Biden Press Release
Second, we need to make sure people can pull into their gas station, in their own neighborhood, and fill up their new tanks. We should require half – 50 percent – of all gas stations operated by major companies to have alternative fuel pumps. That would be about 42,000 gas stations nationwide. Today, just 700 have E85 pumps. Third, we must encourage the production of our home grown fuels. We now produce about 4.5 billion gallons of ethanol – that’s just 3 percent of the fuel we use. Let’s increase the renewable fuel standard: by 2010, let’s produce at least 10 billion gallons; by 2020, 30 billion – that would be a quarter of our fuel grown by American farmers. Fourth, we need to increase fuel economy standards. If every year we increase fuel efficiency for cars and SUVs by just one mile per gallon, we would reduce the oil used in the transportation sector by 10 percent. That’s almost as much as we imported from Saudi Arabia last year. Japan’s fuel economy requirements are 45 miles per gallon, and headed higher. China is increasing its standards to 37 miles per gallon. Our corporate average fuel economy standard is stuck at 27.5 miles per gallon. We can do better, and Senator Harkin, I, and some others have proposed a new approach that sets standards based on the size and weight of a vehicle.