edatoakrun
Well-known member
The story below describes one of the most unsound "green" subsidy in existence, America's ethanol mandate.
But the same economic rebound effect reduces the benefits from every government incentive favoring BEVs as well.
Federal, State, and local government incentives to BEV buyers and manufactures have helped to put a relatively small number of BEVs on the roads, depressing petroleum fuel demand only slightly-so far.
But this reduced demand has also reduced gasoline and diesel prices slightly, encouraging ICEV, hybrid and PHEV drivers to increase their petroleum consumption, by purchasing less efficient vehicles, and/or consuming more petroleum fuel by increasing miles driven.
The essential problem is, this rebound effect will scale up with increased BEV sales.
Imagine the future decline in gas and diesel prices, after a significant fraction of the vehicle fleet shifts to the electric grid for fueling.
Which is why any effective government incentive to reduce petroleum fuel consumption must be a disincentive on use of those fuels.
placing a direct cost on their emissions, for those who continue to use our atmosphere as their sewer.
But the same economic rebound effect reduces the benefits from every government incentive favoring BEVs as well.
Federal, State, and local government incentives to BEV buyers and manufactures have helped to put a relatively small number of BEVs on the roads, depressing petroleum fuel demand only slightly-so far.
But this reduced demand has also reduced gasoline and diesel prices slightly, encouraging ICEV, hybrid and PHEV drivers to increase their petroleum consumption, by purchasing less efficient vehicles, and/or consuming more petroleum fuel by increasing miles driven.
The essential problem is, this rebound effect will scale up with increased BEV sales.
Imagine the future decline in gas and diesel prices, after a significant fraction of the vehicle fleet shifts to the electric grid for fueling.
Which is why any effective government incentive to reduce petroleum fuel consumption must be a disincentive on use of those fuels.
placing a direct cost on their emissions, for those who continue to use our atmosphere as their sewer.
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/ethanol-backfiring-for-climate-change-20760Ethanol in U.S. Gas Tanks is Backfiring for Climate Change
It may have seemed apparent to members of Congress a decade ago that if a motorist pumped a gallon of fuel made from corn into their gas tank, a gallon of fossil fuel would be left in the ground — hopefully on a foreign shore. But real life is not so simple.
A team of researchers has concluded that for every three gallons of corn ethanol that’s being burned under America’s flagship renewable fuel rules, Americans will avoid burning just one gallon of gasoline made from crude...
The researchers, from the University of Minnesota, St. Paul, focused their analysis on the “fuel rebound effect.” That’s economist jargon describing an unintended market consequence of rules requiring America’s gasoline industry to blend biofuels into its products.
“The fuel rebound effect is so strong, and the climate benefits of the biofuels are so small, especially for corn ethanol, that emissions increase,” said Jason Hill, an energy and sustainability researcher who led the work, published in the journal Energy Policy. “That’s a big problem...
increasing the production of an alternative fuel helps make fossil fuels cheaper, tempering the reductions in fossil fuel demand — the so-called fuel rebound effect.
After surveying more than a dozen peer-reviewed studies, the researchers assigned a broadly accepted numerical value to the fuel rebound effect. They also compared the energy content of biofuel with gasoline. Finally, for the sake of number-crunching, they assumed that overly optimistic EPA assumptions about the climate benefits of different biofuels were accurate.
Crunching those numbers led the the researchers to conclude in their paper that America’s fuel standard “actually leads to a net increase” in greenhouse gas emissions — by hundreds of millions of tons from 2006 to 2022...