Inside D.C.

WOTUS, RFS — Acronyms of chaos, noise this week

Leave it to the Obama White House to shove not one, but two of its most controversial regulatory efforts of the last six-plus years out the door in a holiday-shortened week when Congress and a good chunk of the civilians who care are out of town.

To be fair, this is a time-honored strategy for Administrations whose regulatory priorities don’t jive with those of the regulated industry, Congress or both.

Any White House does such things wrongly thinking it can minimize negative fall-out and create media white noise/confusion around whatever it is it’s trying to do.  In this case, EPA released May 27, its final “waters of the U.S. (WOTUS)” rule, a highly controversial effort to extend its authority under the Clean Water Act (CWA) to any “body of water” it determines affects/could affect downstream water quality.  And in good political form, it released May 29 its long-awaited, often bollixed up, equally controversial proposed Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) for all biofuels for the years 2014-2016, and in the case of one biofuel, 2017.

Within minutes of each regulatory release, industry exploded with at best skepticism and at worst, outrage.  On WOTUS, you’d be hard-pressed to find any agriculture/agribusiness group not opposing the rulemaking as a badly scripted and executed power grab by EPA.  So obnoxious is the WOTUS effort, the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) declared WOTUS its number one regulatory priority.  The kindest ag words EPA hears on WOTUS – the agency tried to rename it “the clean water rule” at the 11^th hour – is from the National Farmers Union (NFU), which acknowledges EPA’s goal as laudable, but it’s effort as less than its best.

Congressional denouncement of the WOTUS rule is bipartisan and runs ocean deep.  The House passed a bill last week to force EPA to withdraw the rulemaking and repropose it, and the Senate will follow suit shortly after it returns from Memorial Day recess, a schedule likely accelerated by this week’s release.  The President vows to veto any action to stop EPA, but this threat has more to do with his “climate change” post-presidency legacy than fixing the rule.

When it comes to the RFS, let’s face it, EPA has messed this up from the get-go.  In fairness, the 2007 law authorizing the RFS – how much of each biofuel must be blended with gasoline on an annual basis as a way to cut oil imports and create demand for the alternatives – tied the agency’s hands setting specific “aspirational” annual levels of biofuels.  For instance, the RFS level for cellulosic (non-corn) ethanol the agency tried to set a few years aback couldn’t match industry production, which for the last several years has been zero gallons.  EPA has dithered so badly it’s missed nearly all of the statutory deadlines for RFS announcements, and in 2014, decided to just not set an RFS until mid-2015.

Further complicating the RFS issue is the political debate over its future.  Critics of corn ethanol – livestock and poultry producers, meat processors, the petroleum industry, environmental and hunger groups – see the competition between corn for fuel and corn for feed/food to be an immoral trade-off and an economic nightmare.  They want the RFS gone.  Others rightly contend the energy landscape in 2007 is not the energy landscape today, and at the very least, the RFS needs to be modernized, at least to the point EPA can actually and successfully administer the program.

This was supposed to be the first “quiet” week of the summer, but sadly, ‘twas not to be.  Next week, when both sides of both issues will have read and partially digested the actual White House actions – and a rested Congress comes back from vacation – things will get a lot worse.