Fuels America Sends Letter to President Barack Obama RE: the National Climate Assessment Report
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On May 8, 2014, Fuels America, which BIO is a member, sent a letter to the White House commenting on the most recent announcement of the National Climate Assessment report. </p>
Dear Mr. President:
This week’s National Climate Assessment report is a wakeup call about the serious economic, environmental and public health threats to the American people caused by climate change.
The good news is that our nation has reduced energy related emissions of carbon pollution in recent years and we can achieve further reductions as we move to clean energy sources like wind, solar and renewable biofuels. The bad news is that the Administration, under heavy pressure from the global oil industry, has proposed to significantly reduce the renewable fuel content of gasoline and diesel this year. This would make us more oil dependent, effectively gut the bipartisan Renewable Fuel Standard, strand billions of dollars in private investment, and send emissions of carbon dioxide and other pollutants sharply higher. It represents a significant step backward in your effort to confront climate change.
Given that the United States already consumes far more oil than we produce – and the U.S. Energy Information Agency projects that will continue to be true for decades1 -- lowering the amount of renewable fuel we use will likely increase the amount of foreign oil we import and burn.
Argonne National Laboratory, in a 2012 study funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, showed that the lifecycle CO2 emissions from traditional corn ethanol are 34% lower than gasoline. Advanced biofuels from switchgrass, corn stover or miscanthus represent reductions in lifecycle CO2 emissions of 88%, 96%, and 108% respectively. By cutting our use of these low-carbon fuels and reducing investments into innovative second generation biofuels, the EPA proposal to weaken the Renewable Fuel Standard would trigger a substantial increase in carbon emissions.
In fact, a recent analysis by the Biotechnology Industry Organization shows that this action would increase carbon pollution emissions by 28.2 million metric tons in 2014 alone. To put this in perspective, the impact would be equivalent to adding 7 new coal fired power plants or cancelling every wind farm project currently under construction in the United States. Carrying the EPA's proposed approach forward in future years would trigger even larger increases in climate-altering emissions; by 2022, the cumulative emissions of greenhouse gases would be nearly 1 billion metric tons higher than would occur if EPA continued to set the Renewable Fuel Standard at statutory levels.
The EPA’s proposal will not only undermine your Administration’s efforts to address climate change, it will also undercut the Administration’s efforts to support commercial scale production of cellulosic ethanol and other advanced biofuels – precisely at the time this new industry is taking root. Four new commercial scale cellulosic ethanol production facilities are coming online this year.
Visit the link below to read the letter in its entirety.
