As prairies get ploughed for biofuels, groups demand EPA act
MORE THAN a dozen environmental and conservation groups filed a petition on Tuesday alleging that the EPA is illegally looking the other way as farmers plough over prairies and wetlands to grow corn needed to satisfy a US biofuel mandate.
The Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Federation and other organisations asked the Environmental Protection Agency to force biofuel producers to prove the crops they use come from lands cultivated before Dec 19, 2007, a benchmark under US law.
The petition acts as a warning shot, signalling that if the EPA doesn’t address the issue, the groups could take the agency to court over it. The move marks the escalation of a battle over the US Renewable Fuel Standard, a law that compels refiners to use corn-based ethanol and soybeanbased biodiesel. Once heralded as a cleaner, safer alternative to foreign oil, biofuels are now being questioned by environmentalists who dispute their green credentials.
“Millions of acres of previously uncultivated land have been converted to cropland” to satisfy the biofuel mandate “with far-reaching, deleterious environmental impacts,” the environmentalists say in their filing. “Our air, water, land and wildlife are all suffering as a result.”
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. When Congress expanded the Renewable Fuel Standard as part of broad energy legislation in 2007, environmentalists pushed for safeguards designed to prevent land conversion, including a requirement that biofuels accepted under the program only come from previously farmed tracts. But instead of verifying that biofuel comes from crops grown on eligible, already cultivated land, the EPA chose to assess agricultural land use in aggregate.
The activists say the EPA’s broad approach of only looking at national cropland totals obscures the real picture on the ground, because net acreage can remain the same nationwide if native grasses are ploughed to grow corn for ethanol while existing farms are turned into subdivisions and shopping malls. The EPA approach also violates the Renewable Fuel Standard’s “clear and unambiguous restriction” on land conversion, while undermining the measure’s intended climate and environmental objectives, they argue.
The activists are demanding the EPA end its aggregate approach, write new regulations requiring biofuel producers to prove the crops they use come from lands that were already cleared or cultivated prior to 2007, and lower annual biofuel quotas.
The EPA itself concluded in a June report that actively managed cropland has increased by four million to 7.8 million acres since 2007, with crop production for biofuels driving much of the increase. Corn acreage has also gone up by approximately 10 million acres during the same time frame, the EPA report said.
Fertiliser runoff associated with growing crops for biofuel production may contribute to a dead zone and harmful algal blooms in the Gulf of Mexico that jeopardise sturgeon, sea turtles and other marine life, the EPA said. Conservationists say that when prairies are broken up by farmland that is inhospitable to wildlife, it isolates small communities of butterflies, whooping cranes and other animals that may be unwilling to leave their native habitat.
And environmentalists argue that when land is converted to grow crops, the existing vegetation is destroyed and the soil is tilled, releasing oncestored carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Biofuel advocates say the alternative - more oil-based gasoline - is worse. And they dispute claims that ethanol production drives habitat loss.
For instance, in November, the
Millions of acres of previously uncultivated land have been converted to cropland” to satisfy the biofuel mandate “with far-reaching, deleterious environmental impacts. Our air, water, land and wildlife are all suffering as a result. Environmentalists
Renewable Fuels Association criticised the methodology used for a study documenting increases in cropland around ethanol manufacturing facilities, arguing it misrepresented “unreliable satellite data” and used “highly uncertain modeling” to generate questionable results.
The trade group argues the amount of cropland used to produce corn has decreased from 2007 levels as yields have expanded: “The additional corn needed to support expansion of the ethanol industry came from increased productivity on existing cropland - not from converting native grasslands into new cropland.”
Today, most of the US biofuel mandate is fulfilled by conventional, corn-based ethanol. Although Congress envisioned the law would help spur alternatives using switchgrass, algae and other non- edible plant materials, those next- generation biofuels have been slow to penetrate the market.
“Corn ethanol was always supposed to be a bridge to a truly sustainable biofuel future,” said Collin O’Mara, president of the National Wildlife Federation.
“We’re stuck on the bridge because we’ve created an incumbent industry that is so heavily subsidised at this point that there is no incentive for investors to invest in the more-risky next- generation alternatives.” — Bloomberg