Fighting a Global Tide of Ethanol: From Canada to Mexico and Beyond
In this interconnected world, the United States is certainly not alone in its use of ethanol and other biofuels blended into gasoline. In fact, other nations are increasingly looking to our federal ethanol mandate as a model on which to base their own policies.
The United States historically has been a world leader on conservation issues such as protection of public lands through National Parks and Wildlife Refuges, and environmental stewardship laws such as the National Environmental Protection Act, Clean Air Act, and Clean Water Act.
But the world needs to know that our ethanol mandate is not a model worth emulating.
More than a decade ago, Congress passed its first version of the Renewable Fuel Standard, requiring billions of gallons of ethanol made from corn be blended into our gasoline. Two years later, a new law greatly expanded that mandate and made other fuels eligible, including diesel made from soybeans or other plant sources, and ethanol made from the denser parts of plants.
What followed was a dramatic increase in corn and soy production to meet the new demand for fuel, which has resulted in the loss of millions of acres of wildlife habitat to industrial farming, and lots of additional farm runoff polluting our waterways and drinking water.
Despite these enormous impacts to our natural resources, the ethanol industry continues to tout the fuel as a responsible, “renewable” alternative to gasoline. And they have been shopping this narrative overseas in their bid to gain new markets for their product.
The ethanol industry’s lobbying campaign is bearing fruit on both our northern and southern borders. Looking to the north, Canada in 2010 implemented its own renewable fuel mandate of 5 percent, and some individual provinces have since required even higher ethanol content. The Canadian ethanol industry cannot produce enough fuel to meet these mandates, so the country imports more than a third of its ethanol from the United States.
Canada is now considering a new Clean Fuel Standard as part of its commitments under the Paris climate accord. This new standard is meant to replace the renewable fuel requirement over time, but would replace increasing amounts of gasoline with supposedly lower-carbon fuels. The initial regulatory framework, however, fails to consider indirect land use change – such as that observed in our country as farmers cleared new land to meet the rising demand for corn and soy – in its carbon emissions calculations. Plowing new land emits lots of carbon from the soil and plant matter that has built up over decades or centuries and represents the largest portion of emissions related to biofuel production. Failing to include this as a factor would mean that fuels generating far worse climate pollution could be classified as “clean fuel.”
To the South, Mexico is currently debating its own ethanol mandate. Mexican regulations currently allow, but don’t require, fuel blends of up to 5.8 percent ethanol, but most gasoline does not contain any ethanol. Last year, however, after intense lobbying from American ethanol interests, the government moved to enact a mandate forcing the use of 10 percent ethanol outside of the country’s three main urban centers of Mexico City, Monterrey, and Guadalajara. Ethanol in gasoline actually increases smog formation, which has historically been rampant in these cities.
Here again, there is little domestic capacity to produce ethanol, so if this policy were to be adopted, the fuel would have to be imported from other countries – presumably mostly from the United States and Brazil. Any development of a domestic industry would mean increased cultivation of sugar cane, imperiling the country’s natural areas including its last jungle habitat in the south.
Thankfully, there are politicians and environmental advocates in Mexico fighting this proposal. A lawsuit filed by the law firm Solcargo has led to a temporary stay on changes to the regulation. Last week I participated on a panel in Mexico City with lawyers from the firm and Mexican politician and one-time presidential candidate Gabriel Quadrí de la Torre to make the case that, in this instance, following the U.S. example would be a grave mistake.
I explained how our federal Renewable Fuel Standard has been disastrous for wildlife habitat, water quality, and the climate, and how demand for ethanol in Mexico would only make all those problems worse here in the United States. Mr. Quadrí spoke passionately about how production of ethanol in Mexico would be a similar disaster, risking the loss of habitats raging from rainforest to rangeland to the wintering sights of the monarch butterfly – all while potentially reversing air quality improvements painstakingly made over the last three decades.
Beyond North American shores, other countries too are moving toward ethanol. China announced last year that it will impose a 10 percent ethanol mandate starting in 2020, in part to help draw down a large surplus in corn stocks. The United States is already shipping increasing amounts of soybeans to China for livestock feed. Could corn ethanol become our next major export?
Even as it pushes to export ethanol abroad, the U.S. ethanol industry is pushing for even greater use of its fuel here at home. Our gasoline currently is blended with about 10 percent ethanol (E10), and the industry and its supporters are asking Congress and the Administration for waivers to clean air rules, infrastructure subsidies, and other incentives to produce and consume higher blends such as E15.
This focus on market share and dollar signs from the industry ignores the simple fact that we cannot grow our way out of our climate and transportation problems. And that trying to do so has already caused severe damage to our natural resources.
If we want to be a model for the rest of the world, the United States must show that we can learn from our mistakes and fix the broken mandate that has been in place for the last 10 years. Let us offer a model of adaptive government and true sustainability that truly moves us forward, rather than backward on our energy and environmental goals.
Originally Posted on NWF.org