GoodFuels

RFA CEO in NYT blog

Bob Dinneen, CEO of the Renewable Fuels Association, talked with Green, Inc, the New York Times’ environmental blog yesterday.

Dinneen focused on land-use changes and EPA’s recent decision to include the carbon emissions from “land-use changes” against biofuels.

He made a good point when he asked why biofuel is the only fuel for which land use changes are applied.

Mr. Dinneen emphasized that his group was perfectly willing to factor in such indirect land-use changes. But he expressed concern that biofuels are the only industry for which this calculation is made. Petroleum, for example, does not factor in land-use changes — and besides, he said, “Where’s the carbon impact associated with development in suburbia?”

“They can’t just do it to us and not to everyone else,” he argued.

Additionally, the science is faulty, Dinneen discussed.

“Right now, I think the model is too uncertain, the assumptions are out of whack and it needs to be promulgated more fairly,” he said.

On the subject of cellulosic ethanol — a fledgling but more climate-friendly type of ethanol made from non-food sources like stalks or switchgrass — Mr. Dinneen expressed doubts that federal requirements for the country to use 100 million gallons of the fuel next year would be met. No commercial-scale plants are currently in operation in this country, though a few are being built, with a Range Fuels plant in Georgia being perhaps the furthest along.

Click here to read the entire interview.