Article Analysis and Paraphrasing Environmental

Article Analysis and Paraphrasing Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). (2008). Renewable Fuel Standard Program. U.S. Government. Online at http://www.cwcleancities.org/resourcespolicy.php#standardPrograms

The United States government has battled with the problem of energy policy based on the mutual economic, environmental and practical flaws in the dependency on petroleum. This is the condition at the center of a 2008 article derived from the government's own Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Authoring its own Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) program, the EPA has shown a clear favoritism for biofuel, corn ethanol and biodiesel fuels in creating a new strategy that might remove the high level of need currently related to fossil fuels such as oil and gasoline. The EPA article supports this focus by recognizing the need for a change in energy policy. The world's dependency upon petroleum and other fossil fuels comprises an energy scenario which cannot be sustained. In most scientifically informed circles, and within the context of the progressive political discourse, it is fairly well-understood that the environmental consequences of burning gasoline can no longer be endured. Thus there is a movement on the part of many more progressive organizations, corporations and world governments to pursue viable forms of alternative fuel generation, exemplified here by the EPA. The EPA demands in this article that all producers of energy and fossil fuels must begin to shift a certain portion of their production efforts toward so-called 'renewable fuel' sources. Among these, the development and endorsement of biofuels, and in particular of cellulose- based ethanol, as an eventual replacement for gasoline, is the most explicitly endorsed. Additionally, this has created a government dictated correlation between agencies, with the article indicating that the Department of Energy and the Department of Agriculture are beholden to the EPA on the subject of renewable fuel production. The specific EPA article in question is designed to give girding to that authority, saturated as it is with legislative attention to this method of alternative fuel, demonstrating the U.S. government to be deeply committed to an 'alternative' fuel policy that is widely criticized for its inefficiency. The EPA article shows that the United States government and its oil, auto and agro industry partners have collectively pushed forward with an alternative fuel policy dominated by corn-based ethanol and biofuel strategies. Specifically, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, "the Renewable Fuel Standard program will increase the volume of renewable fuel required to be blended into gasoline to 7.5 billion gallons by 2012. The RFS program was developed in collaboration with refiners, renewable fuel producers, and many other stakeholders." (EPA 2008, p. 1) This passage is a revealing one which demonstrates that under the existing policy and for at least the coming three years, the United States will balk at making real overtures toward the movement away from fossil fuels. The goals projected here show that the EPA remains steeped in perceptions of an energy policy fundamentally based on petroleum. And even with a policy favoring the 'blending' of renewable fuel sources, the insistence upon biofuel methods which have been scientifically and economically scrutinized to a negative outcome reveals an EPA that is delayed in creating a meaningful alternative fuel policy. Paraphrasing the passage above cannot be done without some level of interpretive insight. And in conducting this insight, one can see that the EPA is as much beholden to industry and politicization as to an interest in the challenges presented to the environment. This stands as one of the primary reasons that a widely criticized mode of alternative fuel source continues to occupy a central place in America's future fuel policy.