Even before President Obama cut a backroom deal on health care with the pharmaceutical lobby, the labor unions and wavering senators — and even before he picked that Bill Daley-Bill Clinton-Goldman Sachs alumnus named Rahm Emanuel as his White House chief of staff — anyone paying close attention to the president’s record got a strong hint he was no reformer.
The hint: Sen. Obama’s full-throated embrace of subsidies and mandates for corn ethanol, and his pointed attacks on those — like John McCain — who opposed the federal ethanol boondoggle. (During the campaign, for instance, Obama pledged to outlaw new cars that didn’t run on 85 percent blends of ethanol.)
Now, President Obama is back on the ethanol horse, helping the K Street-savvy industry by discarding scientific findings from last year that cast doubt on the fuel’s environmental benefits, and issuing a rule this month ramping up the federal ethanol mandate.
The Environmental Protection Agency issued a draft rule last year finding that corn ethanol was not really a “renewable” fuel because of all the emissions caused by its production — making fertilizer, planting corn, harvesting, distilling, shipping and causing deforestation. Last week, though, the EPA reversed course and issued a final rule that would boost the amount of grain ethanol the federal government required gasoline blenders to use.
The corn ethanol industry is rejoicing, but EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said, “We weren’t dumbing down the standard to favor any particular industry.”
Measuring the energy inputs and the emission outputs of creating ethanol is tricky (different parts of the industry, in different regions, use different methods). Was it science or lobbying behind the administration’s 180-degree turn on grain ethanol?
Without mind reading skills, we can’t know for sure, but we do know that EPA wasn’t hearing only from disinterested scientists and neutral experts. A powerful and well-connected army of lobbyists works for the corn ethanol industry, and those lobbyists had a say.
For instance, there’s Growth Energy, a new ethanol lobby group co-chaired by former Democratic presidential candidate and Obama donor Wesley Clark. The company’s chief executive officer is lobbyist Tom Buis, formerly the top agricultural policy aide to Obama confidant Tom Daschle.
Former Rep. Jim Nussle, R-Iowa, sits on Growth Energy’s board, while his former chief of staff, Christopher Bliley — also a former associate administrator at the EPA — lobbies for the group. Growth Energy’s top K Street asset, however, is Kountoupes Consulting.
The firm’s three Democratic lobbyists have already given a combined $64,000 to Democrats this cycle, while Republican lobbyist Julie Hershey Carr has given more than $11,000 to GOP candidates and committees since the 2008 election.
Across the ethanol industry, lobbying is picking up. The BlueFire Ethanol corporation last month hired K Street’s Bracewell and Giuliani, including lobbyist Edward Krenik, an associate EPA administrator under Bush and a former hill staffer for Sen. David Durenberger, R-Minn., a close ally of the original ethanol giant, Archer Daniels Midland.
Growth Energy and BlueFire are just two examples. Because ethanol is utterly dependent on government subsidies and mandates, wherever there’s ethanol, there’s lobbying.
So it was the lobbyists with tentacles into both parties and the EPA who changed the Obama administration’s mind on ethanol, despite the fuel’s adverse environmental impacts and upward pressure on food and fuel prices.
The science around ethanol — like the motivations of administration officials — is not clear-cut. But the money trail is unmistakable.
Timothy P. Carney is The Washington Examiner’s Lobbying Editor. His K Street column appears on Wednesdays.
