Why the RFS Is Vital

The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality earlier this week held a hearing on implementation of the new Renewable Fuel Standard.
Rep. Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin (D-S.D.), Environmental Protection Agency Deputy Assistant Administrator Robert Meyers, Bob Dinneen with the Renewable Fuels Association, Nathanael Greene with the Natural Resources Defense Council, Randy Kremer of KL [...]

Can Stopping Ethanol Solve the Current Food Crisis?

President Bush spoke out last week on the global food crisis, suggesting that reducing trade barriers would help increase food supplies.
We’re also urging countries that have instituted restrictions on agricultural exports to lift those restrictions. Some countries are preventing needed food from getting to market in the first place, and we call upon them to [...]

The 15 Percent Solution

Politicians are now beginning to call for a repeal of the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS). Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) recently announced that she would introduce legislation to freeze the biofuel mandate at current levels, saying, “Expanding biofuels while refusing to take other measures, such as lifting the ban on oil and natural gas production [...]

Questioning the Relationship Between Biofuels and Food Costs

A new study released by Texas A&M’s Agricultural and Food Policy Center undermines one of the key assumptions used in the studies that attributed a huge “carbon debt” to biofuels.
The assumption used by Searchinger et al. is that biofuel production increases the cost of all commodity grains, encouraging countries to convert additional land – such [...]

Uncontrollable Forces

Two editorials in the New York Times this week have claimed that rising oil prices are “uncontrollable forces” and “not anyone’s fault.” (See The World Food Crisis, 4/10/08 and Grains Gone Wild, Paul Krugman, 4/7/08). The implication is that biofuel policy in the United States IS controllable – and eliminating use of food crops for [...]

British Government to Study Indirect Impacts of Biofuels

Last week, Britain’s Renewable Fuels Agency (RFA) launched a series of studies of the indirect land-use impacts of biofuels, following a lecture by Princeton’s Tim Searchinger, lead author of “Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases Through Emissions from Land Use Change” published in Science in February.
The RFA intends to publish a draft report [...]

Indirect Land Use Thoughts

Dear Colleagues:
I have spent a lot of time the last few weeks trying to think through the indirect land use change (ILUC) issue. I have divided my thoughts into two questions that I am asking myself: 1) are we in fact currently able to estimate these changes with any degree of confidence?, and 2) if [...]