WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration renewed its commitment Tuesday to speed up investments in ethanol and other biofuels while seeking to deflect some environmentalists’ claims that huge increases in corn ethanol use will hinder the fight against global warming.
President Barack Obama directed more loan guarantees and economic stimulus money for biofuels research and told the Agriculture Department to find ways to preserve biofuel industry jobs.
Obama said an interagency group also would explore ways to get automakers to produce more cars that run on ethanol and to find ways to make available more ethanol fueling stations.
The reassurances to the ethanol industry came as the Environmental Protection Agency made public its initial analysis on what impact the massive expansion ethanol use could have on climate change. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said the analysis shows corn ethanol emitting 16 percent less greenhouse gases than gasoline, even taking into account global future land-use changes.
But that’s true in only one of the scenarios the EPA examined; another showed corn ethanol would account for 5 percent more greenhouse gases than gasoline. The first scenario Jackson cited assumes future environmental benefits over a period of 100 years will more than pay back the initial increase in greenhouse gases from land-use changes; the second assumes a shorter payback period of 30 years.
Frank O’Donnell, president of the advocacy group Clean Air Watch, said the Obama administration was “walking a tightrope” to try to reconcile the expansion of corn ethanol with its determination to aggressively address climate change. He called the assumption of a 100-year ethanol payback to make up for early greenhouse emission increases “nothing but an accounting trick to make corn ethanol look better.”
