I am grateful to small dead animals blog for the Canadian perspective, and especially for doing what I refuse to do. Read the New Yawk Times.
The Law of Perhaps Unintended Consequences
WASHINGTON — When the companies that supply motor fuel close the books on 2011, they will pay about $6.8 million in penalties to the Treasury because they failed to mix a special type of biofuel into their gasoline and diesel as required by law. But there was none to be had. Outside a handful of laboratories and workshops, the ingredient, cellulosic biofuel, does not exist.
In 2012, the oil companies expect to pay even higher penalties for failing to blend in the fuel, which is made from wood chips or the inedible parts of plants like corncobs. Refiners were required to blend 6.6 million gallons into gasoline and diesel in 2011 and face a quota of 8.65 million gallons this year.
“It belies logic,” Charles T. Drevna, the president of the National Petrochemicals and Refiners Association, said of the 2011 quota. And raising the quota for 2012 when there is no production makes even less sense, he said.
Penalizing the fuel suppliers demonstrates what happens when the federal government really, really wants something that technology is not ready to provide. In fact, while it may seem harsh that the Environmental Protection Agency is penalizing them for failing to do the impossible, the agency is being lenient by the standards of the law, the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act.
The question is not “Why can’t American companies compete?” The question is “Why do they even try anymore?”
But, hey. It is the Times. Perhaps it’s all a lie.
This story will die. Astounding as it is, it’s just too much for people to assimilate, so they’ll forget it, and consign it to the same places they put quantum physics and ballet — somewhere just not to go.
It isn’t until it gets personal – when individuals are the victims of this kind of bureaucratic insanity — that we get the message.
This is the logical outcome of the fact that we are all criminals now, in some way, to some bureaucrat or cop, according to some regulation or law we have no idea exists.
Ah yes. We are all criminals now. Cold comfort.
I didn’t intend it to be a comfort.
It is not a fine or penalty on businesses. It is another hidden tax on consumers.
Passed by the majority-Democratic Houses of Congress during 2007 in the same bill that gives us the coming death of the 100-watt incandescent light bulb.
I found the EPA web page that details the total absence of these Federally mandated fuels. Look at all the zeroes…
The same LibProg zombies who can’t stop snarling about the insufficient progressiveness of the headline income tax, completely fail to understand that this sort of thing represents a hidden tax on them. Let’s not forget that the government subsidized Range Fuels, Inc., to the tune of $156 million, with the projection of 250 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol produced last year, and 500 million gallons to be produced this year. Talk about betting the farm on a fantasy! Drip, drip, drip, the corruption is everywhere, and draining our tax dollars into the pockets of the connected, like Vinod Khosla.