Um… and who cares if a product that shouldn’t exist in the first place ceases to exist in the long term? Apparently this guy:
Right now, all across the US, producers of an alternative fuel called “biodiesel” are in a state of panic.
Over the next year, up to three-quarters of them may have to shut down, eliminating nearly a third of this infant green industry’s capacity and thousands of jobs.
These are precisely the kind of relatively high-paying jobs that the Obama administration has claimed that it wants to promote, especially given the slowdown in job growth nationwide. Yet the fact is that this infant green industry, otherwise a success story for smart government policy, is being undone by sheer bureaucratic mismanagement.
That’s what they get for building biodeisel plants that ‘run’ on solar and wind power.
OMG! Another greenie fail???
You would Expect a rag like Forbes (which prevents me from registering!) to have incompetants that “beat their breasts” bout a Subsidized scheme that is designed to aide “insider-fraud”, imo, because the litigation cycle takes 7 years. The O’Bamunists will be long out of office, and the Clintonistas (Scytl–if not this fall, then later) will have replaced them here in a full-blown socialist-state, but the “blame” will be in the ether. Same with “Justice”Roberts whose cowardice , imo, has been spun into him defending his legacy! A legacy of Un-constitutionalism, is not much of a legancy. He should be ashamed, but as a covert-globalist, he has…no…shame.
Like most “green” programs, biodiesel is ripe for fraud as designed. Especially given that the mandated targets are above the continuous capacity of manufacturers to produce. Biodiesel from “used” oils makes sense, biodiesel from foodstocks is an absurdity. And they wonder why the system is working as designed?
The biggest technical difficulty with Biodiesel, is that its coagulation temperature is much higher than diesel, and diesel tends to coagulate at fairly high temperatures itself (around -10F). But for all the complaints above, which I tend to agree with, it is much more feasable than Corn and provides much more energy per acre / per btu of production cost used, than corn ethanol.
The problem isn’t that we have insufficient regulation. The problem is that we have the wrong regulations. Regulating to protect a market from fraud is police action, well within the scope of government action for even the most libertarian of libertarians. It is uncomparable to a requirement to, say not run a di3esel engine for testing or maintenance before noon.
As an aside, issuing a fine on a company for acting in good faith and being defrauded by being solf phony credits is flat-out wrong. At least with RCRA (where this setup began in the cradle-to-grave requirement), you had the rationale that “someone” had to pay for the cleanup and that it was possible to find out where your waste was going. You cannot possibly expect a company to research the origins on every single biofuel producer that it might buy credits from.
bio-diesel = bio-dumb