Michigan Senator wants to see tax cuts for biodiesel
Michigan's junior US Senator, Debbie Stabenow, wants to push for an expansion of tax credits on biodiesel fuels. Stabenow is a member of the Senate Finance committee that will be holding hearings on the subject in the next few weeks, at which time she will move for an increase in the incentives to both supply and use biodiesel. She spoke earlier this week at a biodiesel conference at the NextEnergy center in Detroit that was sponsored by DaimlerChrysler. Unfortunately, it also sounds like she may want to do this through increased farm subsidies. If that happens, much of the money is likely to end up in the corporate coffers of large agri-businesses that are already growing crops like soybeans, instead of promoting new technologies like algae biodiesel and other promising processes.
[Source: Chrysler]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Howard Lee Harkness 8:02PM (3/16/2007)
Government subsidies never help in the long term, and biodiesel doesn't need them anyway. What happens with subsidies (or tax breaks; same thing), is that it will attract a lot of people into the business solely for the subsidies and write-offs. Which means that life will get tougher for the (small-fry) folks that are already in that business for business reasons, and the whole business will get skewed towards being run by the really large companies that have the resources to figure out where all the loopholes are.
And it doesn't really matter which business we're talking about.
If the government wants to support biodiesel, the real answer is to remove the subsidies from dinofuel production.
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