The comments are certainly correct, but the fact that adding 10% alcohol to gasoline reduces the mileage and allows the addition of water are two more reasons why the bad choice should be ended. Of course, those profiting from it, and their lobby people, will scream. But we really must not care.
You gotta buy bait before you fish. They bought the bait (biofuels) and found out the process wasn't cost effective with corn, etc. Stop it! Maybe it is affordable with bio-waste; good thing to try on a pilot-plant basis, but to keep a subsidy just because it is already there - insane. I live in the Rockies; lotsa BLM/Federal grazing land with all the overgrazing, stream erosion, etc. problems. Every time I hear about the grazing rights auctions I want to toss my name in the hat, win, and sell the (discounted) grazing rights to some rancher. Why should anyone support an unfair assistance in a competitive markerplace? Some are chosen winners and we, the taxpayers, pick up the tab. Not fair, wasteful, political.
I'm from the gov'mint and I'm here to tell you that use of the banned word "Constitution" will get you into a lot of trouble. Oops. I just used that word. I gotta arrest myself.
Meanwhile, keep them subsidies rollin. Rollin, rollin, rollin. The fatcats are gittin low on cash...just bought another Caribbean island and them things ain't cheep!
End all subsidies in the US. Let the market handle it's own problems instead of seeing the well connected always getting the upper hand at feeding at the public trough. Outisde of real public safety, defense, and a few other things mention in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, government should really be curtailed to a massive extent in being involved in the subsidies game. It's a game and the tax paying public is generally the loser in it.
Absolutely correct: Subsidizing a particular technology rather than research to come up with something better gives us this mess we have today. The subsidy for ethanol was 100% driven by the Big Agribiz lobby. But because the average farmer, the so-called "little guy" benefits too, he pushes to keep the subsidy in place, thus further empowering ADM and Big Agra who really want to squash that small farmer. Meanwhile, we all pay higher prices at the market checkout and many countries that depend on that food stock as a staple face shortages and even higher prices. Are we ever going to learn and take control of ourselves and our destiny?
The root cause of our biofuel (or any) program is that our representatives are bought and paid for by lobbiests. We all do what we get paid to do. As long as politicians are allowed to have their carears financed by lobbiests, we'll continue to have this useless expensive stuff dumped on us.
Why would subsidy elimination kill engineering enthusiasm? I would posit that subsidies are what kill innovation because they concentrate attention and effort on one thing - in this case, corn based ethanol. The solution to many, if not most, of our problems is economic liberty. Government's record of picking winners isn't stellar and they're using our money to do it.
The numbers here seem a bit misleading. From what I can find, only 10% of the corn crop is used for human food, and an even smaller percentage is sweet corn for direct consumption. The rest is field corn, for livestock feed and ethanol production.
Absolutely this whole program is a joke. The "Flexfuel" thing is an absurd waste which I am inclined to believe was diversion tactic that somehow aided corporate farmers to make a bundle of the public's back.
A 10% ethanol blend is enough to wreak havoc on any engine with a carbeurator. Replacing the ethanol with a fuel that is better researched would help in the long run.
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