In three years EPA has granted 85 exemptions from the Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS) to oil refineries, destroying over 4 billion gallons of biofuel demand and threatening the future of biofuels facilities across the country.
On October 4th President Donald Trump announced a deal to prevent future demand destruction and return integrity to the RFS. Less than two weeks later, when it was up to EPA to enact this deal, the agency rolled out a proposal that removed the certainty President Trump promised American farmers and biofuels producers.
It is time to make your voice heard!
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Can you afford to lose access to that market to favor oil refineries? There are plenty of voices calling on the EPA to stick to the deal the president promised.
"The ethanol and biodiesel industries have a lot of cause to distrust EPA...President Trump brokered this deal, and any attempt to undermine it from EPA would represent a betrayal of the president."
Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA)
"I will absolutely hold EPA accountable. We made a deal: We were guaranteed the 15 billion gallons, and EPA needs to follow through on that..."
Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA)
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Even the White House's own Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) called out the EPA's plan as inconsistent with President Trump's promise. In emails uploaded to the regulatory docket, the OIRA objected to the language in the proposal.
"We do not agree with the inclusion of the alternative as drafted," the OIRA wrote on Oct. 9. "We believe there is no rationale for using older data and the alternative is inconsistent with the White House decision last week to ensure that more than 15 billion gallons of conventional ethanol be blended into the nation's fuel supply beginning in 2020."
University of Illinois ag economist Scott Irwin tweeted on Oct. 22, "It will be interesting to see if EPA can wriggle out of the blatant contradiction between its past policy on partial SREs and what was proposed in the supplemental ...," and on Oct. 24, "...my gut tells me that Trump is losing votes in the Midwest over this SRE businesses. This is turning ugly."
In a letter supported by the Illinois Corn Growers Association and the Illinois Farm Bureau, Illinois Congressmen Rodney Davis, Mike Bost, Darin LaHood, and Adam Kinzinger joined nearly 20 other Republican members of Congress in signing a letter to EPA Administrator Wheeler calling on him to honor the ethanol deal. In part, the letter reads, "...we are disappointed in the proposed rule...this announcement does more harm than good for our producers and lends to even greater uncertainty in this challenging farm economy."
Illinois Corn Growers Association joined other state corn and soybean associations in a letter to President Trump which reads, in part, "The supplemental proposal contains none of the market access remedies sought and makes no commitment to recover gallons lost to SREs after 2020. From an investment perspective, the proposed rule offers little more than the promise of a partial one-year fix that may never materialize."
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