I found a spot where Obama can take a teaspoon out of the 5 gallon bucket of sewage that is our 2010 US budget. Despite the completely obvious scientific evidence to the contrary, Chairman Chu (the US energy secretary) is backing Obama’s new program for renewable fuels spending two billion dollars on expansion of a wasted industry. Like all socialist governments the programs are touted to help the poor and create jobs while in the end all they do is give additional cost hurting the least wealthy while giving additional government control. I say control because now the lobbyists are required to work with congress to get the subsidies they need to support the non-profitable business they are creating. I wish the public would learn to think about incentives every time govt. makes a law but that’s as much a waste of time as wishing to be younger.
Here is a post I did a while ago on super efficient biofuel creation using algae. I discovered that companies are flat lying about the theoretical maximum output of bio-diesel. In fact the numbers aren’t even close.
A little bit of math –What About Algae Biofuel Hype
Just to add weight to my case at the link above, there is a set of news articles that came out recently where corn ethanol producers are fighting back against an EPA ruling which apparently inadvertently would kill an industry mandated to replace tens of billions of gallons of gasoline by 2022.
EPA Rule Would ‘Kill Off’ Corn Ethanol, Peterson Says (Update2)
You know what the huge hideous rule says. Biofuel processes must produce 20 percent less CO2 than gasoline. TWENTY PERCENT LESS, are you listening to me!!! Guess what the reaction of a Minnesota democrat was to this hideous and burdensome requirement, (which adds giant cost to fuels).
May 6 (Bloomberg) — An Environmental Protection Agency plan for measuring a biofuel’s effects on land cultivation would “kill off” U.S. corn-based ethanol, according to House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson.
The proposed methods to gauge greenhouse-gas emissions, part of the EPA’s implementation of a 2007 energy law, are based on “ideology” and aren’t reliable enough to craft policy, Peterson told reporters today outside a congressional hearing in Washington. He said the EPA plan is prompting him to oppose any climate-change legislation that Congress may consider.
“You can’t trust them,” the Minnesota Democrat said of the agency, which would write rules under any bill that would be passed. “I no longer have any confidence in the EPA.”
He no longer has confidence in the EPA!! It’s absolute insanity that they can’t make a process which saves only 20 percent of the CO2 in production from gas and he’s mad that we don’t just keep throwing money at it. The process clearly can’t stop CO2 rising, it clearly doesn’t solve any problems yet he’s mad because the EPA accidentally sets an insanely low bar that they can’t meet!!!!!!!!
Lawmakers at today’s hearing, called to review the EPA’s proposal, expressed frustration with the agency and with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which helped develop the plan. They criticized the decision to include land-use considerations in measuring emissions and said they haven’t had enough time to examine it properly.
‘Novel Methodology’
“We’re not getting a look about how you came upon this very novel methodology,” Republican Representative Robert Goodlatte of Virginia told Margo Oge, an EPA air-quality director. “The process is very accelerated and is not giving people a chance to see what you’re doing.”
And then it becomes about the lobby.
Producers of soy-based biodiesel are concerned that the EPA plan may exclude their fuel from quotas mandated by Congress because it fails to meet emissions standards, while animal fats and restaurant grease are acceptable as diesel sources. The proposed rule would devastate the industry, said Manning Feraci, the vice president of federal affairs for the National Biodiesel Board in Jefferson City, Missouri.
“Biodiesel producers find themselves in the midst of a severe economic crisis,” he said at the hearing.
It doesn’t matter that biodiesel is part of the added load creating our ‘crisis’, it doesn’t matter that biofuels have already caused food price rises which have starved people – to death – in poor communist nations. All that matters is the bio-producers need low bars and easy hurdles because as everyone including CHAIRMAN CHU knows, corn ethanol – DOESN’T WORK!
Guess what percentage savings in CO2 we get from corn – according to the best inflated figures the farmers can turn in to the EPA.
The average was 16 percent less, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said.
And that very low number by many studies is exaggerated. Several groups have concluded that due to heavy processing burden corn biofuel produces more CO2 than gasoline.
Where government is concerned, less is always more. I hope people start to realize global warming has very little to do with the climate.