Pulp Nonfiction

[TheCoxwain]

Article summary: Paper mills use residue from papermaking as their primary energy source. Because of new green fuel cash incentives for biofuels, now they are getting a billion dollar worth for subsidy meant for reducing fossil fuel use. All they have to do to qualify is to mix diesel with the stuff they were already using!


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Two years in Washington have started to make me feel jaded. I've come to expect that even nobly conceived laws will be manipulated and distorted for private ends. But once in a while I hear a story that gives me the queasy feeling that I'm nowhere near cynical enough. Such is the case with the tale of the paper industry and the alternative-fuel tax credit.
Thanks to an obscure tax provision, the United States government stands to pay out as much as $8 billion this year to the ten largest paper companies. And get this: even though the money comes from a transportation bill whose manifest intent was to reduce dependence on fossil fuel, paper mills are adding diesel fuel to a process that requires none in order to qualify for the tax credit. In other words, we are paying the industry--handsomely--to use more fossil fuel. "Which is," as a Goldman Sachs report archly noted, the "opposite of what lawmakers likely had in mind when the tax credit was established."

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Here is the whole article

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090420/hayes

[formercia]

1. That's what lawyers are for

Lawyers as lobbyists, lawyers in Congress and lawyers working for the Corporations, wording legislation and interpreting it to mean whatever they want and putting in loopholes you could drive a semi through.