Ethanol subsidies should be buried face down with a stake through their hearts. Electric vehicles? Toys for the 1%...buy your own damn Tesla or Fisker.

They accidentally did something good. I expect election year lobbying will retroactively reinstate the ethanol subsidy.

Ending the ethanol subsidy is great. Took too long to get rid of it.

As for the electric cars, I'm ok with the subsidies, though they should be lowered from current levels. As the cost to produce these cars comes down, the Feds should wind down the credit to compensate.

Also, as usual, the WP cherry picks their data points. Sure, Chevy missed their 10K car target, but every Volt made in 2011 was sold, and NONE were returned due to the recent battery issues. And using the Karma as an example EV is disingenuous. The Karma is a 1% car. Volts and Prius are not.

The point of a subsidy is to help a business develop a new technology in the early stages when it is difficult to break even, not to help you get cool eco-bling.

Shaggy_C: Elvis_Bogart: Electric vehicles? Toys for the 1%...buy your own damn Tesla or Fisker.

Yep, how dare they try to bring the price point down via subsidy so that the smelly, lazy middle class might have a chance at owning one of those vehicles. Back to your horse and buggy, prole.

Those types of credits should only be there for a short time, if after a few years it can't survive on its own, then you probably need to look at why.

Grand_Moff_Joseph: Ending the ethanol subsidy is great. Took too long to get rid of it.

Agreed, at least for corn-based ethanol. The numbers never made sense, and it was always basically a boondoggle for farmers. Cellulosic ethanol is still worth pursuing, especially for manufacturing from agricultural waste products. Cellulosic material is much harder to convert to ethanol in terms of rate and cost, but the energy investment pans out. It's an interesting problem in applied biochemistry-- you're trying to rapidly break down biomatter that is evolved to resist the elements.

As for the electric cars, I'm ok with the subsidies, though they should be lowered from current levels. As the cost to produce these cars comes down, the Feds should wind down the credit to compensate.

Exactly. Every electric car on the road is a huge benefit in terms of pollution-- this stems from both the inherent efficiency of electric motors, and the higher efficiency of power generation at massive central facilities (~60%) as compared to a car-scale internal combustion engine (~25%). Plus, you eliminate wasteful infrastructure needed to get the key resource into the hands of the consumer-- it's a lot easier to ship and sell electrons than to ship and sell gasoline. And just type 'Iran' into a search engine to figure out the rest.

Pure electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles are exactly the kind of technology the federal government should be investing in-- it leads to cleaner air and water for everyone, and widespread adoption would have a profound national security impact.

rjakobi: B-b-but Iowa Caucuses! What are they going to do with all that corn? They certainly can't EAT all of it.

I see you've never been to Iowa.

LedZeppelinRule: Pure electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles are exactly the kind of technology the federal government should be investing in-- it leads to cleaner air and water for everyone, and widespread adoption would have a profound national security impact.

But they do nothing to end the problem of sprawl. I live in an apartment. Although a plug-in vehicle would suit me very well, there's still no place for me to charge it. And, since I still wouldn't have enough deductions to itemize, I probably wouldn't qualify, anyway.

LedZeppelinRule: Yeah, but, LIBERALS like it, so no.

The Democrats turned the derp up to eleven in 2009. There's no other way to put it. Green alchemy projects are failing one after another, and appropriate taxes on emissions are now out, because they're "regressive." My state's gasoline tax hasn't gone up since 1986. The Federal gasoline tax hasn't gone up since 1993. This is a problem.

/The Chevy Volt is very disappointing. What happened to that all-electric drive?

king_nacho: Those types of credits should only be there for a short time, if after a few years it can't survive on its own, then you probably need to look at why.

You have to look at all the costs. Let's adopt your hypothetical and say that for whatever reason, fully or largely electric vehicles (like the Volt/Leaf, not the Tesla Roadsters and Fisker Karmas of the world) end up being more expensive to manufacture, even at scale. We won't really know what the technology can do for at least a few years, and that scenario is within the realm of possibility.

Ballparking the scale of the problem via Wikipedia, there are ~248 million four-tire vehicles in the US, with a mean age of 8.4 years. So we need to replace about 30 million vehicles per year, give or take.

Let's assume a pretty dire case -- we keep the full-on subsidy ($7,500) forever, which makes them competitive enough to account for half of all sales, or 15M/yr. The price tag for that is unquestionably steep-- $112B annually, or about $375 per American.

But the question isn't "Is it expensive?", it's "Is it worth doing?" The average American driver racks up 13,476 miles each year, with CAFE showing about 28 mpg as typical. That works out to 481 gallons per driver, or 72 billion gallons not burned per year for the 150M electric vehicles we're projecting (after the program has been running for several years). That's 1.7B barrels of gasoline not burned every year, which Americans would have paid $216B (at $3/gallon, which is being kind) for, almost twice the cost of the subsidy.

And you know all this stuff about Iran in the news? Iran produces 1.55B barrels of gasoline every year. Just the US achieving 50% adoption of electric vehicles takes more than that off the market, let alone the impact of getting Europe on board.

And all of that is without even getting into the details about air quality, water quality, and public health improvements. Or the savings in the defense budget we'd realize by not having to care so much about petroleum-producing states-- if their governments could even hold power in a world where petroleum prices plummeted.

Is it a silver bullet that solves all the problems? No. But widespread adoption of electric vehicles would have a huge impact in multiple areas, and even if it costs us $112B per year (it won't), it's probably worth the investment.

watson.t.hamster: And currently clean energy seems to be mostly an expensive and politically biased process (how much did Solyndra add to the grid?).

Citing Solyndra as an example of how the entire green economy is behaving simply wrong.

The price of solar panels dropped 40% last year.

The solar industry's 2011 Q3 growth was 140%.

More U.S. solar electric capacity came online in Q3 2011 than in all of 2009 combined.

The solar industry employs 100,000 Americans in 5,000 businesses across 50 states.

These are all good things.

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dlp211: You realize this was a tax CREDIT not tax DEDUCTION, there is a significant difference.

Still relies upon me making modifications to a structure I rent from a bank (or, in some unusual circumstances, actually own).

/End the mortgage interest deduction, and let rates revert to 2000 levels.