More than a dozen Republican senators, including Senate Environment Committee Chairman John Barrasso, R-Wyo., say the EPA has a clear case to waive or significantly reduce the Renewable Fuel Standard’s (RFS) biofuels mandate. In a letter to EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler on Tuesday, the senators say the cost of complying with the RFS has tripled since the beginning of this year.
Republican attorneys general recently urged the EPA to grant petitions from six governors, including one Democrat, to waive the 2020 RFS requirements amid the pandemic. “A failure to grant, in part or in whole, the governors’ petitions would render this provision of the Clean Air Act utterly meaningless,” the senators wrote. “It would be a gross example of a federal agency nullifying an act of Congress.”
But biofuel backers led by Sens. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, and Tina Smith, D-Minn., have written President Trump noting the conditions to waive the RFS have not been met.
EPA must be able to demonstrate there is “severe economic harm” from the RFS itself to waive the requirements, a feat the corn state senators said it would not be able to do given the ongoing, widespread economic damage from the pandemic.
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