Doug Koplow of the policy consulting firm Earth Track said that the mandate is effectively another kind of subsidy for ethanol, and warns that it may be difficult to come up with new alternative fuels without adverse environmental impacts.
While there has been some enthusiasm about biofuels from switchgrass, cornstalks and algae, Koplow said, "I think people are painting that as too rosy a picture."
Desperately seeking fiscal savings, Congress and President Obama are scrambling to find anything in the federal budget that can be thrown overboard, from child nutrition aid to funding for military bands.
When he releases his new budget in two weeks, President Obama will propose doing away with roughly $4 billion a year in subsidies and tax breaks for oil companies, in his third effort to eliminate federal support for an industry that remains hugely profitable. Previous efforts have run up against bipartisan opposition in Congress and heavy lobbying from producers of oil, natural gas and coal.
LAST time it met, in 2009, the G20 took a stand against a little discussed problem that unites environmentalists and economists: fossil-fuel subsidies. Over the course of the subsequent year, the nations contributed to a list of the “inefficient” subsidies they supported and the things they planned to do about it. So far, this list is unimpressive.
Interesting article by Amory Lovins in The Weekly Standard examining the history and market-related problems associated with nuclear subsidies past and present. Lovins suggests that the structure of many of the proposed nuclear programs do a poor job aligning incentives and accountability for proper risk management and oversight, and create a significant risk of recreating conditions similar to those that led to the meltdown in mortgage markets two years ago. Lovins uses subsidy data from Earth Track, and suggests shifting from always adding new subsidies to various ene
Identifying the real costs of competing energy technologies is complicated by the wide range of subsidies and tax breaks involved. As a result, U.S. taxpayers and utility users could end up spending hundreds of billions, even trillions of dollars more than necessary to achieve an ample low-carbon energy supply, if legislative proposals before the U.S. Congress lead to adoption of an ambitious nuclear development program, Mr. Cooper said in a report last November...
Subsidies for biofuels in the United States have reached levels unimagined when support for an "infant industry" began in the late 1970s. Today, the infant has grown into a strapping behemoth with a powerful sense of entitlement and an insatiable appetite for ethanol's primary feedstock: corn. In 2009, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported a record corn harvest of 13.2 billion bushels, 9 percent larger than the harvest of 2008.
One way to correct market failures is tax shifting -- raising taxes on activities that harm the environment so that their prices begin to reflect their true cost and offsetting this with a reduction in income taxes. A complementary way to achieve this goal is subsidy shifting. Each year the world's taxpayers provide at least $700 billion in subsidies for environmentally destructive activities, such as fossil fuel burning, overpumping aquifers, clearcutting forests, and overfishing.
"President Obama has followed up on his support for 'a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants,' laid out Jan. 27 in his State of the Union speech, by proposing to triple public financing for nuclear power...
"Budget hawks have a different set of concerns. They oppose government 'subsidies' to the industry (in the form of federal loan guarantees), saying taxpayers assume a huge risk given the industry's track record of cost overruns – and loan defaults – in the 1980s.
Detailed look at the hierarchy of subsidies within the US federal government, using the analogy of Dante's Inferno. A great summary when the article first appeared in the mid-1990s, and the core issues raised sadly remain as central challenges today. The paper does cite some of my earliest work on energy subsidies, a detailed review of federal subsidies to all forms of energy.