On Thursday the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs took a step in the right direction in the quest to move our nation away from foreign sources of oil and invest in home-grown energy by rejecting by a vote of 7–15 an amendment offered by Sen. Pat Toomey (Pa.) to eliminate corn ethanol from the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS). Renewable Fuels Association (RFA) President and CEO Bob Dinneen released the following statement in response to the vote.
“Consumers can breathe a sigh of relief when they fill up at the gas pump because today’s vote by the committee ensures that ethanol will remain the number one source of renewable fuel in the world,” said Dinneen. “The committee understood the writing is on the wall when it comes to the RFS, and that legislative proposals that seek to purportedly ‘fix’ the statute are nothing more than political gamesmanship. When Congress passed the RFS it did so with the intention of stabilizing and growing the biofuels market. The committee rightly rejected the amendment by Senator Toomey because it would have done nothing more than squelched investment and created uncertainty in the market, and would thereby have had a detrimental impact on the energy and economic future of generations to come.”