In one of his final actions before leaving office, outgoing U.S. Agriculture Chief Tom Vilsack harshly criticized the EPA’s 2025 Biofuels and the Environment Report.
“The Third Report concludes that the effect of the Renewable Fuel Standard Program varies with time and the RFS Program had a modest positive effect on biofuel production and consumption and thus had a modest negative effect on the environment,” states the EPA. “These endpoints include air and water quality, water quantity, ecosystem health and biodiversity, soil quality, invasive species and international impacts. The impacts of the RFS Program overlap with the more significant effects of biofuels as an industry.”
“The US Department of Agriculture doesn’t concur with the [EPA’s] report to Congress on biofuels and the environment, Vilsack said in a Jan. 17 letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson,” according to Advanced Biofuels USA. “USDA believes that there are critical omissions in the document and overreach in the analyses presented.
“In its study of the Renewable Fuel Standard, which requires a certain amount of biofuels to be blended into the US transportation fuel supply, the EPA didn’t look at the law’s effect on greenhouse gases,” Vilsack said, adding, “Given the importance of biofuels to the rural economy, it is critical that the environmental effects of their production and use be characterized accurately,” according to Advanced Biofuels.
Vilsack is the second-longest-serving U.S. agriculture secretary, serving under both the Biden administration and the Obama administration. He’s known for his support of crop-based fuels.
The Third Report builds on the previous two reports, Biofuels and the Environment: First Triennial Report to Congress (2011) and Biofuels and the Environment: Second Triennial Report to Congress (2018), the EPA says.
“It reinforces the broad conclusions from the first two reports on biofuels in general and further evaluates the attribution of those effects to the RFS Program more specifically,” according to the EPA webpage on the report. “The Third Report updates the previous assessments of the environmental impacts of the Renewable Fuel Standards (RFS) Program and includes new analyses to better separate the effects of the RFS Program from the broader set of factors influencing of biofuels.
“In the first two reports, EPA could not separate the effects of the RFS Program from the impact of other factors (e.g., market or other policy effects). The Third Report includes an ‘attribution analysis’ that better separates the effects of the RFS Program from other factors that affect biofuels production and consumption in the United States.”
President Donald Trump has allied himself with American farmers. It remains to be seen “how he and the new Republican-led Congress will deal with existing policies aimed at boosting output of fuels like sustainable aviation fuel and renewable diesel,” reports Advanced Biofuels.