Scott Walker told me over the phone that he would wind down the federal ethanol mandate — a widely reviled bit of corporate welfare — over two years.
Walker took heat from conservatives (including me) in March when he went to Iowa and seemed to say that he wouldn’t put the ethanol mandate (officially the Renewable Fuel Standard) on the chopping block any time soon. His Iowa comments, and his campaign’s comments afterwards amounted to: Walker opposes mandates, but out of fairness to the industry built up around the RFS, he won’t kill the existing ethanol mandate until ethanol has “market access” on a level footing with real gasoline. (That’s my paraphrase, but I think it’s an accurate and fair paraphrase.)
“You can’t get to” a world without an ethanol mandate, “unless you deal with market access,” he said in Iowa. His campaign followed up: “What he’s saying is he isn’t going to get rid of it on day one because there’s a level of certainty that these people depend on and we need to factor that in when phasing it out.”
I interpreted those comments this way: “It sounds like Walker wants to keep the ethanol mandate until ethanol can compete broadly with oil in a free market. Given ethanol’s inherent shortcomings, that day may never come.”
But when I spoke to Walker last week, he got more specific, telling me that he thinks the ethanol mandate could be wound down over “a two-year period.”
If true, that would give more credence to his campaign’s interpretation of his Iowa comments, and would undermine much of my argument in my March column.
If Walker really would push for a two-year sunset of the RFS, paired with legislation removing market access issues for ethanol, that puts him in a similar place to Rand Paul. Paul has proposed a bill (co-sponsored by Iowa’s Chuck Grassley, an ethanol champion) to remove EPA limits on how much ethanol refiners can blend with gasoline, and Paul has also said he opposes the ethanol mandate.
If Jeb Bush can clarify his position, you could get a GOP field in Iowa where all the top-tier candidates oppose the ethanol mandate.
