(May 25, 2010) Washington – The Renewable Fuels Association (RFA) today challenged environmental groups suing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over its final rule for the expanded Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS2). The Clean Air Task Force, on behalf of perennial biofuel antagonist Friends of the Earth, today filed suit and petitioned EPA claiming the RFS2 would lead to greater global oil use and pollution because America would be reducing its dependence through the use of ethanol and other biofuels.

“To blame American biofuels for increasing global oil use defies simple common sense,” said RFA President and CEO Bob Dinneen. “By this tortured logic, any effort that environmental activists support to reduce America’s reliance on oil would be responsible for lowering U.S. oil demand, reducing global oil prices, and inciting increased consumption somewhere else in the world. Increasing mileage standards, deploying electric vehicles, and any other measure designed to reduce U.S. oil demand would be penalized with carbon emissions from increased global oil consumption under this rubric. It simply doesn’t pass the sniff test.”

This theory, dubbed the “Global Rebound Effect”, is similar in philosophy to the oft-refuted notion of indirect land use change. This time, instead of blaming U.S. biofuels for land use decisions made in other nations, environmental activists are saddling biofuels with global increases in oil demand that would purportedly result from RFS2-induced reductions in U.S. petroleum demand. On one hand, the CATF is acknowledging the domestic energy security benefits ethanol and other biofuels offer, while simultaneously criticizing such benefits as leading to more oil consumption elsewhere in the world.

“As the leading energy consumer in the world, America was right to take proactive steps to reduce our reliance on petroleum and set an example for the world,” said Dinneen. “These environmental groups are implicitly making the case for keeping U.S. oil demand and prices high, rather than displacing imported oil with biofuels. Blocking the use of biofuels will not reduce global oil consumption, but rather increase it as America must look for more sources of oil, which too often comes from environmentally questionable practices like deep water drilling and tar sand conversation.”

In addition, the groups claim that sufficient safeguards are not in place to protect land not currently in agricultural production. This is also false. EPA put in place a very rigid system to prevent the conversion of "natural land" to agriculture. In essence, EPA capped the amount of land that can be used for agriculture at 2007 acreage level. If agricultural land exceeds the 2007 level, biofuel producers must prove that their feedstock did not come from newly converted land. If they can't prove that, their fuel will not qualify under the RFS2.

“We agree that there are fundamental flaws with EPA's RFS2 rulemaking, but it certainly isn't that it didn't go far enough,” said Dinneen. “Still, EPA's insistence on penalizing ethanol and other biofuels for prescriptive and theoretical land use decisions made around the world was not enough to erase the significant carbon benefits gained by using domestically produced renewable fuels.”