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Rick Santorum Answers Questions About the Renewable Fuel Standard

124 views · Published 25 September 2015 · 3:44 · Indexed 17 October 2026

Channel: RFD-TV · 2015 · Entertainment

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Q: "My name is Katie Beherns. I’m with Growth Energy and America’s Renewable Future. While some candidates in the Republican field have been unsupportive of the Renewable Fuel Standard, you’ve stood with Iowans and the rest of rural America by supporting it. What can you say about your support, and why should other candidates see this as such a crucial policy?"

A: Santorum: "Well you know, it was consistent with my policy as I mentioned earlier, I’ve been against subsidies, and I don’t see the RFS as a subsidy because, well, it isn’t. I actually opposed subsidies, on ethanol to be just very honest about it, uh, but I’ve always supported the RFS because I thought it was a market access provision. You have an industry that is vertically integrated from the well head to the pump. You’re now introducing a new fuel originally because the oxygen was needed in our fuel to replace MTBEs and so I was supportive of it to make sure that that was in there. This is a domestically produced fuel. This employs people in the heartland of America at a cost that’s a lot cheaper than protecting foreign oil sources as we have to do around the world. You’re creating jobs here, you have a secure domestic source. It’s a source of oxygen and octane for our fuels. We needed to make sure that the oil companies would accept that into their feed stock and into the marketplace, so it insured the market access provision. It’s a job creator here in America. It’s a national security issue to make sure that we are not overly dependent on foreign sources of oil and if you think about it now, with the explosion thanks to the hydraulic fracturing that’s going on, we now have a lot more sources of oil here in this country and combined with the production of renewable fuels from ethanol and biofuels, that makes America a potentially, in the very near future, energy independent. America today is the number one producer of energy in the world. If I’d have said that to you 10 years ago, no one would have believed it, but we are. It’s a combination of hydraulic fracturing, the technology advances there, and the technology advances on ethanol. I would say one thing, and I always say this to the ethanol folks, you need to do a better job educating the American public about the benefits of ethanol and the efficiency of ethanol.  I’ll go another, I was asked a question in South Carolina the other day, and it wasn’t a friendly place to be asked by a conservative group... they make the claim, "oh it raises the price of food" and "it’s more expensive to make and it uses more energy to make than it does to produce..." All of those things have been debunked, but they’re still out there. It’s like these myths that continue to circulate around the issue of ethanol. One of the things that I’m very proud of is I’m the only person in the Republican side that has been a strong supporter of the RFS from day one and really one of the few in the race that continues to support it. I think it’s important if you’re gonna have a president that’s gonna go out there. I really feel it’s part of the president’s job, not just to vote and decide things, but to use the bully pulpit to educate the American public as to how we have to go. I don’t think this president has done as much for RFS as he’s for global warming. As much as ethanol helps in that regard, you don’t really see this president doing that. I would be a president that would make sure that America knows the truth about all of these fields."

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