Genius: Companies being fined by EPA for not using biofuel that hasn't been invented yet

Isn't this the perfect microcosm of the flat-earth, no-growth, eco-Marxists who today are running wild in the Obama administration?

When the companies that supply motor fuel close the books on 2011, they will pay about $6.8 million in penalties to the Treasury because they failed to mix a special type of biofuel into their gasoline and diesel as required by law.

But there was none to be had. Outside a handful of laboratories and workshops, the ingredient, cellulosic biofuel, does not exist. [Ed: but that never stopped an eco-Marxist, did it?]

In 2012, the oil companies expect to pay even higher penalties for failing to blend in the fuel, which is made from wood chips or the inedible parts of plants like corncobs. Refiners were required to blend 6.6 million gallons into gasoline and diesel in 2011 and face a quota of 8.65 million gallons this year.

“It belies logic,” Charles T. Drevna, the president of the National Petrochemicals and Refiners Association, said of the 2011 quota. And raising the quota for 2012 when there is no production makes even less sense, he said.

Penalizing the fuel suppliers demonstrates what happens when the federal government really, really wants something that technology is not ready to provide. ...Even advocates of renewable fuel acknowledge that the refiners are at least partly correct in complaining about the penalties... “From a taxpayer/consumer standpoint, it doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense that we would require blenders to pay fines or fees or whatever for stuff that literally isn’t available,” said Dennis V. McGinn, a retired vice admiral who serves on the American Council on Renewable Energy.

Yes, but don't ya know that a bunch of masterminds in Washington -- who have never produced a drop of oil, or refined a gallon of gasoline, or know jack-squat about anything related to energy -- are fully capable of producing regulations, fees, and fines, all with the force of law, to demand that technological innovation keep pace with their dreams and desires?

These bureaucrats demand -- demand! -- that innovation keep up with their central planning! How else can they organize an entire society?

That was me sighing. If this isn't the prototypical example that illustrates the utter insanity of modern liberalism, I don't know what is.


Hat tip: Vicki.