Lies are what Mr. Bryce uncovers in this excellent piece.
For example, Mr. Bryce begins his piece,
"Whenever you read about ethanol, remember these numbers: 98 and 190.They offer an essential insight into U.S. energy politics and the debate over cap-and-trade legislation that recently passed the House. Here is what the numbers mean: The U.S. gets about 98 times as much energy from natural gas and oil as it does from ethanol and biofuels. And measured on a per-unit-of-energy basis, Congress lavishes ethanol and biofuels with subsidies that are 190 times as large as those given to oil and gas.
Those numbers come from an April 2008 report by the Energy Information Administration: "Federal Financial Interventions and Subsidies in Energy Markets 2007." Table ES6 lists domestic energy sources that get subsidies. In 2007, the U.S. consumed nearly 55.8 quadrillion British Thermal Units (BTUs), or about 9.6 billion barrels of oil equivalent, in natural gas and oil. That's about 98 times as much energy as the U.S. consumed in ethanol and biofuels, which totaled 98 million barrels of oil equivalent.
Meanwhile, ethanol and biofuels are getting subsidies of $5.72 per million BTU. That's 190 times as much as natural gas and petroleum liquids, which get subsidies of $0.03 per million BTU.
The report also shows that the ethanol and biofuels industry are more heavily subsidized -- in total dollar terms -- than the oil and gas industry. In 2007, the ethanol and biofuels industries got $3.25 billion in subsidies. The oil and gas industry got $1.92 billion."
Thus, Mr. Bryce reveals that the ethanol lobby is already sucking up more subsidies than oil and gas do.
By way of uncovering lies by Wonderboy's administration, he continues,
"Despite these subsidies, the ethanol lobby is queuing up for more favors. And they are doing so at the very same time that the Obama administration and Congress are pushing to eliminate the relatively modest subsidies for domestic oil and gas producers. Democrats want to cut drilling subsidies while simultaneously trumpeting their desire for "energy independence."
The cap-and-trade bill passed by the House aims to "create energy jobs" and "achieve energy independence." Meanwhile, Democrats are calling to eliminate drilling subsidies that have encouraged advances in technology that have opened up vast new U.S. energy sources. These advances have made it profitable to extract natural gas from the Barnett Shale deposit in Texas and the Marcellus in Pennsylvania -- deposits once thought too expensive to tap.
President Barack Obama's 2010 budget calls for the elimination of two tax breaks: the expensing of "intangible drilling costs" (such as wages, fuel and pipe), which allows energy companies to deduct the bulk of their expenses for drilling new wells; and the allowance for percentage depletion, which allows well owners to deduct a portion of the value of the production from their wells. Those breaks provide the bulk of the $1.92 billion in oil and gas subsidies.
In May, Mr. Obama called the tax breaks for the oil and gas industry "unjustifiable loopholes" that do "little to incentivize production or reduce energy prices."
That's flat not true. The deduction for intangible drilling costs encourages energy companies to plow huge amounts of capital into more drilling. And that drilling has resulted in unprecedented increases in natural gas production and potential."
So there you have it. Wonderboy has explicitly lied about the true state of various energy sector subsidies. Or he's genuinely so uniformed and lacks understanding that he can't correctly describe the current state of energy subsidies. Yet he proposes to alter them radically.
Very scary.
Mr. Bryce concludes by observing,
"Eliminating the tax breaks for drilling will make natural gas more expensive. Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Co., a Houston-based investment-banking firm, estimates that eliminating the intangible drilling cost provision could increase U.S. natural gas prices by 50 cents per thousand cubic feet. Why? Because without the tax break, fewer wells will be drilled and less gas will be produced. The U.S. consumes about 23 trillion cubic feet of gas per year. Simple arithmetic shows that eliminating the drilling subsidies that cost taxpayers less than $2 billion per year could result in an increased cost to consumers of $11.5 billion per year in the form of higher natural gas prices.
Amid all this, Growth Energy, an ethanol industry front-group, is pushing the Environmental Protection Agency to adopt a proposal that would increase the amount of ethanol blended into gasoline from the current maximum of 10% to as much as 15%."
That's an interesting explanation of the unintended consequence of removing current oil and gas production incentives. The current administration evidently fails to understand the effects on pricing and supply of curtailing currently in-place production incentives for oil and gas.
Regarding the ethanol energy scam, Bryce notes,
"That increase would be a gift to corn ethanol producers who have never been able to make a go of it despite decades of federal subsidies and mandates. Growth Energy is also pushing the change even though only about seven million of the 250 million motor vehicles now on U.S. roads are designed to run on fuel containing more than 10% ethanol.
There is also corn ethanol's effect on food prices. Over the past two years at least a dozen studies have linked subsidies that have increased the production of corn ethanol with higher food prices.
Mr. Obama has been pro-ethanol and anti-oil for years. But he and his allies on Capitol Hill should understand that removing drilling incentives will mean less drilling, which will mean less domestic production and more imports of both oil and natural gas.
That's hardly a recipe for "energy independence." "
Wow. Only about 4% of vehicles can even run on higher ethanol levels, and using it drives up the price of much of our food.
Yet the administration and Congress want to go full-speed ahead stripping existing energy production incentives from oil and gas, then paying to convert more of our major grain food, corn, into an energy commodity.
Foolish? You bet!
But what do you expect from a president with no life accomplishments, understanding of business or government. Just his own dreams of leveling endless playing fields as a lawyer.
Silly dreams for which we are all about to pay dearly.
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