Free Republic

President Trump will be joining us at our annual convention in Nashville and speaking to the thousands of farmers and ranchers gathered there. The President’s attendance, the 'first for a U.S. president in more than 20 years,' is recognition that Farm Bureau members play a vital role: providing food, fiber and energy crops—and the additional jobs they support—for our country. We look forward to hearing the President’s remarks about issues that are important to farmers’ and ranchers’ bottom lines...

Oil lobbyists aren’t accustomed to hearing the word "no." And from an all-of-the-above perspective, that’s not always a bad thing. America needs more energy, not less. We still import about a quarter of all the oil we consume. But some petroleum companies seem to be taking their influence for granted, and that could prove their undoing with a White House that is known for drawing a clear line between friends and foes. Most recently, a few refiners have begun smearing the president and his allies in Congress for refusing to abandon the Renewable Fuel Standard, which protects U.S. production of...

Can someone remind me...in the Iowa caucus in 2016...

For the first time in years, there is an emerging consensus that the biggest racket in national politics deserves to end. Earlier this month, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and 10 other Republican senators held a luncheon summit at the White House with President Trump with the goal of drastically reforming the Renewable Fuel Standard, the federal mandate that annually funnels $13.5 billion from the wallets of American fuel and food consumers into the coffers of agribusiness giants. Before the national nightmare of Obamacare, there was the RFS, the most sweeping and intrusive federal intervention in the American economy undertaken in...

The ethanol lobby is talking tough and issuing ultimatums to the Trump White House. Its message, in brief, is “Don’t mess with our federal mandate.” If the White House wants credibility in its free-enterprise talk and promises to drain the swamp, it should tell the ethanol lobby to get lost. The fight began because refiners are finding it increasingly unaffordable to comply with the federal ethanol mandate, and if it continues it might kill independent oil companies. The office of Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, came to the White House on Wednesday and sought to dictate terms, telling the executive it...

Dec 8 (Reuters) - President Donald Trump’s administration called two lawmakers from the U.S. Corn Belt to convince them to join talks about potential changes to biofuels policy to ease the burden on oil refineries, according to a spokesman for one of the lawmakers and a source briefed on the matter. The effort is the clearest sign yet Trump is seeking to mediate the long-running dispute between the U.S. oil industry and corn growers over the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), a law requiring refiners to blend increasing volumes of biofuels like corn-based ethanol every year into the nation’s fuels.

President Donald Trump will meet with a group of Republican lawmakers Thursday to discuss ways of addressing problems oil refiners have with the EPA’s biofuels mandate. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is among nearly a dozen Republican lawmakers prepared to confront Trump over his administration’s refusal to ratchet down the biofuel standard. They want to find a way to lessen the impact the standards have on oil refiners. “President Trump will meet with senators today to discuss his commitment to the Renewable Fuel Standard and how to effectively address the program’s impact on independent refiners,” White House spokeswoman Lindsay Walters said...

A couple of weeks ago we learned that opponents of ethanol mandates weren’t going to quietly slink off the stage just because President Trump and Scott Pruitt were backing up the Renewable Fuel Standard. While this subject isn’t sexy enough to be making headlines on cable news these days, the fight is continuing unabated. The previous incident arose from Senator Joni Ernst blocking the nomination of EPA air chief Bill Wehrum and threatening to work with her Iowa partner Chuck Grassley to block others unless the RFS was fully protected.Texas Senator Ted Cruz fired back with his own blockade...

A University of Wisconsin-Madison study shows that the shift of more than 7 million acres into cropland led to massive releases of carbon emissions into the atmosphere after a 2007 federal law mandated ethanol in gasoline. The increased carbon emissions is equivalent to 20 million new cars driving down American roadways every year, according to the researchers' estimates in the study released Wednesday.

Sen. Ted Cruz is pressuring Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds to reach a deal between oil refiners and the ethanol industry over the Environmental Protection Agency's renewable fuel mandate. Cruz, speaking on behalf of a group of eight GOP senators, wrote in a Tuesday letter to Reynolds that they do not wish to up-end the market for corn ethanol produced in her state, which is the nation's top producer of the fuel. Instead, Cruz argued that the senators' real problem with the Renewable Fuel Standard is refiners being required to buy expensive renewable identification number credits, or RINs, to meet the...

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, Senators Charles Grassley (R-IA), Joni Ernst (R-IA), and Deb Fisher (R-Neb) met October 17 to discuss the future of the Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS), which regulates the production of biofuels. At issue was whether the RFS might be lowered for 2018, as Administrator Pruitt suggested in recent months might be the case. But, on October 20, EPA officials announced the renewable fuel volumes for 2018 would be at or above what had been originally proposed, reversing the implication of statements made earlier in the year by Administrator Pruitt. Such a decision matters because U.S. grain and...

Greetings to you, with my hope that you are doing well! According to public records, most of you are. That’s good! The whole U.S. produces somewhere around 15 billion bushels (BB) of corn a year at a rate of ca. 145 bushels per acre. Roughly, that’s 1/3 of the entire world production. Nearly 1/3 of the entire U.S. production comes from Iowa (2.7 BB), Illinois (2.3 BB), Nebraska (1.7 BB), Minnesota (1.5 BB), and Indiana (0.9 BB). Of that bountiful harvest, in the order of 25% are being converted via fermentation and distillation into ethanol, resulting in ~2.9 gallons of...

Corny Capitalism: This is one campaign promise we wish President Trump would break. But alas, he just told his EPA to give up any thought of cutting back on the federal government's anti-consumer, anti-environment ethanol mandate. Sad. The story begins in 2005, when President Bush approved the Renewable Fuel Standard program as part of an energy bill, which required oil refiners to blend in predetermined amounts of "biofuels" into their gasoline, starting at 4 billion gallons in 2006. A revised version of the RFS, which Bush signed in 2007, expanding the program, requiring ethanol levels to climb steadily to 36...

Sustainability (sustainable development) is one of the hottest trends on college campuses, in the news media, in corporate boardrooms, and with regulators. There are three different versions.Real Sustainability involves thoughtful, caring, responsible, economical stewardship and conservation of land, water, energy, metallic, forest, wildlife and other natural resources. Responsible businesses, families, and communities practice this kind of sustainability every day: polluting less, recycling where it makes sense, and using less energy, water, and raw materials to manufacture the products we need.Public Relations Sustainability mostly involves meaningless, superficial, unverifiable, image-enhancing assertions that a company is devoted to renewable fuels, corporate responsibility, environmental...

... "In this time of stress on our fuel supply system, why wouldn't we remove a barrier that would allow E15 to be sold less than two weeks before the allowable date of Sept. 15," said Paige Anderson, director of government relations at the Association for Convenience and Petroleum Retailing, representing gasoline station owners and convenience store chains that sell fuel. ...

In the rich world, cancer therapy is expensive. In the developing world, it may not be available at all. Not only is cutting-edge technology in short supply, but so are things like electricity and medical personnel. The lack of necessary resources for basic healthcare is made obvious by the fact that, if diagnosed with cancer, a person in the developing world is more likely to die from it than a person in the developed world. To help alleviate this problem, cheap, uncomplicated, portable, and preferably non-surgical treatments that do not require electricity are needed. Now, a team of researchers from...

Yes, it’s true… the United States smashed another fuel production record this year. According to the U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA), the country produced over one million barrels per day of this liquid fuel in the first six months of 2017. Unfortunately, this isn’t something to brag about. It would be wise just to keep this lil record to ourselves, rather than broadcast it loudly across the energy news wires and Mainstream media. Why do I say that? Because the U.S. produced a record 1.02 million barrels per day of corn-based ethanol, the lowest quality fuel in the world. Corn...

America's long war on fossil fuels is destroying the famed American prairie. According to a report by the Organic Consumers Association, 95% of the 240 million acres of prairie land that once blanketed the middle of our country, from Texas to North Dakota, already is gone. Only isolated pockets of prairie tall grass, some 35 million acres set aside for soil and wildlife conservation, remain. And that — largely in the Great Plains — is at risk of being destroyed. Among the factors most responsible for this tragic loss of our prairie heritage is the federal renewable fuel standard, a...

The United States exported more than 1 billion gallons (68,000 barrels per day) of fuel ethanol in 2016. Brazil surpassed Canada as the top destination for U.S. fuel ethanol. Imports were almost exclusively (99 percent) sugarcane ethanol from Brazil. Brazil is one of the world’s largest producers and consumers of fuel ethanol, but unlike the United States, Brazil’s main ethanol feedstock is sugarcane. Relatively high global sugar prices during 2016 encouraged more sugar production over sugarcane ethanol production. Most of the imported ethanol went to the West Coast region, most likely for compliance with California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS)...

I laughed out loud when I came across this one. Stuart Chase, the man who coined the term "New Deal" and was an adviser to Franklin Roosevelt, bemoaned the "destruction of goods" in his book titled "The Challenge of Waste". Here is the full paragraph: (page 22-23) DESTRUCTION OF GOODSEven when the industrial plant is running, we find that enormous quantities of the output never reach the consumer at all by reason of defects in the distribution and market mechanism. In a period of so-called "over-production," we see night riders burning tobacco and cotton, corn used as fuel, milk dumped...