Green groups have said cutting US gas demand would have a rebound effect promoting fossil fuel use in other countries

Environmental lobbyists have filed a lawsuit in the US Court of Appeals against the Environmental Protection Agency’s handling of the revised Renewable Fuel Standard.

The Clean Air Task Force and Friends of the Earth have also petitioned the EPA directly, claiming that the agency has ignored requirements set by Congress to ensure US biofuels reduce greenhouse gas emissions compared to the fossil fuels they replace.

They are angry that the EPA has accepted use of all biofuels toward the Standard’s mandates, including corn ethanol.

The groups have also attacked the level of controls in place to ensure that biofuels used toward the supply mandates within the Standard do not threaten uncultivated land.

But the biofuels industry ridiculed the arguments of the environmental pressure groups today – particularly a further claim that increased US biofuels use would have a “rebound” effect in the rest of the world in the use of fossil fuels.

The groups claimed that reducing the use of fossil fuels in the US would mean less demand globally and as a result, lower prices for fossil fuels, which would in turn encourage greater consumption of fossil fuels in the rest of the world.

Friends of the Earth Energy Policy Campaigner Kate McMahon said the EPA has based its assumptions in setting the Standard based on “rosy projections” about biofuels production in 2022.

She said: “Using these projections ensures that for the next several years greenhouse gas emissions will only get worse, rather than better.”

The Clean Air Task Force, a Boston-based non-profit group that filed the lawsuit on behalf of Friends of the Earth, said the Renewable Fuel Standard was “seriously flawed”.

Jonathan Lewis, an attorney with the Clean Air Task Force, said: “It will actually increase greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector in the near term and exacerbate the very problem that Congress sought to correct.”

“Tortured logic”

The Renewable Fuels Association, which represents the US ethanol industry, said the move by the environmental groups “defies simple common sense”.

RFA President and CEO Bob Dinneen said: “By this tortured logic, any effort that environmental activists support to reduce America’s reliance on oil would be responsible for lowering U.S. oil demand, reducing global oil prices, and inciting increased consumption somewhere else in the world.

It simply doesn’t pass the sniff test” - Bob Dinneen, RFA

“Increasing mileage standards, deploying electric vehicles, and any other measure designed to reduce U.S. oil demand would be penalized with carbon emissions from increased global oil consumption under this rubric. It simply doesn’t pass the sniff test.”

Mr Dineen said the environmental groups appeared to be attempting to keep US demand for oil high so that global oil prices are high.

He said: “Blocking the use of biofuels will not reduce global oil consumption, but rather increase it as America must look for more sources of oil, which too often comes from environmentally questionable practices like deep water drilling and tar sand conversation.”

The ethanol trade body said the groups’ claims about land use claims were “false”, and that although there were “fundamental flaws” with the second phase of the Renewable Fuel Standard, “it certainly isn’t that it didn’t go far enough”.