GoodFuels

Orange County columnist: carbon limits unjust

Robert Samuelson, columnist with Newsweek and the Washington Post, has published a column with the Orange County Register today about the California Air Resources Board’s recent vote on the Low Carbon Fuel Standard.

Samuelson is squarely against CARB’s decision, citing indirect land-use changes as one of the rule’s greatest faults:

The irony of government presuming to pick new winners is that one of the losers its edict is creating is corn ethanol, which became feasible as a transportation fuel only because of government’s previous decision to favor its production with subsidies.

Not content to limit its meddling to regulating vehicle emissions, the ARB will measure carbon footprints by applying a calculation of “indirect” effects of CO2 on green space, such as how ethanol production can reduce farm land, prompting cultivation of previously raw land that might otherwise capture carbon and keep it out of the atmosphere.

Such domino theories break down at nearly every juncture, as it has now for once-favored corn ethanol, previously thought to be a wonderful “green” alternative to petroleum fuel. No further proof should be needed that government is terrible at picking winners by failing to identify all the factors in play.

He finishes up by alluding that the Obama administration might be thinking along the same lines as CARB:

Utopian tinkering beyond the influence of voters arrogantly presumes ivory-tower bureaucrats know better. Unfortunately, we may only be in the early stages of administrative governance. The Obama administration and Congress are looking at California’s global warming tactics as a model for a national scheme.

Click here to read the entire column.