EDITORIAL: Congress should kill ethanol mandate

The country’s decade-old Renewable Fuel Standard requires increasing levels of plant-based ethanol and biodiesel to be added to traditional fossil fuels. It was supposed to be good for the economy and great for the environment. It has been neither — and it could get even worse.

Under the RFS, most gasoline sold in the United States is classified as E10, and contains 90 percent gasoline and as much as 10 percent ethanol made from corn. Ethanol delivers fewer miles per gallon than pure gasoline and can collect water, which damages engines.

Although auto manufacturers have longed warned against using gas containing more than 10 percent ethanol, the Environmental Protection Agency — along with misguided renewable-fuel advocates, the big agriculture lobby and their friends in elected office — pushed to add more ethanol to our fuel. In 2009, for example, the EPA approved the sale of E15, which contains 15 percent ethanol and is even more harmful to vehicles. But E15 has been a flop at the pump.

Now the EPA is changing its tune. A decrease in overall U.S. fuel consumption, an increase in domestic oil production because of advances in fracking technology, increased food prices resulting from supply pressures created by the ethanol mandate and unintended negative environmental consequences forced the EPA to propose scaling back the mandates that require even more ethanol production in the years ahead.

But holding the line on current ethanol production is not enough. Thankfully, Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., and other Republicans in Washington, D.C., understand this and are pushing for swifter, stronger action.

Sen. Cassidy’s state has huge fuel refining capacity. Refiners say that being forced to buy ethanol forces them to increase their prices and pass those costs along to consumers. Citing increasing American energy production and improving fuel-efficiency technologies, Sen. Cassidy has introduced a bill that would completely repeal the RFS.

“Workers, refiners, producers, farmers and ranchers across the country are affected by the Renewable Fuel Standard,” Sen. Cassidy said in a recent statement. “More mandates mean less jobs. It means families are paying more for gas and groceries. … Our workers need policies that help move our energy, farming and manufacturing industries forward — that starts by repealing the RFS.”

This ill-conceived mandate wouldn’t exist in the first place if Iowa, the country’s top corn-producing state, didn’t host the country’s first presidential caucus. Any candidate who criticizes this country’s horrible agricultural policies is run out of the state. The ethanol mandate has been great for Iowa farmers and terrible for just about everyone else. But the EPA’s modest proposal has the ethanol lobby in full panic mode, demanding that its largess continue.

We’re finding more oil and natural gas in America every day — we no longer need ethanol for energy independence — yet we still have to subsidize farmers to overfarm for a higher corn yield, creating unnecessary demand for corn that needlessly boosts agricultural prices. The RFS is bad for the economy, bad for fuel and food prices, and bad for the food supply. Because its production and shipment have such huge carbon footprints — ethanol can’t be transported by pipeline — the only thing remotely green about the fuel is the amount of cash flowing into the bank accounts of the ethanol industry and farmers.

Ethanol, biofuels and other forms of green energy must compete in the energy sector on their own merits, without any subsidies or mandates. We simply can’t afford them. Congress shouldn’t modify the ethanol mandate. Lawmakers should repeal it.