Repealing the EPA’s biofuel boondoggle ought to be a no-brainer—but can reformers overcome the “liquid pork” regime?

Imagine a single policy change that could lower food prices, free up land for construction or conservation, improve the environment, cut greenhouse-gas emissions, and reduce fuel costs. You’d think that it would be a no-brainer, especially now, when “affordability” has become the watchword for both parties. And it wouldn’t require a new tangle of regulations or an expanded federal bureaucracy. To the contrary: it would simply mean ending the Environmental Protection Agency’s Renewable Fuel Standard—the byzantine, two-decade-old program that forces refiners to blend plant-based biofuels into nearly every gallon of gasoline and diesel sold in the United States.

In this imaginary world of rational policy, the White House would order the EPA to roll back the RFS immediately, and Congress would vote to kill the program for good. In the real world, though, such commonsense reform currently stands little chance. Despite two decades of criticism, the RFS persists because its political math is irresistible.

Included as part of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (and expanded two years later), the RFS rules were meant to curb emissions and boost the supply of domestically produced fuel. Instead of importing more oil, the logic went, we could pay farmers to grow more soybeans (for biodiesel) and corn (to be converted into ethanol and blended into gasoline).

But the RFS program fails on its own terms. For example, EPA rules effectively require that automotive gasoline sold in the U.S. contain 10 percent ethanol. But that addition doesn’t increase the nation’s gasoline supply by 10 percent. The amount of energy contained in a gallon of ethanol, it turns out, is only slightly higher than the fossil-fuel energy needed to grow and process the corn that produces that ethanol.

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