CQ Roll Call: “Biofuels Standards Put Farm, Oil State Members on Opposite Sides”
RFF Fellow Nafisa Lohawala is quoted in this article about biofuel mandates.
“To keep expenses down while maintaining compliance with Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) requirements, refiners often rely on a global supply of feedstocks and biofuels. Industry sources say this is at least partly because domestic supplies are insufficient to meet RFS volume obligations.
‘You can think of it this way—that biofuel producers end up getting a subsidy out of this program, but oil producers end up getting taxed because they have to comply with this and actually buy those tradeable credits,’ said Nafisa Lohawala, a fellow at Resources for the Future whose research focuses on transportation issues. ‘The fact that the incentives are quite different on both sides means that their priorities are going to be quite different.’”
