Please note this submission…

Please note this submission was also emailed to rebecca.tan@ontario.ca. Referring to that version may be easier to read due to formatting. Citations are also only available on the formatted version. You may also contact Nancy Goucher to request a copy of the formatted version.
January 23, 2018
Rebecca Tan Policy Advisor Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change Climate Change and Environmental Policy Division Air Policy Instruments and Programs Design Branch 77 Wellesley Street West Floor 10 Ferguson Block Toronto Ontario M7A2T5 Phone: (416) 325-5102
Email: rebecca.tan@ontario.ca
Re: Low Carbon Transportation Fuels in Ontario: Amendments to Ethanol in Gasoline (O. Reg. 535/05) and Greener Diesel – Renewable Fuel Content Requirements for Petroleum Diesel Fuel (O. Reg. 97/14) Regulations
Dear Ms. Tan,
On behalf of Freshwater Future Canada and the National Wildlife Federation and, we are pleased to provide comments regarding the proposed Ethanol in Gasoline and Greener Diesel regulations.
The National Wildlife Federation is the largest conservation organization in the United States with more than 6 million members and supporters and fifty state and territorial affiliates, representing hunters and anglers, birders and gardeners, and outdoor enthusiasts from across America. Our mission is to unite all Americans to ensure wildlife thrive in a rapidly changing world—and we work collaboratively to conserve habitat and waterways, promote our outdoor heritage, and connect the next generation with nature. Our interest in protecting and restoring the health of our shared Great Lakes, and in minimizing drivers of conversion of wildlife habitat such as crop demand for ethanol production compels us to weigh in on this proposal beyond U.S. borders.
Freshwater Future Canada's mission is to ensure the healthy future of our waters in the Great Lakes region by building effective advocates and environmental organizations, ensuring policies are in place and enforced to safeguard our waters and bringing together the local efforts of many to create a stronger voice for our waters. At the state, regional, national and bi-national level, we work in conjunction with other policy groups, and lead grassroots outreach on policy efforts. We connect regional and national policy initiatives to community-level groups on the ground, who are engaged in implementation activities. We work with a range of non-profit public interests in a variety of issues including nutrient pollution reduction and wetland protection issues across Canada and the United States.
The proposed amendments to the Ethanol in Gasoline regulation that would require gasoline suppliers to maintain an average of at least 10% ethanol in regular grade gasoline has the potential to negatively impact our natural resources in a number of ways. Through these comments, we will make the case that: Ontario has much to learn from the U.S. experience with a Renewable Fuel Standard in place since 2005 There has been significant environmental harm caused by a similar mandate in the United States that has increased demand for corn-based ethanol The proposed ethanol regulations could act counter to a number of the province’s policy objectives and commitments - e.g., the Great Lakes Protection Act, the Western Basin of Lake Erie Collaborative Agreement
Summary of recommendations: Reject an increased biofuel mandate Promote the use of cellulosic ethanol in the existing mandate Habitat loss should be mitigated through strengthened land use policies and funding for at risk lands Further investigate the accuracy of Ontario’s Lifecycle Assessment Ontario should improve its mapping and monitoring of land conversion
INSET BOX Quick Facts - U.S. Experience with the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) - U.S. farmers, hoping to take advantage of rising prices for corn and other commodity crops due to the RFS, converted more than 7 million acres of native prairie, rangeland, wetlands, and forests into cropland. - 40 percent of the corn crop grown in the U.S. now goes to produce fuel rather than feeding people or livestock. - The swift rise of the massive biofuel industry has had profound impacts to the environment as farmers cleared land, drained wetlands, and applied more fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation water to maximize their production. increased chemical applications paired with the loss of buffer strips and wetlands that filter storm runoff have contributed to declining water quality in the Great Lakes, Mississippi River watershed, Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere.
Since Congress passed into law in 2005 a federal mandate to blend corn-based ethanol and other renewable fuels into conventional gasoline, the increased demand for corn – which has supplied nearly all of these mandated fuels to date – has resulted in a major transformation on the landscape. Farmers, hoping to take advantage of rising prices for corn and other commodity crops, converted more than 7 million acres of native prairie, rangeland, wetlands, and forests into cropland – a devastating loss of important wildlife habitat and critical ecosystem functions like water filtering across the country. This destruction occurred despite language in the law meant to prohibit this type of land conversion, thanks in large part to the government’s refusal to enforce the provision.
Background – The Unintended Consequences of the U.S. Renewable Fuel Standard to the Environment
In 2007, Congress expanded the Renewable Fuel Standard with good intentions: reducing dependence on fossil fuels, accelerating development of sustainable biofuels, and mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. Unfortunately, 10 years later, there have been severe unintended consequences, including large-scale loss of wildlife habitat (especially native grasslands) and degradation of water quality. Wildlife has borne the brunt of these impacts. These unintended consequences threaten some of the country’s most beloved and rare wildlife species, including sage grouse, meadowlarks, longspurs, swift fox, and the monarch butterfly, as well as a range of fish and other aquatic life.
These impacts have been driven, in part, by the large expansion of corn acreage and the resulting land use changes across the country over this timeframe. Demand for corn to meet the RFS mandate for conventional biofuels has been a major contributing factor to this expansion. American farmers responded to the government-created market for corn in a big way. In 2007, the year Congress expanded the RFS mandate, farmers reported to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) that they planted 91.1 million acres of corn. Five years later, as the number of ethanol plants continued to grow throughout rural America, farmers had increased their corn plantings to 94.1 million acres. The portion of the U.S. corn crop devoted to ethanol instead of other uses like food and animal feed, rose from nine percent before the RFS, to about 40 percent. In addition, soybeans, which often accompany corn in rotational planting and are also used to produce biomass-based diesel fuel, increased even more dramatically, rising from 62.9 million acres in 2007 to 75.9 million acres in 2012. The growth in these two biofuel crops drove a rise in overall crop acreage among the major commodity crops of 8.1 million acres during the first five years of the RFS2.
Ample and growing evidence now exists that these new acres of corn and soybean plantings exacted a heavy price on wildlife habitats and water quality, as millions of acres of habitat and stream buffers have been plowed under to make way for new fuel crops, or for other crops like wheat, which had been displaced by corn and soybeans elsewhere. Some of the recently published findings include the following.
7.3 million acres of land were converted from non-cropland into crops between 2008 and 2012. This is likely a significant underestimate of the total, since the study only included parcels of land 15 acres or larger, which would not include all the additional buffer strips, windbreaks, and roadsides that were plowed under to maximize production. Factoring in the 4.4 million acres that were abandoned during the study timeframe for various reasons, the overall net expansion totaled 2.9 million acres. This number mirrors previous USDA estimates, including the Census of Agriculture 2007-2012, the National Agricultural Statistics Service survey, and the Natural Resources Inventory.
Areas of the Dakotas and western Minnesota have seen the greatest conversion, with grassland loss rates similar to tropical deforestation in the 1990’s., Meanwhile, conversion has happened all over the country, with new frontiers of agriculture in which county-wide levels of cropland have more than doubled. Grasslands have been the dominant source for new cropland since the implementation of the RFS (as much as 77 percent of the total), yet significant amounts of wetlands and forest land are also being lost to agricultural production. A large portion of the conversion has happened on land coming out of the Conservation Reserve Program – land that had not been cropped in 10 or more years. The majority (67%) of new cropland was on lands considered marginal or unsuited for cultivation by the Natural Resources Conservation Service, and these new croplands were twice as likely as existing croplands to be on the poorest quality land. The expansion is also pushing cropping into more arid lands requiring heavy irrigation, while ethanol refineries consume very large volumes of water, adding additional stress to areas already burdened with declining aquifers and water storage and insufficient in-stream flows. This is especially problematic since it has been found that corn ethanol production is more water intensive than gasoline. Ethanol production is explicitly linked to agricultural expansion in areas surrounding ethanol refineries: additional ethanol refinery capacity in a given location has led to meaningful increases in both planted corn acreage and total agricultural acreage within 100 km of that location. The greatest impact was seen in areas with little previously existing agriculture, meaning that ethanol production was directly tied to the conversion of non-agricultural land.
All of this cropland expansion has grave potential impacts, particularly for native grasslands, which are hotbeds of biodiversity, huge sinks of carbon storage (in extensive underground root systems), and are also rapidly disappearing. Grasslands are perhaps our nation’s most endangered ecosystems, even prior to the RFS era, with less than one percent of historic tall-grass prairies and 30 percent of mixed grass prairies remaining. With such precious little undisturbed prairie remaining, even small losses to agriculture have an outsized importance in terms of biodiversity and carbon release.
Grassland dependent wildlife species are also at outsized risk due to conversion of their already declining habitat. For example: - Grassland bird abundance and richness has been found to be much higher in perennial biofuel plantings compared to corn or other annual biofuel plantings.,, - Increased cultivation of biofuel crops results in reduced vertebrate diversity and abundance compared to the habitats that the crops replace. These effects are greatest with conversion of habitat to corn. Additionally, the researchers found that birds of conservation concern are affected more by conversion to corn than species of less conservation concern.
These results are particularly troubling in light of the fact that grassland birds are among the fastest and most consistently declining groups of birds in the country – with 48 percent of grassland-breeding bird species identified as species of conservation concern.
Land use change and loss of habitat has been cited as a major threat to the survival of the monarch butterfly – a species whose population decline has been well-documented. Additionally, studies have found that mixed prairie and switchgrass (a cellulosic biofuel feedstock) support much greater abundance and diversity of native bees and other important insect pollinators than corn.
Finally, land conversion and particularly the intensification of corn-based agriculture has contributed to degraded water quality throughout agricultural watersheds.
Compared to other biofuel crops including soybean and perennial grasses, corn has the highest level of application of nutrients (fertilizer and pesticides) resulting in higher runoff from fields. A model scenario of switching other row crops to continuous corn would result in an increase of sediment yield of 42 percent, and converting pasture to corn would increase sediment yields by up to 127 percent.
Potential Implications for Ontario’s Efforts to Clean-up Lake Erie Lake Erie has become the unfortunate poster child for what intensifying agricultural production can do to degrade our waters. Toxic algal blooms have exploded in the western and central parts of the lake since 2007, with 2015 being the largest on record and last year’s being the third largest. This uncontrolled algae growth is fed largely by the nutrients running off of farm fields.
Intensive row crop agriculture has long been associated with high levels of nutrient loss and soil erosion, leading to contamination of water supplies. Compared to other biofuel crops including soybean and perennial grasses, corn has the highest level of application of nutrients (fertilizer and pesticides) resulting in higher runoff from fields.
In the U.S., the increased demand for corn created by the mandate has incentivized row crop and poor management practices that contribute to higher levels of nutrient runoff including: - converting non-farmland to corn - switching from non-corn crops - moving from a rotation such as corn-soybean to continuous corn - Increasing the intensity of farming - bringing land back into production that had been set aside as marginal - plowing field borders and buffer strips along streams to squeeze in a few more rows
All of these have impacts on water quality. One recent study modeled the impacts of crop and land switching and came up with dramatic results for water outflows. A model scenario of switching other row crops to continuous corn would result in an increase of sediment yield of 42 percent, and converting pasture to corn would increase sediment yields by up to 127 percent.
Ontario has been working with the Government of Canada to address algal blooms in Lake Erie. Targets under the Great Lakes Protection Act commit the province to reducing phosphorus loading to the lake by 40 percent by 2025. This commitment was reinforced through other policies including the the Western Basin of Lake Erie Collaborative Agreement. An action plan for meeting these targets is set to be finalized in February 2018.
An increase in ethanol blending requirements could act to increase demand for corn and result in significant water quality impacts that would undermine the investments and policy goals made by Ontario and Canada. Any change in ethanol requirements must consider implications on water quality to avoid further nutrient loading to our water bodies, in particular Lake Erie.
Biofuels’ Dubious Role in Reducing Climate Pollution The efficacy of turning to biofuels as a strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions has long been debated. The largest uncertainty in assessing the lifecycle emissions profile has been the amount of attendant land conversion, both direct and indirect, domestically and internationally. Before implementation of the RFS in the United States, scientists were estimating that corn-based ethanol could result in twice the GHG emissions as gasoline. Recent assessments have concluded that first-generation biofuels do, in fact, increase these emissions rather than reduce them, and that emissions associated with land conversion in the United States between 2008 and 2012 totaled as much as an additional 20 million cars on the road.
Implications of Meeting the New Mandate In considering whether to require additional ethanol in Ontario’s fuel supply, it is worth asking where this new ethanol will come from. The domestic ethanol industry is currently operating at capacity, producing far less than the total fuel needed to meet existing blending requirements. The balance is imported from the United States. Therefore, any additional domestic demand for biofuels in Canada will necessitate additional importation of biofuels from the United States, only exacerbating the negative environmental impacts associated with its own Renewable Fuel Standard.
Recommendations It is clear that in the U.S., the mandate to turn corn into fuel has contributed to a major disruption of their shared land, water, and wildlife resources. Ontario should practice extreme caution before increasing ethanol blending requirements. The government should learn from U.S. experience and develop solutions that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions in a way that does not have other negative environmental impacts. As such, we provide the following recommendations:
Recommendation: Reject an Increased Biofuel Mandate Given the evidence summarized above, it would be a mistake for Ontario to require additional blending of biofuels. Any perceived improvements to the sustainability of the fuel supply would come at great cost to water quality in the Great Lakes and to wildlife such as migratory birds and monarch butterflies whose habitat would be degraded or destroyed because of greater crop production in the United States. Even worse, these fuels may, in fact, actually increase the very climate pollution they are intended to reduce.
Recommendation: Promote Truly Sustainable Biofuels For all ethanol use in the province, the focus should be placed squarely on supporting and developing the nascent technologies to produce ethanol from sources other than corn and soy. Cellulosic ethanol derived from the denser parts of plants – like grasses, cornstalks, and wood pulp – has the potential to be much better for wildlife, water, and greenhouse gas reductions. For instance, studies have found that mixed prairie and switchgrass (a cellulosic biofuel feedstock) support much greater abundance and diversity of native bees and other important insect pollinators than corn.
Once again, the U.S. policy experience is instructive here. Despite requiring ambitious levels of cellulosic ethanol production, the Renewable Fuel Standard has not yet succeeded in stimulating the large-scale commercialization of second-generation biofuels, production of which has lagged precipitously below mandated levels. Therefore, caution should be taken when attempting to mandate a solution before it is viable; and at the same time, the promise of better fuels should not be used to justify expanded or continued use of a dirtier alternative.
Recommendations: - Ontario should investigate the pitfalls of the U.S. RFS policy to understand how it can promote the use of cellulosic ethanol. - Rather than expand the existing biofuel blending, Ontario’s policy should prioritize cleaner cellulosic-based fuels, allow them to replace less sustainable biofuels over time, and include sufficient safeguards to ensure that they are truly sustainable.
Mitigate Habitat Losses As documented in the previous pages, the U.S. has lost some of its most vital remaining wildlife habitat, complex native ecosystems, and natural water filtration systems over the course of the RFS. The cost to wildlife, water quality, and our way of life has been tremendous, and Ontario must not allow the same thing to happen. While the major impacts of increasing ethanol blending here in Canada will likely be felt most acutely in the United States in the near term, there is appetite to expand domestic ethanol production. Therefore, risk to Canadian natural resources does exist and warrants establishing strong protections against future degradation.
Recommendations:
- Prohibit land clearing for the purpose of supplying ethanol. Do not to allow fuels from crops grown on newly converted land. A credible, enforceable mechanism for verifying this must be written into the law.
- Establish a new fund that will directly conserve and restore habitat in areas threatened by crop expansion. These funds could also support the work of land trusts and conservation authorities in protecting at-risk lands.
- Strengthen wetland protection policies to prevent further wetland conversion to croplands
- Amend agriculture policies and incentives to discourage or prohibit further land conversion, including: marginal lands along the edges of existing farms that support pollinators like bees and monarch butterflies, and buffer strips along waterways that filtered out polluted farm runoff before it clogged the lakes, streams, and rivers.

Further Investigation into the Lifecycle Assessment As part of its research, Ontario did a lifecycle assessment (LCA) to offer certainty that environmental outcomes are achieved and consider administrative simplicity and resource implications. Ontario’s proposal hinges on the accuracy of it’s LCA which concludes that an increase in ethanol blending requirements will have a net environmental impact. In the U.S., we have seen a number of problems with the EPA’s LCA that require close examination by Ontario officials.
Researchers in the U.S. found that emissions from conventional biofuels can actually be higher than those of gasoline., Several analyses of the LCAs of corn ethanol provide evidence that intensive nitrogen fertilizer use and land conversion, including deforestation, actually result in greater atmospheric-warming emissions when compared to traditional gasoline in the near to medium term.
There are many potential ways in which current EPA modeling and assumptions may underestimate the GHG emissions associated with biofuels, particularly corn ethanol. Researchers have raised questions with the EPA’s assumption that burning biomass for energy (including biofuels) is inherently carbon-neutral., Additionally, existing models typically undervalue or ignore land conversion of various land classes, which we know to be occurring. While the EPA accounts for land use change in its analysis of emissions, its estimates are on the very low end of the results from a number of computational models, making for an optimistic assessment of the emissions reduction potential of biofuels. Additionally, EPA’s analysis excludes the emissions from rangelands on the assumption that they will not be converted to biofuel production. Yet, we know that significant amounts of pasture and rangelands have seen conversion.
Recommendations: As demonstrated in the U.S., there are many ways that LCAs can inaccurately estimate the sum of environmental impact on a landscape. If Ontario continues to require gasoline suppliers to maintain any level of ethanol in gasoline, the province should have an accurate understanding of the environmental impacts associated with all the stages of a product's life from raw material extraction through materials processing, manufacture, distribution, use, repair and maintenance, and disposal. We recommend that Ontario commission an independent assessment of its existing LCA modeling with a particular emphasis on proper accounting for direct and indirect land use change associated with biofuel production. This report should be made public, and the government should be required to act on any recommendations within a reasonable timeframe.
Enhance monitoring and mapping Monitoring trends of land conversion rates would not just be critical to understand potential implications of changes in the ethanol regulations, but also helpful for tracking other trends in environmental health. Prior to implementation of any new ethanol regulations, Ontario should establish benchmark data on current land uses (if this does not already exist).
- Ontario should ensure it has a program in place that tracks trends in land use data. This data should be made publicly available, perhaps in map form.
- Ontario should publish annual conversion data including location and land type being converted.
Thank you for the opportunity to comment on Ontario’s proposed Amendments to Ethanol in Gasoline regulations. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Sincerely,
Nancy Goucher Freshwater Future Canada nancy@freshwaterfuture.org David DeGennaro National Wildlife Federation DeGennaroD@nwf.org

[Original Comment ID: 212242]