Sierra Club Challenges Environmental Protection Agency

READ THE COMPLAINT HERE

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Today, the Sierra Club officially filed its lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency for its continued failure to conduct the required environmental impact analysis on the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS). The EPA is almost four years overdue in its last review for Congress and eight years overdue on its air quality impact analysis. Both are necessary to determine the extent of the RFS program’s adverse air quality impacts and inform the EPA in its annual setting of renewable fuels volumes. The Sierra Club filed its notice of intent to sue in February 2017 and filed its complaint in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

EPA’s failure to analyze and address the impacts of the agency’s annual standards, which have drastically increased biofuel volumes in our nation’s fuel mix, has led to unchecked land conversion, causing the elimination of vast native landscapes for the production of corn for ethanol. In just the first four years of the RFS’ implementation, more than 7.3 million acres of land – largely grassland including native prairie, pasture, and federal Conservation Reserve Program lands -- were converted to cropland to meet EPA’s ethanol volume requirement. Approximately 40 percent of the U.S. corn crop is diverted to biorefineries for fuel production, up from nine percent in 2001. Excessive nutrient runoff from this increased agriculture production have contributed to severe algal blooms in water bodies including the Great Lakes and the hypoxic area known as the “Dead Zone” in the Gulf of Mexico.

“The EPA is mandated to protect our communities and the environment, and it is wholly unacceptable that the Agency has ignored the environmental impacts of the Renewable Fuel Standard for nearly a decade,” said Sierra Club Staff Attorney Devorah Ancel. “Today’s lawsuit is a reminder to Administrator Pruitt that his duty is to the American people, and we will continue to hold him accountable for both his harmful actions and inaction alike.”

A previous investigation by EPA’s inspector general found that the agency had failed to meet these critical statutory deadlines. In response, the EPA promised to complete the Triennial Report by December 31, 2017 and the anti-backsliding air quality study by September 30, 2024 -- 15 years after the law required the study to be completed.

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More about the Renewable Fuel Standard:

The Clean Air Act was amended in 2005 and 2007 to address the significant climate change-inducing emissions from the transportation sector with the goal of reducing and replacing gasoline and other petroleum-based fuels with significant quantities of renewable fuels. The amendments require the Environmental Protection Agency to conduct triennial reports to Congress on environmental and conservation impacts of the Renewable Fuel Standard and an anti-backsliding analysis to determine if mitigation measures are necessary to address any adverse air quality impacts. The law requires specific amounts of biofuels, mostly corn-based ethanol, to be blended into the nation’s fuel supply each year. The EPA sets annual standards of billions of gallons, but has been increasing volumes without analyzing the environmental impacts and reporting them to Congress. These impacts include converting millions of acres of native grasslands to cropland, with attendant loss of habitat and harm to sensitive wildlife species, increased use of pesticides and water pollution, and release of carbon into the atmosphere. In addition, the RFS program is undermining the federal Conservation Reserve Program which was designed to encourage farmers to preserve grasslands in their natural state, while the RFS program encourages conversion to corn for use in gasoline.