Two new organizations have entered the fight for the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) today as concerns about the future of the RFS deepen with the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) proposed 2014 renewable fuels volumes going south. VoteVets.org and Americans United for Change held a press teleconference to announce their participation in the counteroffensive against what they are calling, “Big Oil’s lies about the renewable fuel industry’s remarkable record of creating nearly 400,000 American jobs that can’t be outsourced, revitalizing rural communities, innovating next-generation renewable energy, and making us safer by reducing reliance on oil from unstable foreign regions and regimes that hate us.”

On the call were Jon Soltz, Co-Founder and Chairman of the 360,000+ supporter veterans group, VoteVets.org; Brad Woodhouse, President, Americans United for Change; and Myrna Heddinger, Mayor of Emmetsburg, IA the site of a current POET ethanol plant and the location of Project LIBERTY, a commercial scale cellulosic biorefinery under construction by POET-DSM and expected to go into production my mid-year 2014.

Woodhouse announced a joint campaign between Americans United for Change and VoteVets.org to, “join the fight against big oil and standing up for common sense, bipartisan policies that are helping America become more energy independent.” He noted that the RFS has cut America’s dangerous dependence on foreign oil and because of this bipartisan law, the U.S. now gets 10 percent of its energy from clean renewable sources.

“For the last several months, the oil industry has been waging a misleading and self serving scare campaign against this policy,” Woodhouse added. He said their campaign will be focused on key markets and consists of advertising as well as grassroots and grasstop efforts.

Soltz, who is a veteran, served in Kosovo in 2000 and has done two tours in Iraq. he stressed that the country’s dependence on foreign oil is putting American soldier’s lives at risk. He said that people need to understand that, “If you go after ethanol, potentially you’re funding people who kill our troops. There is no question about it, oil is a blood diamond inside the Middle East that has cost us thousand of lives.”

In addition, Mayor Heddinger stressed the importance of what the ethanol industry has done for the economic revitalization of their community and surrounding towns. When asked what would happen if the ethanol industry were to collapse, she said she doesn’t even want to think of that because she said that if consumers understand the economic, energy security and environmental value of ethanol and other biofuels, the industry will continue to grow.

Listen to the press call here: Veterans Enter Fight for RFS