Source: PRESS RELEASE, 10/19/17

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.