Response to Luke Tonachel's NRDC Blog on Clean Fuel Standards http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/ltonachel/new_study_clean_fuels_are_good.html

Theoretically, the Clean Fuel Standards sounds great but “advanced biofuels” do not exist.  So it is likely that the standard will be largely met with corn ethanol with all its serious environmental problems— inefficiency, land use issues, waterway pollution, food security/inflation, etc. 

The World Bank, Oxfam, U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, and others have been implicating corn ethanol as a factor in the rising cost of food, and famine.

http://e360.yale.edu/digest/rising_food_costs_compounding_east_african_famine_world_bank_says/3085/

http://www.oxfam.org/en/grow/food-price-volatility-map

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/25/the_new_geopolitics_of_food

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=ethanol-domestic-fuel-supply-or-environmental-boondoggle&page=3

Your comment that ”biofuel manufacturing facilities need to be built” should be examined in light of Pennsylvania’s biofuels history.  Former PA Gov. Rendell was a biofuels cheerleader.

http://www.cglg-australia.org/news_files/News%20Release%20-%20PA%20-%20Clearfield%20Ethanol%20plant%20to%20be%20one%20of%20nations%20largest%20-%20March%2013%202008.pdf

Pennsylvania  1st ethanol plant, Bionol/Clearfield, only a few years old and supported by $17.4 million of taxpayer money , is now an abandoned industrial site. http://www.theprogressnews.com/default.asp?read=27593

And it continues…. PA Gov. Corbett is giving $8.75 million for a biofuels plant to two organizations, Perdue and LCSWMA(Lancaster County Solid Waste Management Authority), both, recently involved in failed biofuels initiatives (Perdue a plant and LCSWMA two proposed plants).

 "A major unsecured creditor is Perdue Grain & Oilseed, an affiliate of chicken company Perdue Farms Inc. that is owed approximately $9.4 million. Last October, Perdue Grain said in a statement that it struck a deal to supply Bionol Clearfield with 40 million bushels of corn and to sell the grains that are a byproduct of the company's ethanol production."(Wall Street Journal Dow Jones Financial Information Services7/21/11)

LCSWMA wasted lots of citizen/taxpayer time and money trying to put two ethanol plants on farmland on the banks of the Susquehanna River.

So it looks like Gov.Corbett is continuing Gov. Rendell’s pattern of supporting “green jobs” that are not really “green.” And maybe the Clean Fuel Standards would work if biofuels, especially corn ethanol, were not considered clean fuels