From home of the weather station that started it all, Marysville, CA their small town newspaper writes a scathing opinion on the California Air Resources Board.
They get it. The problem is that people that make up CARB are like clueless Al Gore clones. With a recent 340% error exposed, CARB is going along like nothing has happened. The problem is CARB chief Mary Nichols, who sees herself and her organization as above the democratic process.
Our View: Air board’s arrogance damaging
California seems intent on traveling a road to self-destruction paved with government mandates and regulations that drive businesses and jobs out of state while discouraging new job creation. A prime job-killing, business-punishing scheme is the insistence on achieving radical environmental goals, despite their real-world economic liabilities.
The California Air Resources Board has adopted a mandate that utility companies produce 33 percent of their electricity from so-called renewable resources by 2020. That’s a drastic increase over the previous 20-percent requirement, which the state still is nowhere near achieving. For some perspective, Congress, firmly controlled by a Democratic majority, refused to hike its renewable requirements even to the 20-percent level.
Compounding the state air board’s error is its arrogance. Even the state Legislature, controlled by left-leaning Democrats, failed this year to impose such an over-the-top requirement. But neither Congress nor the state Legislature’s reluctance dissuaded the Air Resources Board’s unaccountable bureaucrats from going where elected representatives fear to tread.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported that air board boss Mary Nichols says the 33-percent standard is important because it “sends a strong, positive message to the market.” The market will get the message, alright. That’s part of the problem.
The message is that California energy prices will soar, on top of the added costs of huge taxpayer subsidies that will be needed to finance so-called renewable energy sources. Wind, solar and geothermal energy are all economically infeasible without massive subsidies.
Like the huge amounts of taxpayer dollars already wasted in government subsidies for the ethanol industry, other renewable-energy endeavors are likely to face similar fates. In Spain, where large tax-financed subsidies spurred its solar industry, 50,000 subsidized solar entrepreneurs now “face financial disaster” as the government realizes it can’t afford to continue propping up the industry with price guarantees, Bloomberg reports. Not only can’t Spain afford to continue subsidies that paid 10 times the wholesale price per kilowatt-hour, but for every new “green” job created by the subsidies, more than two normal jobs were lost.
Without generous tax breaks and subsidies, wind power costs $149 per megawatt hour compared with $100 for coal, according to estimates from the Energy Information Administration.
======================================================
Read the full editorial here
IMO, CARB is a clear and present danger to the livelihood of people of California, it is unchecked bureaucracy gone mad.
Addendum:
Since November 2nd, I’m getting a 3x increase in SPAM inviting me to move to/incorporate my business in Nevada. Given what lies ahead for business in California, the idea has merit.
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I am not a fan of E95 in compression ignition engines, wrong fuel wrong engine. Ethanol does not autoignite as easily as diesel as noted in the topic. They might find a way around that over time, but the diesel engine is fuel limited for power, not air limited so it is an inappropriate use of the fuel. It would be much better to run a smaller diesel engine on diesel with ethanol injection for situations that require brief high power operation.
Diesel engines love alcohol injection and can make stupid power levels using it as a power adder in addition to the normal diesel fuel vs some half baked conversion. Direct injection ethanol engines can get the same thermal efficiency as diesel (about 40%) so that would be a more useful avenue to pursue in my opinion.
http://www.epa.gov/otaq/presentations/gni-mjb-051303.pdf
As I posted above there are suitable places for each type of engine (diesel, spark ignition, turbine etc.) but you should not try to force a square peg in a round hole and try to use an oxygenated fuel in a compression ignition engine.
By doing so they are fighting two of the “advantages” of alcohol fuels in spark ignition engines due to the difference in how ignition is performed.
A diesel engine accomplishes ignition by using high compression ratios to raise the incoming air charge above ignition temperature for the fuel. In a spark ignition engine one of the advantages of E85 and Alcohol fuels is their high heat capacity and latent heat of evaporation. That provides substantial charge air cooling that helps increase a spark ignition engines breathing efficiency by increasing charge are density. Since a spark ignition engine is air limited that results in increased power.
In a diesel cycle engine using E95 that “advantage” of alcohol is a disadvantage directly competing with the necessary conditions for charge air heating, not to mention E95 does not auto ignite like diesel fuel does.
The other advantage of alcohol based fuels in a spark ignition engine is that they are oxygenated and carry additional oxygen into the cylinder, this allows them to burn at much richer fuel air mixtures (lower oxygen demand) than gasoline, and wider flammability limits (fewer misfires able to run at much leaner mixtures) so you net more power by being able to burn more fuel with the available intake air charge. On a diesel engine this is not an advantage since a diesel engine always operates with excess air and is throttled by changing fuel rather than by limiting air flow.
As above — square peg in a round hole.
I do not advocate misusing a fuel just because it makes for good marketing. Especially when there are other biofuel pathways to produce direct replacement bio-diesel fuels. Save the alcohol for the spark ignition engines (or as a power adder) and use a proper fuel suited to diesel cycle ignition as the primary fuel in compression ignition engines.
The injector problems are an example of the cleaning effect of ethanol. Not a fuel deficiency, but a simple matter of figuring out where the ethanol is scavenging the crud from and eliminating it.
Larry
We want our State back, and if that doesn’t work, we want to split the State into:
Kalifornia and the State of Jefferson.
Let the Greenies have the coasts and Flatramento they frolic in, we get the rest.
Always thought too many whimpering people who complained about California politics were just too lazy to get up off their dufflebag and do anything but talk. The difference between the quick and the dead is action, not talk.
“That feed corn is also not directly used in human food products (ie is not turned into corn tortillas etc. it is a totally different corn variety than the corn used in corn meal, corn flakes, and other directly consumed corn food products.”
Larry,
The price of corn is now tied to the price of oil. Even if the human consumption of corn remains constant, the price of corn will go up if there is an increase in the price of oil. This is what happened in 2006-2008. And we are seeing it again now. Besides, there is not enough land to produce enough ethanol to come even close to replacing oil or other fossil fuels. We have created the worst of both worlds. Higher food costs and no corresponding drop in fossil fuel consumption.
It will be interesting to see how the CARB rules affects the California Ports. The cruise ship business is way down because of Mexico’s problems. The shipping business is facing the impact of the Panama Canal widening that will be completed in 2014. Eastern and southern US ports are already expanding in preparation for taking business away from California. Last week Felipe Calderon celebrated the opening of a new port of entry at San Luis near Yuma, Arizona that will allow cargo to avoid California altogether. Guymas, Mexico has quietly developed to allow container cargo to be unloaded from ships in the Sea of Cortez.
Update to this post:
Another commercial, also from the “Real California Milk” campaign, this time the words said 99% of California dairies are family owned. Beautiful. As often as I’ve heard complaints about Big Agriculture and corporations taking over farming and raking in the profits, that percentage doesn’t inspire confidence in the future of California dairy farming.
Website: http://www.realcaliforniamilk.com/
This was found there: New Study: California Dairy Industry Responsible For More Than 443,000 Jobs – Three Percent of State’s Job Production
It has these highlights:
Illustrating a problem with wording on studies like these, the following is found in the “Study Methodology” section:
Apparently for statistical purposes, jobs can be “created” anew every year. As California likes to lead the way, here there is more creative jobs reporting than found in the Stimulus Bill “success” figures.
“Sustainability” gets a front page listing on the website. Also, from the linked study:
They sound very proud of that.
There’s something curious at the bottom of the website’s pages.
What sort of governmental creation is an “instrumentality”?
10,000 truckloads of goods go through Laredo Texas every single day now. They are already avoiding having anything to do with California.
Rhoda R says:
November 14, 2010 at 1:41 am
Ann r; the reason why they don’t want to call hydro a renewable resource is because the greenies want to disassemble all the hydro dams.
If you include hydro with the other renewables, electrical generation from renewables peaked in 1997. The boom in highly subsidized wind generation has been more than countered by the decline from peak annual output from hydro.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table1_1.html
As to the prospects of converting transport to biofuels, in 2009 energy use for transportation amounted to 26951 Trillion Btus, the contribution from all biomass sources was 922 Trillion Btus.
http://www.eia.gov/emeu/aer/txt/ptb0201e.html
Unless you can suggest a program to increase biofuel production more than 30 times beyond present levels, and though I haven’t done the actual calculation I suspect you’d run into a limit from feedstocks well short of that goal. Regardless of where you fall on the merits of biofuels as functional and economic fuels, there is little prospect of them filling more than a small supplemental role in powering the transport system and the mounting subsidy costs and environmental consequences makes even that contribution seem like a questionable policy choice.
Dr A Burns says:
November 13, 2010 at 1:34 pm
True. Wind power cannot possibly be that efficient, considering you must build a gas fired power plant of equivalent capacity simply to serve as backup when the wind isn’t blowing, AND to turn the turbines to maintain lubrication. Not to mention that installed wind capacity is only 10-25% utilized.
In Europe and probably in US I think the subsidizes for ethanol are indirectly through the more generalized farming subsidize, as in you get paid not to farm or not to farm certain crops or to farm certain crops. What’s interesting is that the ones buying the sugar, corn or and what not, are also subsidize to make and produce the E85 or Bio Diesel and this even though the whole process from crop to produced product is spewing out loads of CO2 and that CO2 appear not to be included in the calculations for the whole scenario that E85 and Bio D are CO2 neutral.
Another thing to note as well is the added CO2 emission from having to import more food in a time when the same hobnob hippies–who created this whole ethanol bs in the first place–want every one to eat primarily locally produced food. Talk about double paradox. First without even more subsidize locally produce spells expensive (which mean imported becomes cheaper) and second aren’t the people of what ever country we have to import from supposed to primarily eat locally produced food as well (and they have to pay higher prices as well since they compete with heavily subsidized, and therefor lucrative, ethanol or Bio D production at the same time they have to compete with lucrative export.)
But of course the CO2 emission belongs to the exporting country in the statistics.
On the price of coal and oil:
The primary cause of relatively high coal and oil prices right now is world monetary policy. All of that money the world’s central banks are throwing around is going to go chasing after something. High prices are no more a sign of supply shortages than high prices for sugar, gold, silver, etc. are a sign of shortages of those commodities. “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” Milton Friedman.
The price of grains has always been tied to the price of oil, transportation costs are critical to being profitable in any production process, especially any process that uses fuel extensively in the production process.
In the 1970’s as a result of the sudden spike in oil prices, prices of grains went through the roof. The “high cost of grain” everyone complains about today is trivial compared to the cost of grain during the oil embargo days. That is why it is strategically critical that we have at least a minimum capability to have self sufficient energy. It has nothing at all to do with “green” agendas, it is a survival issue.
http://www.inflationdata.com/inflation/images/charts/Oil/Inflation_Adj_Oil_Prices_Chart.htm
http://inflationdata.com/inflation/images/charts/Corn/corn_inflation_chart.htm
Everyone whines about the cost of corn today due to bio-fuels but if you have a clue about the inflation adjusted cost of corn, it was much more expensive back in the early 1970’s not because of bio-fuels, but due to oil costs.
In 2008 dollars in, corn sold for $15.67/bu in 1974.
Corns cost in 2008 was half as much at about $7.50 /bu.
Biofuels have nothing to do with high corn costs and never did. It is a cost of energy problem and biofuels were introduced to try to reduce that problem.
In the early 1970’s when the oil embargo first hit, and people were waiting in lines to buy gasoline, it was obvious that the cost of wheat and corn shot up due to the sudden spike in fuel and transportation costs. That drove the first moves into fuel ethanol to provide a local fuel production capability to cushion such price shocks in the future. Your gasoline costs today would be about $0.35 / gallon higher if we did not mix up to 10% ethanol in our gasoline. It both directly displaces gasoline by dilution and it is the most cost effective octane additive you can use short of TEL allowing lower cost gasoline cuts to be sold without additional expensive refining.
Don’t fall for the marketing crap by Tyson and others who have a financial interest in ultra low corn prices.
You don’t have to “replace oil” you only have to produce enough that we are not in a strangle hold situation to over seas oil supplies if they are drastically cut back. There are lots of ways to make ethanol, corn is only one of them, and only makes economic sense in certain parts of the country. You can make fuel ethanol from waste beer (Coors Beer does that to produce about 3 million gallons of fuel ethanol a year). You can make it from algae, you can make it from any source of starch or sugars including sugars that are not normally edible. Beets, potatoes, sugar cane, food waste, the list is endless.
People need to quit falling for the propaganda pitched by speculators and food producers like Tyson that built their chicken empire on artificially low corn prices. They are finally having to pay fair market value for corn and they don’t like it.
Food and energy are always intimately tied together and will remain so forever. We can however make at least a token effort to avoid having to make a choice between heating our homes or eating, and that path is to develop multiple production paths for transportation fuels so no one path becomes a critical failure choke point.
The 1973 oil crisis was triggered by a price increase of 70% and a reduction in oil production of 5%. Ultimately oil costs rose by a factor of 4 from $3.00/bbl to $12.00/bbl due to these relatively small reductions in availability.
The 1979 oil crisis was triggered by only a 4% reduction in oil production.
0il price =energy cost = food production and transportation costs = food prices
Any increase in fuel cost or reduction in transportation fuel availability always causes food prices to increase.
Alternative fuel energy sources is the solution, not the problem! Food costs are a symptom of how critical our dependence on cheap energy is to a sound economy.
For those of you who never had to stand in line for hours to buy gasoline or watch your fuel gauge needle bounce on the E while trying to find an open gas station, are getting duped by the same sort of manipulated data about biofuels that we see in CAGW propaganda.
The saddest thing is most of you actually believe the ethanol subsidy goes to the ethanol producers. It does not! It goes to the company that blends the fuel ethanol with the gasoline (can you say oil companies?).
It is called the blenders tax credit because it goes to the blender not to the farmer or the ethanol producer. Only a very small number of ethanol producers are smart enough to actually blend their own fuel ethanol with gasoline and sell it themselves, and many of them are finding that the oil companies are making it difficult to impossible for them to buy the raw gasoline used for that blending. You need to look for the shoes behind the curtain. Food costs vs corn for ethanol is a con job, and you are getting played by the same sort of cons used to promote wind energy and other renewable energy streams.
Ethanol can and will compete with oil as a major blending stock for transportation fuels. It was the dominant transportation fuel until it was crushed by prohibition. It was government intervention that broke the fuel ethanol business in the first place and government intervention that has systematically prevented it regaining a fair playing field with oil.
In spite of the fact that the blenders tax credit goes to the wrong people it still accomplished what was intended. It allowed ethanol added gasoline to be sold in large enough quantities to allow the industry to build out a brewing capacity that now is in the billions of gallons a year. In addition it is a zero cost subsidy to the tax payer because the ethanol production companies pay back more in taxes than is paid out in the blenders tax credit and the reduction in farm price supports payments (now that corn is selling a fair cost compared to production) has actually netted a reduction in total costs to the tax payer.
Larry
Re: Dr A Burns says:
November 13, 2010 at 1:34 pm
Although $149 per mwh is in the ballpark for unsubsidized wind, $100 is way off the mark for coal even if utility transmission and distribution fixed costs are included. Take a look at current average wholesale electric power at the U.S. trading hubs. You’ll see that the current mix which is dominated by coal, natural gas and nuclear generation averages $40 to $45 per mwh.
If you wish to see a real horror, take a look at unsubsidized, photo-voltaic solar generation. Spain and Germany are paying $400 to $560 (U.S.) per mwh AT THE PLANT FENCE! When Spain reduced their price to under $400 (in desperation) producers started going belly-up, unable to service their construction loans.
The California Dream is an economic nightmare. Incoming Governor Moonbeam would do well to abandon the “Tooth Fairy Economics” of outgoing Governor Terminator and look at some real numbers before he proceeds with his plan to make California the “renewable energy capital of the entire world”.
Claude,
Those prices are from an EIA report for NEW generation costs. Consistent with your observations, the cost of existing generation is significantly lower since the capitol investment occurred in 1970s(ish) dollars. Off shore wind costs even more at about $195 per MwHr and, like you said, solar is ridiculously expensive at about 300 per MwHr and up.
Many people don’t realize that as we build out generation infrastructure the price of electricity will go up. And the type of generation we build will just determine how much it goes up. This is an artifact of the regulatory structure the industry operates in. I personally think that nuclear would prove to be the cheapest if the capitol cost is levelized over the 40-60 year life of the plants BECAUSE the cost is all front loaded in today’s dollars. 20-60 years from now the power from those plants would look pretty cheap just as the power from plants built in the 70s looks cheap now. In the interest of full disclosure, I work for American Electric Power at a nuclear plant. Obviously, these opinions are mine not theirs.
Re: Doug Badgero says:
November 14, 2010 at 9:13 pm
We’re pretty much singing the same tune. You are certainly correct in your distinction between “old” and “new”. Also in the interest of full disclosure, I spent 10 years with TVA designing both conventional and nuclear plants. I spent the next twenty plus years of my career developing, designing, owning (through my company) and operating alternate energy plants. I done my waltz down Wall Street; I know the technologies and I know the numbers. Now that I am retired, I can afford to be an uninhibited “truth teller”. Fashion aside, both wind and solar suffer “energy density” and “capacity factor” problems that doom them as viable alternatives (in a rational world) to fossil-fired and nuclear.
I’ll end this by adding that wind farm operating costs are turning out to far exceed industry projections and I have yet to see the notorious degradation over time of PV cell performance taken into proper account.
Thanks Hotrod (Larry) for some very informative and well thought out posts. Key is that biofuels replace fossil fuels even if only a percent. Total replacement is not necessary.
Those complaining of not enough land need to look at the link i provided that gives clear yields per acre. They need to look at Brasil and its sugar plantations and the total area they use.
A good example is New Zealand, they need only to use 30% of land set aside since 1998 to achieve full biofuel independence and not use any fossil fuels for transportation.
Similarly, from reading these posts I feel solar panels should be stamped clearly with the full KWH that it took to manufacture them. Thus indication how long they need to be used to at least get that back An important element for users.
Anthony has really set up a good information exchange here besides the Global warming fraud.
Oil costs in transportation affect all goods, corn and food products were specifically impacted because of ethanol. See: Calming ethanol-crazed corn prices
With alternative fuel in the limelight, the cost of corn has skyrocketed, but experts say the free market should keep food prices in check.
By Steve Hargreaves, CNNMoney.com staff writer
January 30 2007: 3:54 PM EST
http://money.cnn.com/2007/01/30/news/economy/corn_ethanol/index.htm
With regard to claims that ethanol is not being subsidized, the Washington Post noted: “The Congressional Budget Office this month estimated that, all told, the costs to taxpayers of replacing a gallon of gasoline with one of corn ethanol add up to $1.78. ” http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/23/AR2010072304345.html
In addition, mandates to use ethanol are themselves subsidies.
As for mileage, edmunds.com notes:
http://blogs.edmunds.com/greencaradvisor/2010/09/e15-backers-say-analysis-shows-higher-ethanol-levels-wont-harm-older-vehicles.html
If ethanol is as an efficient and economical fuel as its advocates say it is it won’t need subsidies or mandates to compete in the market.
Also of interest: “New Perspectives on the Energy Return on (Energy) Investment (EROI) of Corn Ethanol: Part 1 of 2” http://netenergy.theoildrum.com/node/6760
The state of the State of California reminds of the The Gipper saying ‘the scariest thing I ever heard was someone from the Government saying “Can I help you?”‘
********
Claude Harvey says:
November 14, 2010 at 10:21 pm
Fashion aside, both wind and solar suffer “energy density” and “capacity factor” problems that doom them as viable alternatives (in a rational world) to fossil-fired and nuclear.
********
As a former power-plant engineer, that about sums it up for me, too.
The amount of resources supporting solar & wind generation should be proportional to their subsidy-free potentials — generously a few percent of the pie. Nuclear & clean-coal should be the top of the list.
The Gipper, heh…. gosh, people.
Alpha Kappa Psi
http://www.akpsiok.com/about.php
Famous Brothers include: Sam Walton, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon
These quail hunting buddies maybe envisioned themselves as rich aristocracy or possibly even royalty? They obviously helped each other out.
What fool would trash our trade agreements that had protected our businesses for 200 years? Then give preferred trading status to Communist China?
They’d be what used to be the Whigs. We had the Jeffersonian ideal of an egalitarian agricultural society, advising that traditional farm life bred republican simplicity, while modernization threatened to create a politically powerful caste of rich aristocrats who threatened to subvert democracy. These proto-republicans took us away from the Jeffersonian path. Whigs demanded government support for a more modern, market-oriented economy, in which skill, expertise and bank credit would count for more than physical strength or land ownership. Modernization wasn’t all bad, but the greed to follow was/is a significantly costly side effect. They actually made the rich ultra-liberal possible, as well as career politicians. Whereas before someone served a term or two and returned to the farm.
That is why I vote Constitution Party. I see them as a small candle in the darkness, in the tunnel of the stupidity from both sides.
Reference your comments above:
Pump price reduction due to fuel ethanol added:
http://www.card.iastate.edu/publications/DBS/PDFFiles/08wp467.pdf
Fuel economy does not necessarily drop due to added ethanol in gasoline. Energy per unit volume of fuel does not track with fuel mileage. Fuel mileage depends on the overall effeciency of the engine to extract useful work from the fuel, and that depends on both the physical design of the engine/car but most importantly on how the engine management system adapts to different fuels. This study show that higher ethanol fuels can get better fuel mileage on high ethanol blends compared to gasoline.
Reduction in fuel mileage is not a characteristic of the fuel, but due to how the engine management system is designed on cars not optimized for using oxygenated fuels. Note the Toyota Camray in this study got better fuel mileage on high ethanol fuel (30% ethanol) than on straight gasoline.
http://www.ethanol.org/pdf/contentmgmt/ACE_Optimal_Ethanol_Blend_Level_Study_final_12507.pdf
Ethanol subsidy and tax
http://waysandmeans.house.gov/media/pdf/111/2010Apr14_Growth_Energy_Submission.pdf
Current corn production exceeds demand even after ethanol demand is met. There is no corn shortage.
http://waysandmeans.house.gov/media/pdf/111/2010Apr29_NCGA_Submission.pdf
Larry
Followup on your links posted above. Your second link to the Washington post refers to this CBO document.
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/114xx/doc11477/11477_Summary.pdf
The CBO is required by law to only address the specific issues placed in a request for their evaluation by members of congress. As a result CBO reports can be biased even before they are written, by how the request is worded. As specifically noted in that document, they completely ignore all the secondary tax revenues from ethanol production and in doing so totally ignore all the tax revenues generated by the ethanol production and distribution process and all the salaries paid in that industry. Since that is the counter value that makes the blenders tax credit zero cost, they are specifically disregarding all those revenues and not including them in the account.
They also use the flawed approach of computing “gasoline equivalent energy” for ethanol on the false assumption that the volumetric energy content of a fuel directly correlates to either fuel mileage or efficiency.
It does not!
By way of example we can look at actual measured energy per mile figures from my first E85 conversion in a 2002 Subaru WRX. I measured my fuel consumption for over a year, recording every tank of fuel and the distance traveled and came up with these final figures.
OEM gasoline configuration on a new car.
Gasoline mileage @ur momisugly 125,000 Btu/ gallon / 24 mpg = 5208 BTU/mile
My E85 conversion, changing only the fuel injector size to provide the proper fueling for E85.. With the larger injectors flowing 30% more fuel, on straight E85, I got the following numbers:
92% of gasoline mileage or 22 mpg resulting in — E85 90,500 BTU/gallon/22 = 4114 BTU/mile.
As you can see, even though my fuel flow increased by 30% over the stock fuel flow to achieve proper fuel air mixtures. E85 actually used less energy to go a mile. This was due to the increased power the engine made and its ability to pull loads at lower engine rpm that would lug the gasoline engine and force me to shift down (to pull hills for example).
At the fuel prices that existed at that time, it cost me approximately 12 cents per mile to use gasoline and 10 cents per mile to go a mile on E85.
In addition to all that, the car also made more power (I bought it as a performance car and enjoy flogging it). From the factory, on gasoline, the car delivered 170 hp to the wheels here at 6000 ft elevation on gasoline. With that simple conversion changing only the fuel injectors flow rate, peak power at the wheels went up to 202 hp.
Using E85 does not need to reduce fuel mileage near as much as the production FFV’s do, if properly tuned. Since the major manufactures have no reason to optimize for ethanol added fuels, home experimenters like me easily out perform the factory FFV’s in all respects.
By the way for those that care, this WRX easily passed Colorado’s IM240 emissions test on this E85 conversion, where they place the car on a dyno and test emissions while the car drives a standard test cycle of acceleration and cruise to simulate normal driving.
Larry
Iowa State, non-peer reviewed publication, claims up to 40 cents a gallon cost reduction in gasoline prices due to ethanol based on a time-series model–not buying it.
.
Perhaps. But it does in the actual vehicles on the road.
Advocate advocating for subsidies and tariffs, and a tariff is another form of subsidy.
Another advocacy group, note from the table in the testimony, that while total corn production has increased very little in the last few years, corn for ethanol has increased significantly, by 38%. That is enough to affect food prices.
You present pro-corn advocacy sources as evidence and then suggest the CBO is providing a biased analysis, but provide no evidence of that. Note from the CBO report:
That does not include the costs of state level tax incentives, nor the costs to consumers of mandates, nor the cost to consumers of damage to older vehicles and off-road engines which were never designed to use ethanol as a fuel.
Ethanol has a place, but it should find it without subsidies and mandates.
Corn ethanol subsidies (the $0.45/gal blenders credit) end on Jan. 1st.
Don’t resort to appeal to authority. It is abundantly clear that some of the biggest crap published recently has been peer reviewed. The peer review process has been shown to be horribly corrupt and self serving and in no way guarantees quality in the output.
If you have a problem with the data presented in the report please tell us what it is, but trying to dismiss it by saying it is not peer reviewed simply will not fly on this forum.
Your assertion that their conclusions are wrong does not wash with the real world experience of the 1970’s and 1980’s when ethanol was added to gasoline specifically to reduce costs at the pump — which it did.
Gasohol (as it was called at the time) was several cents a gallon cheaper than straight gasoline. Accounting for inflation 5-10 cents a gallon cheaper in 1973 would correspond to 25-50 cents a gallon in 2010, which brackets their numbers quite well. When any commodity is in short supply and prices are increased due to that shortage any means that increases available supply will drive down prices.
Would you care to submit data to backup your assertion that added ethanol added to gasoline must always increase fuel consumption given I have shown controlled tests that show there is no direct correlation between increasing ethanol percentage and increasing fuel mileage? In fact the correlation can be negative where cars can get better fuel mileage on high ethanol blends than they do on low or no ethanol gasoline blends.
You are confusing “does” and “should”. Yes I agree Detroit FFV’s get crappy fuel mileage on E85 and high ethanol blends. That is because they are:
A.) Incompetent engineers and cannot develop systems as efficient as home hobby conversions.
B.) It is not cost effective to get EPA approval for the engine modifications necessary to achieve reasonable fuel efficiency on high ethanol blends
C.) They are converting them to use E85 to get CAFE allowances only and there is absolutely no reason to expend engineering talent, and research on optimizing E85 performance when it will gain them nothing financially.
I am inclined to believe B. and C. are far more likely than A.
Are you actually saying an advocate should not be expected to present the best evidence they have to support their position, and that the anti-ethanol advocates do not do the same? Being opposed to ethanol is an advocacy position also, to presume otherwise is absurd. If advocacy is a test for validity, your sources are no more valid than mine.
If the intent of expanding the fuel supply with ethanol is to reduce dependence on foreign energy suppliers, are you saying it makes sense to you to allow Brazil to crush our ethanol industry with state subsidized sugar cane ethanol, in an economy that uses near slave labor methods and simply switch our dependence from the middle east oil fields to the sugar cane fields of Brazil?
Are you actually asserting that you have no problem with Brazilian ethanol producers getting U.S. tax breaks intended to help build out our ethanol infrastructure to increase our fuel security?
You have to look at these issues strategically.
1. A decision has been made to provide a blender tax credit to encourage the oil companies to use ethanol blended into gasoline to stretch fuel supplies and reduce our exposure to external manipulation of our fuel supplies by other countries.
Right or wrong that is the method that has been chosen.
If that is the case, do you allow external suppliers to rip off the American tax payer and at the same time compete unfairly with the U.S. Ethanol industry.
Brazilian ethanol is a state supported export, but you want American companies to compete with that unfair trade situation unprotected?
Sure it would be nice if all tax breaks and subsidies world wide for all forms of energy were stripped away and everyone competed on a completely level playing field. Large oil companies would have to raise private armies and navies to protect their oil shipments and would have to take on 100% of their exploration risks with no rapid depreciation or other benefits and this would be uniformly applied to every oil company and country in the world.
Sorry charlie — not going to happen. The ethanol subsidies are paying their way, as the government gets back more tax revenues from the ethanol producers and their workers and secondary suppliers, than they pay out in blending tax credits. They are also achieving their intended goal of helping to give investors enough confidence that new ethanol production can actually be sold, resulting in a new industry which keeps transportation fuel dollars here at home rather than shipping that income overseas.
You spend one dollar on overseas oil and your out a dollar and get a dollars worth of fuel. You spend that same dollar here at home for local production of fuel and you not only get back one dollar worth of fuel but that dollar rolls over in the economy about 6x as it moves from seller to producer to secondary supplier to wage earner to a final long term investment like buying a car. At each step of that process it is taxed at about 15%-20% as income then taxed again at point of sale, all of which goes back to local state and federal tax revenue. Net result the economy sees $6.00+ of economic activity and the various governments that paid out various tax incentives get back more tax revenue than they gave up to provide the incentive.
No you obviously missed the whole point — I told you exactly what the problem was with the CBO report. Like all CBO reports it can only address the specific question and assumptions it is asked to address. Just because a source is advocating a position does not necessarily make their data bad. The folks opposed to fuel ethanol are just as biased and are also advocating a position, are you proposing that every source you have cited is also useless?
You can’t have it both ways, your sources are also advocating a position. If you have a problem with the data presented, tell us where the data is wrong. I have already shown you how I think the prevailing anti-ethanol advocacy groups are misrepresenting the case and providing bad data. They are making blanket assertions that simply fail to match the facts or the historical record.
If adding ethanol to gasoline did not increase availability and reduce prices I would not have been buying ethanol added gasoline 38 years ago when we were forced to drive miles out of our way to find gas stations that still had fuel to sell. Due to the 4 x increase in oil prices at the time, everyone was price shopping gasoline and gasohol was always a few cents cheaper than gasoline in spite of the limited ethanol production capacity and technology of the time.
I have shown you that both my car, and production cars used in controlled studies can and do get higher fuel mileage on some blends of ethanol.
I have shown that fuel mileage absolutely does not track with the volumetric energy content of the fuel but it depends on the engine management system used.
That proves that the reduced mileage of FFV’s is not due to the reduced volumetric energy content of ethanol, but due to improper engine management and lack of incentive for manufactures to optimize engines for oxygenated fuels.
Larry