Another Pending Political Disaster

Politicians making rulings on things they know nothing about.

Days after a federal appeals court said the Obama administration is setting overly optimistic production quotas for the struggling biofuels industry, the government issued new standards Thursday that raise production estimates for 2013.

New standards announced by the Environmental Protection Agency require production of 14 million gallons of so-called cellulosic biofuels made from grasses and woody material. That’s up from an 8.7 million-gallon requirement in 2012 — when actual production was near zero.

An oil industry representative said the Obama administration was thumbing its nose at a ruling last week by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. The court threw out the 2012 mandate for cellulosic biofuels, saying it was based on wishful thinking rather than accurate estimates for an industry the Obama administration wants to encourage. Administration officials have said that increased use of biofuels could lower greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming, as well as lower U.S. dependence on foreign fuel.

I’m 100% for biofuels, as I think its one of the few renewable formulations that actually seem to work as well as Diesel Fuel. Not sure what they have as a gasoline substitute, still I don’t know if we will EVER have the infrastructure to make a full replacement for traditional oil-based fuels.

Still politicians are going to make rules by pulling numbers out of thin air, and demand we meet their hopes and dreams. This is fine if its a little girl asking for a pony for Christmas, despite living in a 2nd floor walk-up apartment, but these rules come with penalties, enforced with men with guns.

Scary really!

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5 Responses to Another Pending Political Disaster

  1. Kristophr says:

    Biofuels are OK for recycling. If you have a ton of old fryer grease, or thousands of gallons of rancid canola oil that didn’t sell from your farm, then burning it in your old Mercedes or your farm equipment is a good thing.

    But deliberately growing food stocks to make fuel uses up fuel itself, making vehicle fuel more expensive, and causes the cost of food to go up by taking farms out of food production.

  2. Kristophr says:

    Another good option would be to throw socialist hippies into scorpion pits, and use heat depolymerization to make soylent diesel.

    You would get about 80 gallons from one metric ton of dead hippie.

    This would make a good stop gap during the time we would need to retool SUVs to use small Strontium-90 powered pebblebed reactors.

  3. D2k says:

    Look into algae sourced butanol, it’s the most promising gasoline substitute I’ve seen yet.
    Still not going to be available in any reasonable amount for a good 10 years.

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