Energy Mandates Fuel a Rift (Coal Interests vs. Environmentalists)

WASHINGTON -- Raising the federal mandate for using renewable and alternative energy sources may mean bigger government incentives for efforts to turn coal into diesel-engine fuel. But President Bush's push for domestic alternatives to imported oil has ignited a battle between coal interests and environmentalists -- and underscored tension between the goals of increasing U.S. energy security and curbing global warming.

Greater use of liquid fuels made from coal, the nation's most plentiful energy source, would reduce reliance on imported oil. But making the liquid fuels and burning them in automobile engines would release additional carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas thought to accelerate climate change, environmentalists say.

The president's proposal, described in his State of the Union address, would require blenders of gasoline to include 35 billion gallons of renewable and alternative fuels by 2017. The 2005 energy law includes incentives for renewable fuels, such as ethanol, but not for alternatives, such as coal-based fuel.

James Connaughton, who heads the White House Council on Environmental Quality, says the president's proposal is designed "to create an opportunity for a variety of other approaches," which, he said, could include such fuels as methanol and diesel oil made from coal. The goal, he says, is to create a technological horse race that will make it easier for promising ideas for alternative fuel to find investors. Currently, there are no commercial-size coal-liquefaction plants in the U.S.

While administration officials have assured coal-industry lobbyists that coal-to-liquid fuels are embraced in the president's proposal, Mr. Bush has kept the focus on more environmentally popular options, such as corn-based ethanol and ethanol produced from farm wastes, including corn stalks.

Enviors have dislike traditional sources of energy because of the environmental impact. While they find a coal mine or oil drilling rig to be revolting, they think that waving fields of corn are preferable. Yet, the coal mine or oil well probably has far less total impact on the environment than the field of corn.

Enviros embrace the concept of "sustainable" energy, yet to do that they must use what can only be called unsustainable tax gimmicks, tax credits, subsidies and intervention in the ability of the market to freely set a price. It must be honestly acknowledged that any use of government to distort a freewill decision, a voluntary agreement between buyers and sellers or to collect a tax is only enabled because government has armed agents to enforce the decrees and laws.

If the left whines about the givaways to the proverbial "big oil", let them lobby for the removal of every single penny and percent of government subsidy, tax credit and special rule for any energy company. In return, let us make all energy companies like Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs), a taxation regime that passes all profit to the shareholders in the form of dividends, and upon which they pay the full tax on such income.

If this tax structure is good enough for owners of apartments, malls, and industrial parks, it should be good enough for oil companies, and the left.

The left is trying to have it both ways, if only because they are so conflicted about the hard choices and realities of life, especially life now threatened by Islamists who insist the west must convert, submit, or die.

Just as the left simultaneously demands "affordable housing", yet demands the right to sell their homes for the market price, they want their air conditioner to run in the summer, and their car to take them to work, yet don't have the slightest clue as to the scope and scale of the energy industry that makes it all possible, and so affordable that in the US, over 80% of poor people enjoy air conditioned homes and have at least one car.

"David Hawkins, a climate-change expert for the Natural Resources Defense Council, says the diesel fuel still contains carbon dioxide, which will be released into the air when it is burned in the engines of cars and trucks."

So does biodiesel and ethanol for that matter. The crops grown to produce these fuels do soak up carbon dioxide, but then again so would whatever was growing there before these crops were planted for biofuel production. They aren't exactly ripping out parking lots to grow soybeans or corn for biofuels. They're using existing farmland and bringing lands into service as farmland that no doubt had something growing on them prior to being used as farmland. The fuel they produce will release carbon dioxide when burned, and some will also be released during the production of these biofuels. They aren't that "clean."

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