As prairies get plowed for biofuels, green groups demand EPA act

• More than a dozen environmental and conservation groups filed a petition last week alleging that the EPA is illegally looking the other way as farmers plow over prairies and wetlands to grow corn needed to satisfy a U.S. biofuel mandate.
• Millions of acres of previously uncultivated land have been converted to cropland” to satisfy the biofuel mandate “with far-reaching, deleterious environmental impacts,” the environmentalists say in their filing. “Our air, water, land and wildlife are all suffering as a result.”
• It wasn’t supposed to be this way. When Congress expanded the Renewable Fuel Standard as part of broad energy legislation in 2007, environmentalists pushed for safeguards designed to prevent land conversion, including a requirement that biofuels accepted under the program only come from previously farmed tracts. But instead of verifying that biofuel comes from crops grown on eligible, already cultivated land, the EPA chose to assess agricultural land use in aggregate.
• The activists say the EPA’s broad approach of only looking at national cropland totals obscures the real picture on the ground, because net acreage can remain the same nationwide if native grasses are plowed to grow corn for ethanol while existing farms are turned into subdivisions and shopping malls. The EPA approach also violates the Renewable Fuel Standard’s “clear and unambiguous restriction” on land conversion, while undermining the measure’s intended climate and environmental objectives, they argue.