Chuck Grassley: “this is the third amendment today that has been very detrimental to the future of ethanol and other renewable fuels. If…”

“this is the third amendment today that has been very detrimental to the future of ethanol and other renewable fuels. If we had had this attitude expressed 20 years ago when we started, in a very elementary way, down the road to a successful renewable fuels industry that we are now developing, and it is still an infant industry, we would never be here today, where we could say that we have a strong opportunity of renewable fuels. This is the third amendment that raises questions about whether we are going to continue to have investment in renewable fuel production and everything that is connected with it. Something that bothers me more than anything else, and I have expressed it on previous amendments today, is throughout the development of renewable fuels, and particularly agriculture being the production of the renewable feedstock, we have always had agriculture very much united between renewable fuels. Within the last 4 or 5 months, because corn has gone from $2 to $4 a bushel, we now have beef producers raising questions about whether we ought to have an ethanol industry. You have the pork producers--and evidently we have the poultry people--raising the same question. If agriculture is not going to be united, if they had not been united, we would never have gotten here.”