appointment, I thought I would try to give a few words of advice to the new administrator as she takes over at a critical time in our nation’s history as it relates to the environment. 
 
- Remember who you work for: the taxpayers – including businesses, which are too often demonized. My understanding has always been that EPA’s goal is ensuring regulatory compliance. However, I’m concerned that the primary method of ensuring compliance has been through enforcement, rather than compliance assistance.

In less than a decade, the role of unconventional oil and gas has dramatically changed the energy outlook in the United States. Over the next 20 years, US natural gas and coal exports will increase and oil imports will decline steadily.
 
Abundant domestic energy can be a huge driver of the U.S. economy. In order to facilitate economic growth we need to move away from policies based on energy scarcity to our new reality of abundance – an abundance that can benefit our nation’s long-term economic outlook enormously.

Former Gov. Haley Barbour (R-Miss.) served up the usual field-tested oil industry talking points last week. The Hill readers may have been interested to know Gov. Barbour, the “B” in BGR Group, now counts Chevron as a client. In his defense, he is not alone. Walking lock-step with the American Petroleum Institute is common among politicos, past and present, looking for any conversation-stopper whenever the issue of the industry’s darling treatment by Washington comes up.

There is a huge story playing out right before our very eyes this year in agriculture that nearly everyone is missing: Despite the fact that this nation has faced two of the worst farming years in decades – with devastating drought in the Southern Plains and flooding in the Midwest in 2011, and widespread drought over major corn and soybean growing regions in 2012 – there has not been a single call for an ad hoc disaster bill from America’s crop farmers.
 
And why no calls for disaster assistance from crop farmers? Because 86 percent of planted farmland in 2012 was protected by crop insurance, the best risk management tool available to farmers. Before crop insurance was widely available, natural disasters like we have just experienced would have triggered a very costly, unbudgeted ad hoc disaster bill. Forty-two such emergency disaster bills in agriculture have cost taxpayers $70 billion since 1989, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Every once in a while an idea gets broached in Washington that superficially appears to offer an easy way out of a difficult problem. Avoiding sequestration by raising taxes on America’s energy industry is one such idea.
 
This we know: Washington has a massive spending problem. But pushing for tax increases on energy companies as a quick fix for our country’s fiscal problems is about as nonsensical as it gets. In fact, such tax increases actually would slow economic growth even further.