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to estimate the effects. Some studies make ethanol look terrible. Some studies make it look great.
• It all depends on what the model looks like and how much land conversion you assume. Bob Dinneen, president of the Renewable Fuels Association, told the AP that "the science is most certainly not there" to model land conversion at all.
• Even some of the research being promoted by the ethanol industry isn't cut and dried. For instance, the industry points to a Dutch study that found that urban sprawl internationally was responsible for greater grassland loss than biofuels. But that study, which wasn't peer-reviewed, contains this line, which the ethanol industry does not emphasize: "In the USA, biofuel expansion is the dominant cause of agricultural land use loss."
• Q: Then why does the government keep this going?
• A: The administration could waive the ethanol requirements and Congress could rewrite the law. That hasn't happened in part because of politics. Abandoning this policy would put the corn-friendly Obama administration on the side of Big Oil, which hates the ethanol mandate. Agriculture interests wield a lot of clout in Congress. And then there are the Iowa caucuses, which can obliterate the dreams of presidential hopefuls who are seen as anti-farmer.
• But the administration knows the ethanol mandate hasn't lived up to its environmental promises. Today, when officials talk about it, they are more likely to cast it as an economic lifeline for rural America, not as a green-energy plan.
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