Grassley: Land issue didn’t seem ‘big deal’

Des Moines Register
By Philip Brasher • pbrasher@dmreg.com • May 12, 2009

Sen. Charles Grassley said today that he didn’t think the land-use issue “was a big deal” when Congress approved an energy bill requiring the EPA to measure the greenhouse gas emissions of biofuels.

Grassley is among a number of lawmakers who are complaining that the agency calculated impacts on land use in determining the carbon emissions caused by producing ethanol and biodiesel. The theory is that diverting food crops to biofuels in the United States can lead to destruction of rain forests, peat bogs and grasslands elsewhere in the world, releasing carbon into the atmosphere.

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