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New page -- needs title & page settings.
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What's in the 2005 Energy Bill?
On the gasoline front, the big ticket item is subsidies for ethanol—as usual. Archer Daniels Midlands (ADM) owns 7 ethanol plants with a production capacity of 1,103,000,000 gallons per year. The ethanol tax subsidy is 51˘/gallon, so that comes to $562,000,000/year. (Now there's a lobbying effort that paid off.) But we need energy independence, right? Unfortunately, reducing fossil imports by the energy in 1 gallon of gasoline costs us a couple dollars in subsidies. (There is hope for better ethanol.)
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Now what about those hybrid-car tax breaks of $1700-$3000 per car?
Toyota figures it can get a $2400 subsidy on one of its great new hybrids that get about 50 mpg instead of about 25 mpg like most of us get. Driving 100,000 miles over the life of the car saves 2000 gallons so that's $1.20 per gallon saved. And that savings requires no nitrogen fertilizer. It also helps to jump start one of the best new technologies out there.
How much money will be spent on hybrid tax breaks? There's a limit of 60,000 cars per company; figure 6 companies and $2400 on average, that's $864,000,000. But that's for four years, 2006-2009, not per-year like the ADM subsidy. Why the limited budget on a much better deal? Because no American car companies can sell more than about 60,000 hybrids in that time. If they had expanded the program, Toyota, which will sell 100,000 hybrids in 2006, would not run out of tax breaks in August of the first year. These tax breaks encourage conservation, but like the ethanol subsidy, their purpose seems more to help corporations.
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Ever wonder how we got leaded gas and how we got rid of it?
Here’s an interesting chapter in that saga:
A year after the National Academy of Sciences reported that leaded gasoline is the largest single source of atmospheric lead, the Reagan Administration’s Task Force on Regulatory Relief (chaired by Vice President George H. W. Bush) proposed abandoning the planned phase-out of leaded gas.
But then, the EPA Administrator Ann Gorsuch admitted to a gas refiner that the agency would not enforce lead limits. The resulting bad publicity prompted the Bush Task Force to abandon its proposal, causing an unplanned speedup of the phase-out.
Exposure to lead negatively affects children's cognitive development and behavioral skills. Between 1976 and 1980, as the amount of lead in gasoline dropped 50 percent, blood-lead levels in children dropped 37 percent. The decline continued. Read the whole story here.
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http://zfacts.com/p/815.html | 01/18/12 07:17 GMT
Modified: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 22:21:16 GMT
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