If wishes were biofuels, we'd all be energy-independent

Critics of environment- and efficiency-focused government regulations like to portray such laws as trampling on people’s freedoms: the freedom, for example, to buy the most inefficient light-bulb possible or to drive gas-guzzling “autos on steroids,” if that’s what they want.

It’s a libertarians-gone-wild type of thinking that can make for juicy news-hour soundbites, and sells well with a segment of the voting public. But it makes no sense in today’s increasingly energy-constrained reality.

Just as nonsensical, though, is the idea of trying to legislate into reality something that isn’t currently feasible.

Like, oh, say, mandating the use of a fuel that doesn’t yet exist as a commercially available product.

But that’s exactly what the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is doing with fuel suppliers that aren’t meeting federal requirements to blend gasoline and diesel with cellulosic ethanol, a next-generation biofuel with great promise in theory but essentially unobtainable in meaningful amounts in reality. And, as the New York Times article on this silliness reports, the fines being assessed for failing to use cellulosic ethanol in 2011 will be even higher this year … with no commercial supplies of the biofuel in sight.

The explanation from the EPA for why this is so is even more Orwellian. The cellulosic ethanol blending mandates make sense, an agency spokesperson is quoted as saying, because, they aim to “avoid a situation where real cellulosic biofuel production exceeds the mandated volume.”

Huh?

That makes as much sense as setting quotas for unobtainium.