Lawrence Solomon: Even environmentalists tell Trudeau his ethanol plan is terrible

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s plan to replace fossil fuels with ethanol and other low-carbon fuels through a “clean fuel standard” — expected to slash greenhouse gas emissions by 30 million tonnes a year by 2030 — faces mounting opposition, especially from a powerful lobby south of the border.

No, not from U.S. President Donald Trump or the Republicans. At least, not yet — officially they’re pretty much in sync with Trudeau on this one, largely because the U.S. is a big exporter of ethanol to Canada. The fierce opposition comes chiefly from the U.S. environmental lobby, which has awakened to one of the most colossal environmental mistakes in its history: the ethanol mandate, part of America’s Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), which effectively mandates that 10 per cent of gasoline at the pump consists of ethanol.

The ethanol mandate was born more than a decade ago of good intentions: to reduce tailpipe emissions as part of a larger strategy of tackling global warming. The result has backfired. Admits Henry Waxman, the U.S. congressman credited with the legislation’s passage in 2007, “it’s clear that the RFS has been a net-negative for the environment. Not only has the RFS failed to spur significant development of truly advanced fuels, but conventional biofuels like corn ethanol and soy biodiesel are destroying wildlife habitat at home and abroad, polluting waterways, and increasing global warming pollution.”

To make amends, Waxman now chairs Mighty Earth, a global environmental organization that is spearheading efforts to kill the environmental monster he helped launch. Its recent report, which calls biofuels “dirtier than dirty old oil,” notes that “soy and palm biodiesel have two and three times the emissions of fossil fuel.” This week his angst only increased with the Trump administration’s decision to permit year-round sales of 15-per-cent blends, which will worsen air pollution in hot summer months.

Reform legislation in the U.S. by environmental-leaning Democrats — New Mexico’s Tom Udall and Vermont’s Peter Welch — is now gathering support in both houses of Congress, aided by an environmental lobby determined to end subsidies to ethanol as well as its mandated use. “The Sierra Club applauds Senator Udall, Congressman Welch, and all the members of Congress who are putting common sense first rather than continuing to permit a dirty and destructive policy to remain intact,” said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club. “Instead of continuing to play political games with our environment and public health, these legislators are moving policies that will help undo the damage caused by the ethanol mandate. We urge Congress to pass this legislation immediately rather than continuing to push false theories about ethanol.”

The Sierra Club’s views are echoed by other U.S. environmental groups, such as the National Wildlife Federation and Earth Justice, as well as anti-poverty and human rights groups that point to damage to rural communities at home and abroad, including Canada. To date, Canadian environmental groups have been muted in their opposition, downplaying ethanol’s degradation of the environment, and refraining from a broadside against Trudeau’s clean fuel standard, which represents the single biggest subset of his climate change plan.

But although Canada’s environmental groups aren’t coming clean as to their culpability in promoting environmentally harmful biofuels, they haven’t totally wimped out. In a submission to Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC), the Pembina Institute, Environmental Defence Canada, Equiterre and the Conservation Council of New Brunswick questioned whether the benefits from biofuels will be all they’re cracked up to be, noting that ECCC’s methodology ignores the greenhouse gas emissions indirectly created by converting fields and forests to croplands. ECCC, less focused on protecting the environment than on meeting its 2018 and 2019 deadlines for implementing the clean fuel standard, effectively told them to buzz off, saying it “may make updates to the emissions calculations to reflect indirect greenhouse gas emissions at a future time.” That time may never come, because it would expose the shell game of Trudeau’s climate change agenda.

The Trump decision to permit year-round 15-per-cent blends may be a shell game of another kind, since it’s expected to be coupled with a transfer of ethanol subsidies from U.S. domestic consumption to exports, a move that could decimate ethanol use in the U.S. A press release this week from Growth Energy, the lobby for America’s ethanol producers, said that subsidizing exports would have “a crippling impact on American agriculture — significantly reducing demand for ethanol and corn. It would also have major trade implications, as (this) would be considered a subsidy by our global trading partners, who will likely challenge this as an unnecessary advantage to U.S. ethanol.”

Growth Energy fears a future that phases ethanol out of the U.S. domestic scene, followed by trade challenges that phase it out of export markets. With environmentalists now out for redemption, ethanol’s salad days may be over. The Canadian ethanol lobby should be just as fearful. Cut-rate competition aside, it’s only a matter of time before Canadian environmental groups, many of them supported by the same U.S. funders backing the anti-ethanol campaigns south of the border, take it on. Trudeau’s clean fuel standard, not expected to fully arrive until 2030, may be run off the road long before then.