Talk to your Member of Congress

Bringing an issue into focus can be a tough challenge, especially when public officials are bombarded on all sides by media reports, constituent requests, committee meetings and dozens of new legislative proposals being introduced each day. In this whirlwind of activity, it is especially important to ensure that public officials clearly understand our issue and are motivated to act on our behalf. Engaging the congressional political community regularly will keep the conversation about ethanol alive and help positively affect local, state and federal issues now and in the future.

Act NOW  and go to congress.org and enter your zip code to contact your Member of Congress, encouraging them to support the E15 waiver. Remember these key messages:

• We are asking the EPA to lift the arbitrary limit on ethanol because the science overwhelmingly supports the use of E15. In fact, the science supporting a shift to E15 is even stronger than the science supporting our initial shift to E10 three decades ago.
• In 2007, Congress mandated the use of 36 billion gallons of renewable fuel by 2022. This mandate to secure America's future will not be realized unless the government promptly removes artificial restrictions on ethanol and approves the use of higher ethanol blends in America's vehicles.
• The Clean Air Act was not intended to mandate the use of 90 percent non-renewable, ozone-depleting gasoline from the Middle East and other unstable regions when we have a viable homegrown alternative in ethanol that is clean-burning, renewable, and ready for use now.
• We will grow our economy and create American jobs by moving to E15 - for every one billion gallons of ethanol produced, conservative estimates show another 10,000-20,000 green-collar jobs will be created.  That means moving to E15 will create 136,101 new green-collar jobs across America, according to a recent North Dakota University study.
• We will make our gasoline cleaner and greener with E15 - moving from our current E10 blend to E15 means we could reduce an additional 20 million metric tons of GHG emissions per year.  That means E15 would reduce greenhouse gas emissions equal to removing 10.5 million vehicles from the road.
• Commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol will be produced in the next two years, and high-tech efficiency improvements continue for the corn-to-ethanol process.  But that advanced technology will never materialize if the ethanol industry is not allowed access to the fuel market. 

Download a sample letter here.