Will FDL support or oppose the so-called HCR bill?

Can’t the Stupak Amendment be removed in conference committee?

The price we paid just to get this to the floor was very high.

Coverage of this is a bit confusing. It is designed to raise money to pay for the health bill, but then sometimes they call it a credit.

I already said I opposed it the day it dropped.

They could… and so Rahm Emanuel will gut the public option as per corporate demands and then he will smirk and say that that was the price of undoing the Stupak amendment so [edited by mod].

A bad bill is actually about to get much worse.

And that price will get higher. The progressives thought they could act like somebody and therefore victory cannot be declared until they are crushed.

This project may explain why the biofuel rider is a bad investment. Ask yourself what are they going to make the biodiesel from, where’s the source located, how much material is it going to take to generate the amount the firm predicts as annual output.

In other words, where’s the business plan? And have they done this successfully anywhere else?

Actually Jane Michigan is not a big biofuel especially cellolusic biofuel town so if he is from Michigan he is not the one for which the rider was in. I think the main goal of the rider was to clawback the ill gotten win fall that the pulp and paper guys (one of the largest polluters) were getting because black liqour qualified under the previous language.

Full disclosure I am in the biofuels businesss…

“And have they done this successfully anywhere else?” Kinda misses the point of the credit which is to encourage risk taking. Plus is a credit earned AFTER the plant produces the biofuel not before.

The Ethanol fraud is just another Oil Company gimmick to stop genuine alternative NON-POLLUTING renewable energy sources. Remember, that so-called “bio-fuels” use up land and water that would be used for food. This increases the price of food and the profits of Exxon. It is just more Corporate Criminality.

So the way this rider raises money is by closing the loophole on pulp and paper, that was in the Times article. But are the biofuel people gaining a credit or are they just not losing their credit, that is the part I am not clear on.

If Stupak can be paid off with a bit of pork, we should absolutely do it. I’d much rather have a larded-up bill without the Stupak amendment, distasteful as it may be to accede to such an asshole’s demands in any way.

That’s just nonsense. Check your facts. The oil companies fought tooth and nail ethanol blending and they are now deliberately standing against the 15% blend level increase. Further the facts about ethanol and food prices are out, do some research before spouting nonsense.

There is no increase just a protection of legitimate biomass derived fuels and a small extension of the definition while still closing the $50 billion loophole to black liquor. I am wondering though if black liquor would qualified if it was gasified and converted into DME to me that’s a legitimate use of black liquor as a feedstock, but I think the paper guys screwed themselves when they overreached and claimed the credits simply for blending it and burning it in their boilers.

Instead of calling arguments nonsense, produce some facts or a link or two where people here who are not in the biofuels business can check your assertions vs what frank33 said. And it would be helpful when you talk about biofuels if you would keep the jargon to a minimum for those of us who aren’t up to speed with this yet.

How can ethanol ever be a viable alternative considering the amount of land needed to produce enough of the inputs to make the final product?

Whether ethanol is carbon-neutral depends entirely on the inputs. Ethanol derived from corn (maize) isn’t carbon-neutral. Sugar cane is carbon-neutral, because you can make more BTUs in ethanol (even after fermentation and distillation) than are consumed in growing and harvesting the crop.

If we can develop a system for celluose digestion to glucose, we’d be in business with ethanol production. Instead of fermenting the grain, we could harvest the grain and convert the cellulose in the remainder of the plant to ethanol. Termites do it with their gut commensals, and eat up our houses doing it. We can figure out how to do it too.

I’m not sure how the numbers come out on biodiesel. Again, the feedstocks are crucial to how things balance. Worse, there isn’t an obvious big win like cellulose for biodiesel. We’ll have to see what seed stocks can be bred for ridiculously high oil content.

Point taken about providing information to the benefit of the board. Having said that I don’t feel particularly motivated to provide evidentiary information to combat specious argument by someone that did not themselve support there statements with any facts.

At any rate CBO came out with their report on Ethanol’s role in food prices last year and found that ethanol was only responsible for 9% – 15% of the increase in the price of food. Or about $0.50 tp $0.80 of the $5.10 average increase. With fuel and the marketing activities of the manufacturers being the main culprits.

http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/100xx/doc10057/04-08-Ethanol.pdf

BTW I am not in the ethanol business and I believe ethanol is a small part of the answer and for sure corn ethanol is a transitory fuel.