Legislating the Future

The problem with letting bureaucrats legislate the future is that they have no commitment to the future and their laws carry no cost to the legislators. It is all 'funny money' so it is easy to mandate expensive non-solutions in order to create the appearance of 'action' on an agenda. This is stupid and expensive and slowly drives a nation down a path of economic decline.

Sadly, as this bit from a posting by Geoffrey Styles on his Energy Outlook blog points out, the US energy policy is heading down this idiotic bureaucratic path:

The disconnect on US ethanol policy is even more pronounced, because the current path can only be sustained for a few more years. An op-ed in Saturday's New York Times reminds us of the shortcomings of our current reliance on ethanol produced from corn, while comments by the CEO of Shell, a major investor in next-generation biofuels, makes it clear that the extremely ambitious targets for cellulosic ethanol and other non-food-based biofuels that the Congress mandated in the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 are extremely unlikely to be met. And even before that shortfall becomes serious, the nation's distilleries will exceed the capacity of current US motor gasoline sales to accommodate all the ethanol they can produce, unless the government also lifts the 10% blending limit.

While we can argue about whether that ought to happen, the bigger issue is that these two developments expose the failure of the key assumptions under which the Congress crafted the Renewable Fuel Standard: E85 has turned out to be a dud in the marketplace for good reasons--consumers have figured out that a fuel that costs more dollars to go fewer miles is a bad deal--and it turns out to be really hard to make fuels on a large scale or at an affordable cost from non-food biomass. The appropriate response when your expectations of the future turn out to be so badly wrong would be to freeze the status quo in place while revamping the standard to reflect more realistic assumptions, not to enshrine the false assumptions in new EPA rules that will drive up fuel costs for consumers without doing a thing to improve the environment.

Politicians are like Wall Street bankers, i.e. they can run high risk heads-I-win-tails-you-lose strategies to promote their political careers by fronting whatever idiocy some advocacy group puts forward. The costs, like the financial crisis, are ultimately paid by the taxpayers as a whole. This is a system set up to deliver failure and bureaucratic regulations that favour nobody and serve no real purpose other than suiting some fleeting agenda of some advocacy group. Sad.