President Joe Biden will visit corn-rich Iowa on Tuesday to announce he will suspend a federal rule that prevents the sale of gasoline with a higher ethanol blend this summer as his administration tries to reduce prices at the pump that soared during the Russia’s war with Ukraine.
Most gasoline sold in the US is blended with 10% ethanol. The Environmental Protection Agency will issue an emergency waiver to allow the widespread sale of a 15% ethanol blend that is generally banned between June 1 and September 15 due to concerns of increased smog at high temperatures.
Senior Biden administration officials said the move will save drivers an average of 10 cents per gallon at 2,300 gas stations. Industry groups say most of those stations are in the Midwest and South, including Texas.
Biden will announce the move at a biofuels company in Menlo, west of Des Moines. Iowa is the largest producer of corn in the country, key to producing ethanol.
The waiver is another effort to help ease world energy markets that have been shaken since Russia invaded Ukraine. Last month, the president announced that the US will release 1 million barrels of oil per day from the nation’s strategic petroleum reserve over the next six months. His administration said that has helped push gasoline prices down slightly of late, after they rose to an average of about $4.23 a gallon in late March, compared with $2.87 in the same period a year ago, according to AAA.
Members of Congress from both parties, as well as industry groups, urged Biden to grant the E15 waiver.
“Iowa’s homegrown biofuels provide a quick and clean solution to lowering prices at the pump and increasing production would help us become energy independent once again,” said Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley. He was one of nine Republican and seven Democrat senators from Midwestern states who sent Biden a letter last month urging him to allow year-round sales of E15.
The trip will be Biden’s first as president to Iowa, where his 2020 presidential campaign limped into fourth place in the state’s technologically flawed caucus.
After rallying to win the Democratic nomination, Biden returned for a rally at the Iowa State Fairgrounds four days before Election Day 2020, only to see Donald Trump win the state by 8 percentage points.
Biden returns to the state at a time when he faces even greater political danger. He is saddled with declining approval ratings and inflation at a 40-year high, while his party faces the prospect of huge midterm electoral losses that could cost him control of Congress.
The president also planned to promote his economic plans to help rural families struggling with higher costs, while highlighting the bipartisan $1 trillion infrastructure law enacted last fall. The law includes money to improve internet access, as well as modernize wastewater systems, reduce flood threats, and improve roads and bridges, clean water, and power grids in sparsely populated areas.
“Part of this is showing up in communities of all sizes, regardless of the results of the last election,” said Jesse Harris, who was a senior adviser to Biden’s 2020 campaign in Iowa and led early voting efforts for Barack. Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008.
Harris said that most of the presidents who visit Iowa tend to go to the largest cities in the state. Pounding an area like Menlo, part of Guthrie County, which backed Trump over Biden by 35 percentage points in 2020, “speaks to the importance the administration places on infrastructure in general, but also infrastructure in rural communities and smaller”.
The Biden administration plans to spend the next few weeks boosting billions of dollars in funding for rural areas. Cabinet members and other top officials will travel the country to help communities gain access to money made available as part of the infrastructure package.
“The president is not taking this trip through a political prism,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said. “He’s making this trip because Iowa is a rural state in the country that would benefit greatly from the president’s policies.”
Still, administration officials have long suggested that Biden travel more to promote an economy that is recovering from the setbacks of the coronavirus pandemic. The number of Americans collecting unemployment has fallen to the lowest levels since 1970, for example.
But much of the positive national labor news has been overshadowed by rising gas, food and housing prices that have pushed consumer inflation to 7.9% over the past year ending in February. . That’s the steepest increase since 1982. March inflation figures, due out Tuesday, are likely to bring more bad news for the Biden administration.
“Maybe a trip back to Iowa is just what Joe Biden needs to understand what his reckless spending and big government policies are doing to our country,” Iowa GOP Chairman Jeff Kaufmann said in a statement. .
After Iowa, Biden will visit Greensboro, North Carolina, on Thursday.
Psaki blamed Russia’s war in Ukraine for helping to push up gasoline prices, saying the administration expects March’s consumer price index to be “extremely high” in large part because of that.
The EPA has lifted seasonal restrictions on E15 in the past, including after Hurricane Harvey in 2017. The Trump administration allowed the sale of E15 in the summer months two years later, but a federal appeals court struck down the rule.
Reference-www.cnbc.com