The bottom line for the Environmental Protection Agency when it came to making a decision on the request for a partial waiver of the Renewable Fuels Standard was the impact within the next year.

According to EPA, “implementation of the RFS would have no significant impact in the relevant time frame (the 2008/2009 corn season), and the most likely result is that a waiver would have no impact on ethanol production volumes in the relevant time frame, and therefore no impact on corn, food, or fuel prices.”

EPA also determined that the evidence also indicates that even if the RFS mandate were to have an impact on the economy during the 2008/2009 corn marketing year, it would not be of a nature or magnitude that could be characterized as severe. Even in the modeled scenarios where a waiver of the RFS mandate might reduce the production of ethanol, the resulting decrease in corn prices is anticipated to be small (on average $0.30 per bushel of corn), and there would be an accompanying small increase in the price of fuel (on average $0.01 per gallon in fuel costs). The average increase in corn prices in all modeled scenarios, including scenarios where the RFS mandate would and would not have an impact, was $0.07 per bushel of corn. Such levels of potential impacts from the RFS program do not satisfy the high threshold of harm to the economy to be considered severe.

Read EPA’s decision justification here.