Enough Is Enough: No More Special-Interest RFS Handouts

A broad, diverse, and growing chorus of voices continues to tell Washington that Enough Is Enough as politicians like Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) squabble for more special-interest handouts veiled as so-called “fixes” to the fundamentally failed Renewable Fuel Standard.

While Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) called the recently announcement RFS compromise struck at last week’s White House meeting a terrific decision and a win-win, we beg to differ. There’s nothing terrific about maintaining a deleterious mandate and entrenching winners and losers ever deeper.

If this issue weren’t so serious, the tired Washington theatrics and insider deal-cutting would be funny. But it is serious and we are committed to ending this harmful policy.

AEA remains laser-focused on advocating for real reform – and encouraging voters to let Washington know that the harmful RFS must be repealed (learn more here, here, here, here, here, and here).

Others – including many with whom we rarely see eye-to-eye on policy matters – agree.

Paul Driessen, a senior fellow with the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow and Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, as well as Financial Post columnist Lawrence Solomon, “one of Canada’s leading environmentalists,” leveled withering critiques upon the RFS here and here.

Additional voices continue to speak out from across the political spectrum:

• In a recent editorial, the Washington Examiner highlights the fact that “the government encourages overproduction of corn by ordering refiners to add inordinate quantities of corn ethanol to the fuel supply” as one example “of how unfree the market is.”
• On forbes.com this week, energy expert Robert Rapier writes that the RFS “isn’t a free market. Mandating a product and then forcing consumers to subsidize it is the opposite of a free market.”
• In the Houston Chronicle Friday, former top EPA official J. Winston Porter penned a column, reinforcing the fact that so-called RFS “fixes” “are sure to fail because they represent even more heavy-handed market interference, government action at its worst.”

Send a message to Washington and let them know: Enough Is Enough.