Obama passes a major test, but most of the class doesn’t notice

Across the pond, Guardian UK contends that Barack Obama passed the first major test this week of his promise to put science before politics. The test took the form of an arcane government regulation called EPA-420-F-09-024, which might help explain why Barack Obama passed a science test and most of the class didn’t notice. And as is too often the case, the Americans who did notice graded Obama based on the bias they came with and overlooked the nuance of his moves on the court and the grace of his jump shot.
According to the Guardian, Obama faced “intense pressure” from a powerful industry and members of Congress:
The Obama administration took on the powerful farming interests in America’s heartland today, making clear it does not see corn-based ethanol as part of the long-term solution to climate change.
If you don’t think corn farmers are powerful, take a look at the ingredients label on just about any American processed food product. As Michael Pollan writes in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, “To wash down your chicken nuggets with virtually any soft drink in the supermarket is to have some corn with your corn.”
In recent years, as American minds turned green and foreign oil turned expensive, corn farmers started putting corn in our gas tanks, too. The ethanol business boosted demand for corn, which may have increased the cost of everything from chicken nuggets to soft drinks. That made corn farmers richer and more powerful. Then gasoline prices fell, and the bottom fell out of the ethanol business.
Ethanol refiners started filing for bankruptcy and begging the government for help. Corn farmers weren’t about to give up the increased demand they enjoyed from ethanol, but environmentalists wanted them out of the energy trade. Studies were published showing corn ethanol is worse for the environment than gasoline. In the middle of this web of interests: Obama.
EPA-420-F-09-024 phases corn out of the energy trade, but only after allowing it to recover and grow a bit. That’s the nuance of Obama’s moves on the court. The nation’s corn ethanol supply can grow from nine billion gallons per year to 15 by 2016. After that, all new ethanol must derive from advanced biofuels, which can be made from just about anything, it seems—prairie grass, agricultural waste, algae, restaurant sewage, old telephone poles. But corn starch is out, and the new fuel sources must do substantially less damage to the environment than fossil fuels. That’s the grace of his jump shot.
Environmentalists had already begun declaring defeat the day before the announcement of EPA-420-F-09-024, when they noticed Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack was participating in the press conference with Lisa Jackson of EPA and Steven Chu of Energy. Many environmentalists can’t look at Vilsack without seeing a corn-fed Iowa farm boy with a wisp of straw between his teeth. And in fact, in his first interview as agriculture secretary, Vilsack had promised to help those struggling ethanol refineries.
By the time the decision came, so defeated were the environmentalists that some didn’t notice what they won. The first reaction of Frank O’Donnell, from Clean Air Watch, was “It is clear that pressure from the corn lobby is making inroads.” Not everyone shared that reaction: the Natural Resources Defense Council reacted to the new regulation with cautious praise. But both Clean Air Watch and the Clean Air Task Force, in their own words, “raised an eyebrow.”
They acknowledged what early media coverage noticed—that the Obama Administration handed them a victory by counting “indirect land use” when it calculates the environmental damage of different fuels. (This is the provision that most miffs ethanol refiners and other biodiesel producers. Indirect land use comes into play when an acre of corn or soybeans is used for fuel, and another acre, somewhere else, must be converted to food production, possibly from rainforest.) But many activists doubt the horizon placed on the future of corn ethanol, believing that surely corn farmers, with Vilsack on their team, will slip in the back door. Jonathan Lewis, an attorney with the Clean Air Task Force, reacted this way:
EPA should be doing everything it can to figure out how to lower greenhouse gas emissions over the next few decades. EPA’s proposed approach would perpetuate the use of corn ethanol and other outdated biofuels that contribute to global warming.
Environmentalists worry that EPA will compare the environmental cost of ethanol to fossil fuels over a 100-year time period, which makes corn ethanol look better than it does over a 30-year time period. And EPA said it wouldn’t rule that out. But if the cool-headed British at Guardian UK have the right take, and science is winning the day, science should win that fight as well.
Ultimately, what matters as much as the corn in the gas tank is the corn in the argument. Pressure groups are supposed to keep pressure on an issue, I suppose, and not let up, but all the pressing can start to look like the shrill politics of old, when what’s happening in Washington is genuinely new. The 100 days hoopla got old by the noon of the 100th day, but it was refreshing to see most environmentalists pausing from the full-court press to admit the president is even greener than he sounds.