Investors expect the Environmental Protection Agency to back down from a proposal to reduce the amount of ethanol blended into gasoline this year—but reducing ethanol content may be the only way to save the ethanol industry, an energy economist said in Chicago last week.

“The EPA has a method to save the ethanol scheme, but now they’re being scared off by the very industry that would go down with it,” Colin Carter, director of the Gianinni Foundation of Agricultural Economics at UC Davis, told about 65 people at the University of Chicago on Thursday.

In November the EPA proposed scaling back the amount of corn ethanol required in gasoline this year from 14.4 to 13 billion gallons, citing decreased demand for motor fuel and a constraint on the percentage of ethanol that can be blended into gasoline without voiding vehicle warranties—10 percent.

via Ethanol’s Victory Could Be Ethanol’s Ruin.