Now, take it out of the gas
10 Responses to “Now, take it out of the gas”
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June 17th, 2011 at 9:39 am
How the Frack did this get past Grassley of Iowa? He’s the Biggest Corn Whore in the Senate! Guess his Agribusiness Cronies won’t be feeding his Campaign Chest much longer.
June 17th, 2011 at 10:19 am
I cant wait for the day when I can easily get real gas in PA… 65mpg back in my bike, instead of the 55 I get now.
June 17th, 2011 at 10:23 am
Of course, they left the mandate alone, so the gas companies are still required by law to buy the same amount of ethanol and put it in the gas. All this has done is shift the subsidized cost to the consumers – i.e., the taxpayers. All this has done is take the .gov out of the middle.
It will add to the expenses of those who drive but don’t pay taxes, while removing some (but not all) of the burden from those who pay taxes but don’t drive. The cost of food and other goods will rise again due to increased transportation costs.
It’s all smoke and mirrors. It does nothing constructive, it just moves the cost around.
Like Uncle said, “Take it out of the gas.”
June 17th, 2011 at 10:50 am
Not to gloat . . . . but I scored a major ass kicking yesterday 🙂
Jake, baby steps. This was roundhouse that landed square on the jaw. Not the knockout punch, but its put them off balance. We’ll get to that damn mandate too.
June 17th, 2011 at 1:16 pm
the only time I’ve ever did the walk-of-shame with a jerry can in my hand was one of my first months living in Massachusetts. The Gas gauge on my Ranger never ran properly, but the mileage was always consistent.
Well consistent on REAL gas like we get in Maine.
Dumbasses don’t get that EtOH produces less CO2 per gallon, but you have to burn more of that worthless shit to push your car down the road.
June 17th, 2011 at 1:43 pm
This does not shift the cost to the consumer. The only reason Ethanol blends are competitive is the subsidy. Take it away and they have to compete directly with petroleum on a value basis. It will be unpossible. It will cost more and offer lower mileage and performance. Smart consumers will continue to refuse to buy it and it will go away. Refiners can “blend” all they are mandated to blend, but it will not sell. Or it will have to sell at a loss. Perhaps the EPA will mandate a subsidy in the near future.
June 17th, 2011 at 3:48 pm
@ Jeffersonian: Except for the fact that in many areas of the nation you can’t get anything but blended gas. I don’t know of a single station in my area that offers unpolluted gas.
IIRC, the mandate is that a minimum percentage of gas sold has to be blended. So rather than getting to the end of the year and saying “Oh crap, we didn’t sell enough blended gas” and facing fines, the gas companies blend everything outside of a few specialty areas because it’s just simpler to do. They won’t change that practice – and worry about fines – when it’s easier to just raise prices and point to the government as the cause.
Even if I’m wrong and the mandate is for manufactured percentages and not sales, they’re not going to shuffle blended gas off to limbo when they are required by law to make it. Every gallon not sold is lost money. Even if no one bought it, or if they had could only sell it at a loss, they would just raise the price of non-blended gas to make up for it.
It will not go away as long as the government requires that the petroleum companies produce it.
June 17th, 2011 at 8:10 pm
The other thing that they’re not doing is to kill the import duty on ethanol. Of course if they did that, then it would just ruin the ethanol-from-corn-in-the-USA business model. I call this Free Trade*
*except of course when “Free Trade” actually benefits the consumer.
While they’re at it, they can drop the tariff on imported sugar. Then we would stop making crappy sugar and crappy gas out of corn.
June 18th, 2011 at 12:30 am
SM: Both the subsidy and the import tariff expire Dec 31, 2011. The Coburn-Feinstein Amendment that was voted on yesterday Stopped both the VEETC and Import tariff at the same time.
It won’t be signed into law, but they both will expire this year. Big Ethanol (Growth Energy, which is a front for Jeff Broin, America’s billion dollar welfare queen, and RFA, which is ADM) are targeting a couple of things. They are worried about your investment in renewable fuels and want to make sure that your investment isn’t wasted: so they are proposing that congress end the subsidy and transfer it to build infrastructure (dedicated ethanol pipelines and dedicated ethanol blender pumps – essentially e85 which is 85% ethanol). Right now the corn ethanol mandate is capped at 15 billion gallons in 2015. Beyond that it needs to be “advanced biofuels” or “cellulosic ethanol”. Both are decades away from commercial production, if even that. Big Ethanol is also gunning to expand the mandate to allow corn to take the advance biofuel share.
June 18th, 2011 at 12:33 am
Jake
Your essentially correct. Though the mandate kicks in at the refinery. EPA sets the fuel blend every year. They have a tradable credit system in place to allow blenders some flexibility, but atthe end of the day if you don’t produce what’s allotted to you as a refiner your gonna get prosecuted.