Congresswoman Cindy Axne.
Iowa Congresswoman Cindy Axne is calling on congressional leaders to include money for the renewable fuels industry in the infrastructure bill they’re crafting.
President Biden’s American Jobs Act proposes spending $174 billion to promote the development of electric vehicles and install charging stations.
“We’ve also got our homegrown alternatives in clean biofuels that can be readily be put in place immediately,” Axne said, “much more quickly than we can move towards electric vehicles.”
Axne, a Democrat from West Des Moines, said she’s talked with U-S Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg about ensuring the biofuels sector gets included in the final package. There are more than 284 million registered vehicles in the U.S. and fewer than half a percent of them run on electricity today. Axne said investing now in biofuels infrastructure — like new fuel pumps that dispense higher blends of ethanol in gasoline– would have an immediate impact on air quality.
“We can get into markets more quickly,” Axne said. “We can increase the amount of ethanol used and automatically reduce our greenhouse gases and make sure we’re coming out of the gate with this bill actually making an impression from the beginning.”
In a letter to six top House leaders, Axne cited recent Harvard University research that suggests ethanol’s carbon intensity score is nearly half that of gasoline and could be be even lower.