BioFuels Journal

Washington—Citing EPA’s Renewable Fuel Standard as “flawed,” Clean Air Task Force has today filed both a legal challenge to EPA’s rule in the US Court of Appeals and petitioned EPA to reconsider two elements of its rule.

When Congress expanded the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) biofuel mandate in 2007, it required US EPA to ensure that the biofuels provided a reduction in net greenhouse gas emissions as compared to gasoline and diesel.

Congress also established safeguards to protect prairies and other natural ecosystems from being plowed under to grow biofuel crops.

In regulations it finalized in March 2010 to implement the RFS, EPA determined that all types of biofuels – even corn ethanol – achieve the emissions reduction requirements set by Congress, despite a growing body of research that indicates some biofuels are actually worse for the climate than petroleum fuels.

EPA also failed to put reliable measures in place to prevent natural land in the United States from being converted into biofuel plantations.

Today’s legal challenge to EPA’s rule was necessitated by EPA’s decision to finalize its assessment of biofuels’ lifecycle greenhouse emissions based on optimistic projections about emissions impacts in 2022.

EPA relied on that approach to determine that all types of biofuels meet Congress’s emissions reduction thresholds – even though its own data indicate that the fuels’ emissions will exceed the thresholds over the next few years.

“EPA’s rule is seriously flawed because it will actually increase greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector in the near term,” said Jonathan Lewis, an attorney with the Clean Air Task Force, “and exacerbate the very problem that Congress sought to correct.”

The Clean Air Task Force is filing the lawsuit on behalf of Friends of the Earth.

In the petition also sent to EPA today, the Clean Air Task Force has asked EPA to reconsider its failure to account for the “global rebound effect” when analyzing the lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions from biofuels.

By displacing some gasoline from the US market, the RFS reduces overall demand for petroleum, which in turn leads to lower prices, increased consumption, and higher greenhouse gas emissions in other countries.

If EPA had considered the “global rebound effect” in its analysis of different biofuels, only a few of those fuels would have met Congress’s emissions reduction requirements.

The Clean Air Task Force also petitioned EPA to reconsider its assumption that the RFS will not cause any natural ecosystems to be converted to agricultural land.

EPA’s assumption is based on outdated data, and it fails to account for recent studies by the U.S. Department of Agriculture indicating that the RFS is indeed contributing to land conversion.

For more information, call 617-894-3788.

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