Free Republic

Last Friday the Biden administration raised the mandatory amount of biofuel, specifically ethanol, that must be blended within the U.S. gasoline supply. The previous amount of 10% (summer blend) was raised to a year-round 15% (waiver) by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This is likely to lead to two sets of bigger issues, less food and higher gas prices. ♦ First issue. – The Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) is a government mandate, passed in 2005 and expanded in 2007, that requires growing volumes of biofuels to be blended into U.S. transportation fuels like gasoline and diesel every year. Approximately 40...

According to reports, the U.S. and Russian military will be engaging in an anti-terrorism exercise that will involve Russian paratroopers using U.S. weapons to “take and hold” the main facilities of the CIA and Denver International Airport in Colorado and the National Security Agency in Utah. (Related: Learn about the hypothetical ‘war games’ the U.S. and China have been playing) The European Union Times has more on the report announcing this exercise from the Russian Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation: Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Colonel Alexander Kucherenko publically announced this 24-21 May “anti-terror drill” this Friday past noting that this...

We all know what the relationship between environmental activists and the oil and gas industry is like. It’s an endless series of demands that we stop using fossil fuels. Reduce emissions. Keep It In The Ground! You know the story. So is there anything that can bring these two, diametrically opposed groups together? Turns out there is, and it’s the EPA’s decision (vocally supported by President Trump) to allow year-round sales of E15 ethanol-blended gasoline. But wait, you’re probably thinking. Don’t environmental activists support biofuels? Well… yes. At least for the most part. But they also know that burning ethanol...

The ethanol wars between King Corn and the oil and gas industry continue, with the corn faction finding a new champion this month in the person of Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-Illinois). It shouldn’t come as any surprise that she’s teaming up with Senators Ernst and Grassley since Illinois is the third largest ethanol producer in the country. The fight is still going on over the EPA granting waivers to smaller refineries from the ethanol blending requirements in the Renewable Fuel Standard, but Duckworth is raising the stakes. She’s asking the EPA’s Inspector General to investigate whether or not Trump’s EPA...

We’ve spent plenty of time here talking about the federal Renewable Fuel Standard, particularly as it pertains to ethanol blending. But what’s less often discussed is that fact that many states and cities have been implementing their own standards. The majority of these involve mandates that a certain percentage of their energy be supplied through green, renewable energy sources such as wind and solar while weaning themselves off hydrocarbons. What’s often left out of the debate about states adopting these sorts of energy portfolios are the questions of how effective they are and how much they wind up costing. Bloomberg...

We knew (or at least feared) that this was coming, but Friday saw the finalization of the new biofuels – specifically ethanol – blending requirements for 2019 and 2020. And true to the promises that President Trump made to Iowa politicians, we did not see any significant reductions in the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) mandates. In fact, they went up, much the same as under Obama’s EPA. (EPA website)

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...

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...

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...

There was a time in America — and it wasn't even so long ago — that liberals cared a lot about working-class people. They may have been misguided in many of their policy solutions — e.g., raising the minimum wage — but at least their hearts were in the right place. Then a strange thing happened about a decade ago. Radical environmentalists took control of the Democratic Party. These leftists care more about the supposed rise of the oceans than the financial survival of the middle class. The industrial unions made a catastrophic decision to get in bed with these...

Hillary Clinton owes Bernie Sanders’ campaign an apology, the campaign said Friday. Clinton on Thursday accused Sanders’ camp of “lying,” alleging that his campaign has been claiming Clinton accepts money from the fossil fuel industry — a statement she forcefully rejected when confronted by an environmental activist. “I think she probably owes the senator an apology for that because the senator is not lying about her record,” Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver told MSNBC. “He’s talking about her record. He’s talking about her practices. She obviously doesn’t like it, but that doesn’t make it lying because you don’t like it.”...

Take a look at this abstract from the journal Progress in Human Geography: ………………………………………………………………………Glaciers, Gender, and Science:A FEMINIST GLACIOLOGY: framework for global environmental change research Mark Carey, M Jackson, Alessandro Antonello, Jaclyn Rushing ABSTRACT Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change. However, the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers – particularly related to epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge – remain understudied. This paper thus proposes a feminist glaciology framework with four key components: 1) knowledge producers; (2) gendered science and knowledge; (3) systems of scientific domination; and (4) alternative representations of glaciers. Merging...

Washington could become the first state in the nation to impose a direct tax on carbon emissions from fossil fuels such as coal, gasoline and natural gas. A ballot measure before the state Legislature would create a carbon tax of $25 per metric ton of fossil fuel emissions burned in Washington, while reducing taxes. ...

Wood Mackenzie's report, cited by the energy news service Platts, said about 3.4 million barrels' worth of oil a day was not profitable below $35 a barrel. According to the International Energy Agency, the world's supply is 97.07 million barrels a day. While today's oil prices are below this threshold, the report suggests the price at which US shale and other producers would be forced out of the market is lower than previously thought. As Platts writes, "For many producers, being cash negative is not enough of an incentive to shut down fields as restarting flow can be costly and...

If Donald Trump is the Tony Soprano of American politics, Ted Cruz is a less-affable version of Mr. Haney from Green Acres (Ok - not quite, but sort of! Do feel free to say, H&R readers, which movie character is a better fit with Cruz). But the only thing cleverer than Cruz's impression of Inigo Montoya in Princess Bride (and not the least because it irritates Billy Crystal and the insufferably self-righteous Mandy Patinkin so much) is the campaign strategy he devised in Iowa to defeat the ethanol cartel and win the primary, I note in my column at The...

When Obama carried out his Solyndra con game, he broke the same law that Martha Stewart went to prison for breaking In 2009 the Obama administration gave $535 million to Solyndra, claiming that it would create 4,000 new jobs. However, instead of creating those 4,000 new jobs, the company went bankrupt. It was later revealed that the company’s shareholders and executives had made substantial donations to Obama’s campaign, that the company had spent a large sum of money on lobbying, and that Solyndra executives had had many meetings with White House officials. It was also revealed that the Obama administration had...

From the “fresh melt water will disrupt the planet” department, except that this ongoing alarm has already been debunked by NASA, see: NASA refutes Mann and Rahmstorf – Finds Atlantic ‘Conveyor Belt’ Not SlowingIllustration depicting the overturning circulation of the global ocean. Throughout the Atlantic Ocean, the circulation carries warm waters (red arrows) northward near the surface and cold deep waters (blue arrows) southward. Image credit: NASA/JPL Melting Greenland ice sheet may affect global ocean circulation, future climateUniversity of South Florida and international scientists find influx of freshwater could disrupt the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, an important component of global...

Last year, 42 North American drillers filed for bankruptcy, according to law firm Haynes and Boone. It's only likely to get worse this year. Experts say there are a lot of parallels between today's crisis and the last oil crash in 1986. Back then, 27% of exploration and production companies went bust. Defaults are skyrocketing again. In December, exploration and production company defaults topped 11%, up from just 0.5% the previous year, according to Fitch Ratings. That's a 2,000%-plus jump. It's just the beginning, says John La Forge, head of real assets strategy at Wells Fargo. If history repeats, people...

This seems like it may be a day late and a dollar short as the saying goes, but someone has decided to ask a question in Iowa this week which would normally border on blasphemy. Do Iowans really know much about the ethanol issue and, even more to the point, do they really care? Going by the conventional wisdom this seems like a preposterous prospect. Iowa is the domain of King Corn and it drives all things political out there, right? Well, the American Council for Capital Formation (ACCF) decided to take the question to the voters directly rather relying...

Obradovich: Branstad puts ethanol over caucus futureLink only