The Environmental Protection Agency announced it’s considering a new proposal to reduce 2018 biodiesel, advanced biofuel and total Renewable Fuel Standard volumes, in addition to a prior proposal to cut 2019 volumes. that has ethanol supporters ‘hopping mad.’
Ethanol Industry groups swiftly responded with press releases that the EPA proposal was unjustified, unneeded, contrary to the RFS’s intent, and would harm the industry, jobs and energy independence.
An angry longtime ethanol backer and supporter of President Trump took to the Senate floor:
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Republican Chuck Grassley of Iowa read several Trump campaign quotes from then-candidate Trump, supporting ethanol and vowing to defend the Renewable Fuels Standard as president Grassley says he was suspicious Trump would be able to keep his word, when the new president nominated oil-patch Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to head the EPA and former Texas Governor Rick Perry to be Energy Secretary:
Then, a couple of months ago, Grassley says the President called the Senator, personally, and asked Grassley to tell his Iowa constituents, Trump would keep his word on ethanol:
Grassley complained bitterly, the latest proposal came out of “nowhere,” after the EPA in July, had already released a plan that left the 2018 biodiesel level untouched at just over 2-billion gallons…and the same, in 2019.
The new plan would pare ’18 biodiesel, advanced and total biofuels by almost half-a-billion gallons.
Grassley calls it a “bait and switch” and leads Grassley to suspect that Big Oil is again prevailing in the Trump EPA, as he claims it did in the Obama EPA. That’s not a way he says, “to make America strong, once again.”