Member in the News: Scott Irwin

The Shocking Truth About America's Ethanol Law: It Doesn't Matter (For Now)

By Dan Charles via NPR
It took Sen. Ted Cruz to finally persuade me to answer a riddle that's bothered me for years. Suppose somebody yanked away the law that currently props up the nation's ethanol industry, as Cruz has proposed. What would actually happen?

Before we get to the answer, let me mention why it's important, and why I'm writing about it here in The Salt. The gasoline that fuels your car is actually 10 percent ethyl alcohol, or ethanol, and that fact has had a profound impact on America's farming landscape. As ethanol use increased over the past 15 years, dozens of giant distilleries — known, more respectably, as ethanol plants — appeared in the country's corn belt. Feeding those distilleries is now a full-time job for roughly 35 million acres, or 55,000 square miles, of corn fields. Offhand, I can't think of a single agricultural product that exceeds the scale of ethanol.

Corn farmers love the ethanol boom, the way any manufacturer loves a big customer. Many environmentalists, on the other hand, despise it. Ethanol is often called a renewable fuel, because you can grow that corn year after year, absorbing carbon dioxide from the air in the process. But growing all that corn for fuel also means more soil erosion, more water pollution, and it can even force the clearing of more land to grow things that people actually eat.

This argument over the virtues and evils of ethanol focuses on one particular law: the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), which requires that gasoline manufacturers purchase large and, until this year, ever-growing amounts of ethanol, which they then blend into the nation's fuel supply. (True insiders will protest that gas companies can buy renewable fuel credits, called RINs, instead of ethanol, but the ethanol-boosting effect is the same in either case. So we'll stay away from that rabbit hole.) As you might expect, corn farmers and ethanol producers helped push this law through Congress.

If you oppose government interventions in the free market, as Cruz does, the RFS is an outrage. "End the Ethanol Rip-Off," wrote author Robert Bryce in The New York Times last year. He pointed out that a gallon of ethanol delivers only two-thirds as much energy as a gallon of pure petroleum-based gasoline, and as a result, we're paying about twice as much for that ethanol, per unit of energy, as for petroleum-derived gasoline. The loser, he says, is the American consumer, to the tune of about $10 billion each year.

This view of the RFS is widely shared across the political spectrum, including, for instance, the editorial board of The Washington Post. Groups hurt by high corn prices, including hog farmers and the fast food industry, are on record calling for the abolition or relaxation of the ethanol mandate. In fact, even ethanol's backers, in their fierce defense of the RFS, appear to believe that it is essential for the survival of their industry.

But is that really true? It took ethanol-dissing Ted Cruz's victory in ethanol-loving Iowa's Republican presidential primary to finally persuade me to hit the phones and figure this out.
I found two experts who've examined this question in great detail: Paul Niznik, an analyst at Stratas Advisors, an energy consulting business in Houston, and Scott Irwin, an economist who teaches at the University of Illinois. And here's their bottom line: If the law changed tomorrow and gasoline companies were free to ignore ethanol, they'd almost certainly keep right on blending ethanol into their fuel.


Read the entire article here: http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/02/10/466010209/the-shocking-truth-about-americas-ethanol-law-it-doesnt-matter-for-now?utm_content=buffer4041e&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer