It's a rare day that TTAC gets to report a roll-back on government (i.e. taxpayer) funding for ethanol, but that's the way it's going down in… Michigan. Yes, the Daily News reports that the home state of the American [owned] automotive industry, where a trio of carmakers are LOVING the federal fuel economy credits given their dirt-cheap-to-mod greenwashed E85-mobiles, has rolled back a seven cent a gallon corn juice tax credit. State Rep Dan Nitz is not amused. "This tax break was good for consumers, GM and Ford, and the environment. With nearly $777,000 saved, it's obvious that people are taking advantage of this incentive, and I can't figure out why keeping it is not a priority." No? What about the legislature's desire to pocket every damn penny in revenue they can find to support their political power? Nah. Meanwhile, gas station owner Jim Little does the math. "With a capital investment of almost $70,000 to install E85 pumps, I want to make sure I have some kind of incentive to sell E85 to customers. This incentive was a cushion to help me keep E85 at a lower cost for consumers and still be able to afford to sell it." Otherwise… why bother?
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Just a general question:
Why are tax credits for E85 a boondoggle, while tax credits for Solar or Wind are not?
And for those of you who will come out and make the case for wind, please remember that the environmentalists fight Wind tooth and nail because it kills birds and messes up the views.
Basically it seems to me that in the environmentalist world,
Global Warming = real and bad
Renewable Wind Energy = bad
Zero Emission Nuclear = bad
Renewable E85 = bad
Low Emmision Clean Coal = bad
Natural Gas = not good, not bad.
So basically, the nation is to power itself with Solar and Cooking Oil Biodiesel.
Good luck with that.
Typical. Think twice before you invest money based on benefits from the government. I have taken a bath on that one, NEVER AGAIN. If I owned a gas station, there is no way I would put up 70k for an E85 pump.
@Alex Rodriguez
Tax credits for E85 are a boondoggle because corn ethanol is a boondoggle, and environmentally very damaging. Tax credits are not a boondoggle for solar and wind because solar and wind are not a boondoggle. Its that simple.
As for environmentalists and wind, you are lumping all environmentalists together. I can tell you that there are plenty of environmentalists in Massachusetts who can’t wait to see Cape Wind built, including me, and I have a house on Cape Cod. Senators Kennedy and Kerry ARE hypocrites on this issue, and deserve to be slammed for it, but our governor, whatever his faults, is supporting Cape Wind wholeheartedly.
As for nuclear power, there are substantial carbon and/or other emissions in the mining of the uranium, the transportation of the building of the plants, the decommissioning of the plants, and the unsolved waste problem, and the plants also provides a tempting target for terrorists.
As for “low emission clean coal,” it doesn’t exist yet. If they get to the point where they can either sequester most of the carbon, or use it to grow algae for fuel, then your phrase will be applicable. But there will still be the problem of moutain top removal in Appalachia. They literally throw the waste down in the valleys where the people live, killing the streams, making many parts of appalachia uninhabitable.
As for global heating, things are going to get really interesting. People are going to starve all over the world.
Great to hear that Michigan has gotten smart!
Alex listed:
Renewable Wind Energy = bad
Wind energy is good until it becomes handled by Mighty Wind. Like King Coal and Big Oil, MW tends to ignore environmental and individual concerns in favor of the bottom line.
Zero Emission Nuclear = bad
AIUI, nukes are successful in France, are expensive failures everywhere else, and have been deadly in the former Soviet Union. Maybe it’s the wine. Still, I don’t know what the French are doing with the radioactive wastes.
Natural Gas = not good, not bad.
Not so bad, but we’re probably running as short of NGas as we are of petroleum.
The Future of Cars
So what is going to happen? When? Will we be able to keep our 240 million light vehicles running? If so, how much can we use them? Can we power our cars with something else? Hydrogen? Natural Gas? Electricity? Cow manure? Will we be able to afford the trillions it will take to replace our current fleet of private vehicles or will many of us be riding in carpools, buses and trains? The answer to these and similar questions will do much to determine what our lifestyles will be like 20, 30 and 50 years from now. For the next few weeks I would like to explore possible futures for personal transportation.
http://www.fcnp.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2430&Itemid=35
“As for global heating, things are going to get really interesting. People are going to starve all over the world.”
If it does indeed happen, we will be able to grow food where we couldn’t before so the starvation aspect is extremely alarmist.
France refines their nuclear fuel to weapons grade which allows them to run power plants more efficiently and with very little waste. Also they add wine, I believe.
Its interesting that Michigan of all places would be working against the current saving grace of their home industry. Like Governor Granholm said, “I’m not going to approve tax breaks for wealthy corporations and take money away from our schools.”
… the starvation aspect is extremely alarmist.
Ever heard of the Irish Potato Famine aka The Great Hunger? Half a million folks were evicted from their farms, and the population declined about 25%, but all the while Ireland was a net exporter of food.
Growing food somewhere else isn’t necessarily going to help those in need.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Potato_Famine_(1845-1849)
So I guess some legislators are getting the message. Or more money. I hope for the former.
Do you know that during the timeframe of the Potato Famine, the climate changed so much that Greenland was lush & fertile, so much so that the Viking settlers named it Greenland. The 300 feet of ice there now – did not exist. Then the Little Ice Age came and slowly starved the Vikings and turned Greenland into a solid sheet of ice.
I wonder what caused the temperature in the 1000-1400 timeframe to rise so rapidly that Greenland was a Garden of Eden?
Could it have been evil mankind’s carbon belching paper factories? Maybe it was the carbon polluting horse transportation system that turned our planet into a greenhouse. Did they have private jets then. It had to be man somehow, because otherwise the planet stays a cool 72 degrees into infinity. I know this because Al Gore told me so.
@Alex Rodriguez
Your history of Greenland is wrong. For one thing, there were always parts of Greenland that were not covered in ice. Most of the place is covered, but the two small places where the viking settlements were have never been under ice in the last thousand years. Nonetheless, it was absolutely not a “garden of eden.” Eric the Red, who had been banished from Iceland, and from Norway before that, named it Greenland because he had a sense of PR, and got a number of people to follow him there, something they probably never would have done had they known what it was really like. But it was always an absolutely miserable place. The Vikings lived in sod houses, because there weren’t much in the way of trees to build houses, and the walls were six feet thick, to keep out the cold.
As for the potato famine, that happened in the middle 1800s, 500 years after the Viking settlements in Greenland died out.
People are starving and the diversion of soy and corn to the biofuel production stream is one reason:
“Currently 37 countries worldwide are facing food crises due to conflict and disasters. In addition, food security is being adversely affected by unprecedented price hikes for basic food, driven by historically low food stocks, droughts and floods linked to climate change, high oil prices and growing demand for bio-fuels. High international cereal prices have already sparked food riots in several countries.” Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN
@Alex Rodriguez: The Vikings were long gone during the Irish Potato Famine. I’m not sure at what you’re getting. Your sarcasm is noted but perhaps in the Middle Ages climate change was a result of “pollutants” from volcanic eruptions or massive forest fires (no firefighters in those days). We modern people know that human activities put many pollutants into the air, water and soil.
We can’t control the volcanoes but we can certainly control our own actions to mitigate climate change.
Jazbo123 If it does indeed happen, we will be able to grow food where we couldn’t before so the starvation aspect is extremely alarmist.
How aobut this: While China, for example, whjich has 1,500,000,000 people to feed, heats up, its rivers are going to dry up most of the year, becuase the glaciers that feed them in the winter are melting. Same with California’s Central Valley, which is irrigated with water from the Sierras.
Inland areas will become dryer. Most of the US will have relative drought.
Furthermore, in general, weather is projected to become more extreme, with bigger droughts, bigger floods, stronger hurricanes, etc., so where-ever farming happens, there are more likely to be crop failures.
Yeah, maybe you will be able to move some farming to other parts of the world, but you are talking about absolutely huge migrations of people to do so. You can’t just wave your hand and it’s done.
Given the difficulty of moving refugees around today–for example all the Iraqis who are in mortal danger for having helped us, and we’re not letting them in, don’t count on being able to move world farming, willy-nilly, to Siberia and northern Canada. And don’t count on a climate hospitable for farming once the farmers get there, if they do.
The other problem with moving farming is that you can move it, but if the climate really gets out of control, you may have to move it again 10-15 years later, when the farmers are just getting settled in, and learning how to operate under their new conditions.
Alex Rodriguez…
A little research into the supposed medieval warming period reveals that it was a localized event, and not even all that warm, nothing at all like the rapid rise in temperatures we are currently experiencing. You can hold out as a denier as long as you want, but it becomes clearer and clearer that deniers are just people/corporations/governemnt who do not want to be part of the collective sacrifice necessary to combat global warming. Now if that is the choice you have made, so be it. That, however, does not change the facts of global warming.
“The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) states that the “idea of a global or hemispheric “Medieval Warm Period” that was warmer than today however, has turned out to be incorrect” and that what those “records that do exist show is that there was no multi-century periods when global or hemispheric temperatures were the same or warmer than in the 20th century”.[2]”
I am all for new technologies to make transportation and energy production more efficient and less polluting. I am looking into buying a skystream 3.7 windmill for my house, and hope to do solar panels someday. Why? Not because Al Gore is twisting my arm from his 20,000 sq. ft. Bali Residence, but because I want to save money on my utility bills.
But for the “Man-made Global Warming is indisputable fact” crowd to try to solve the problem by shooting ourselves in the foot while the rest of the world gets a free pass (namely China & India) is just DUMB.
Not only that, but typically this crowd gives a lot of lip service to saving the planet and then sues, cajols, and fights virtually every type of renewable energy powerplant or fuel to the death, save for Solar and Crisco-diesel.
A-rod: Not only that, but typically this crowd gives a lot of lip service to saving the planet and then sues, cajols, and fights virtually every type of renewable energy powerplant or fuel to the death, save for Solar and Crisco-diesel.
While there are certainly a few big instances of hypocrisy, which I’ve already alluded to, as a generalization this is no more accurate than the notion that Greenland was once a garden of eden.
Regarding the rest of the world, this is something where we need to try to lead, because if we don’t, we’re doomed. But many of the measures that will help mitigate GH heating will save money for both big companies and individuals, which is why a lot of big companies are already working on reducing greenhouse emissions. As for China, it has higher fuel mileage standards than we do, which, while not enough, is at least evidence they are not taking a free pass.
Holzman: “As for China, it has higher fuel mileage standards than we do, which, while not enough, is at least evidence they are not taking a free pass”
Well, thank god for the little victories, eh? Horrible pollution everywhere else, dismal living, appaling treatment of human rights, but shit, they get better miliage.
Holzman: “As for China, it has higher fuel mileage standards than we do, which, while not enough, is at least evidence they are not taking a free pass”
Well, thank God for the little victories. Sure, they have pollution that puts ours to shame, dismal living conditions, apalling human rights, but hey, they get better gas miliage.
Yes, thank god, huh, Virtual Insanity? Seriously, h
ow about cutting down the sarcasm a bit. Yes, of course china has appalling human rights and dismal living conditions, but that wasn’t the issue. I was responding to Alex Rodriguez’ important question of whether it makes any sense for us to mitigate global warming unilaterally. China’s level of human rights, pollution, and etc. doesn’t affect my answer.
I have a modest proposal: Let’s treat oil and ethanol alike.
1. Let’s have a strategic ethanol reserve just like the strategic petroleum reserve.
2. Let’s give corn farmers a soil depletion allowance just like the oil depletion allowance.
3. Let’s allow ethanol companies to merge into a few big corporations like Exxon-Mobile, Chevron, and Conoco. Let’s give them a de facto monopoly over liquid fuel distribution.
4. Let’s allow corn farmers to lease federal land in competitive bidding like off shore oil leases on the continental shelf.
5. Let’s allow payment in kind for farmer’s leases like the payment in kind that the oil companies enjoy when they put oil in the SPR.
6. Let’s not audit the payments but just take their word for it that they were made. And let’s not get upset when we later find that $60 Billion has gone missing.
7. Let’s invade Brazil to capture ethanol production facilities and land just like we did for the oil companies in Iraq.
8. Let’s call all subsidies for oil a boondoggle.
it was warm enough at that time in greenland to raise crops for the live stock and yes it has been studied by scientist – the earth has warmed and cooled many times – it did over the life time of those vikings in greenland, they just didn’t have the internet and news outlets to tell the rest of the world their climate was changing, many scientist believe it also but its not fashionable to question a hypothesis (man made global warming is not a fact)anymore i guess.