Among the many components most answerable for this tragic lack of our prairie heritage is the federal renewable gas normal, a congressional mandate requiring refiners to combine renewable gas (largely corn-based ethanol) with U.S. gasoline, diesel, jet gas and heating oil merchandise.

The renewable gas normal has generated an enormous surge in ethanol manufacturing, growing from 9 billion gallons in 2009 to fifteen.9 billion gallons per yr at the moment, based on the Vitality Info Administration. By 2022 the full is projected to succeed in 36 billion gallons.

Ethanol per se is just not the issue, nonetheless; Washington’s lack of widespread sense is the issue.

For many years now, ever because the Arab oil embargo of 1973-74, U.S. policymakers have been preoccupied with oil shortage. That, together with environmental issues, is what led to the renewable fuels mandate, which triggered large will increase in corn manufacturing on the expense of different crops and prairie grasslands.

Presently, roughly half of all the U.S. corn crop—which topped greater than 15 billion bushels final yr, based on the U.S. Division of Agriculture—winds up in biofuels.

The difficulty is that this: When prairie is plowed underneath to develop corn it turns into a barren panorama. With out the grasses, the atmosphere helps little wildlife. With the grasses, it’s house to geese, pheasants and a few 800 different forms of birds, in addition to monarch butterflies and honey bees.

As a substitute of damning oil as evil, politicians and pundits ought to begin questioning their blind religion in ethanol. In 2005, when the Vitality Coverage Act launched the renewable gas normal, requiring oil firms to mix ethanol with gasoline and diesel could have appeared like the appropriate factor to do for power safety.

Right this moment, due to the shale revolution, it makes little sense.

On account of technological improvements enabling producers to extract hard-to-reach oil from shale formations, home crude-oil manufacturing has elevated to greater than 7 million barrels a day, in contrast with 5 million barrels a decade in the past.

In the meantime, oil imports, particularly from OPEC international locations, have plunged. The home economic system is now not hostage to OPEC and others, akin to Russia and Venezuela, which use exports to attain geopolitical targets.

Remarkably, the quantity of technically recoverable oil in the USA accessible for long-term growth now exceeds 100 billion barrels—greater than 20 occasions the present stage of annual manufacturing, based on IHS, a world analysis firm.

It’s not too late to do one thing concerning the renewable gas normal’s damaging influence on wildlife habitat and the prairie ecosystem. A very good place to start is by taking a essential have a look at authorities help for corn manufacturing.

Nationally, corn growers obtained some $94.3 billion in subsidies from federal commodity, crop insurance coverage, catastrophe aid and conservation applications between 1995 and 2014. Corn subsidies in Ohio alone totaled $4.2 billion, based on U.S. Division of Agriculture information.

Such subsidies—together with the ethanol mandate itself—present a robust incentive for growers to proceed clearing prairie to supply corn for ethanol, even because it destroys the prairie ecosystem.

It’s time for widespread sense. The ethanol mandate has triggered an environmental catastrophe. Kicking the ethanol behavior must be as a lot of a no brainer as buckling up earlier than beginning a automobile.