Don Nickles: “I appreciate the question. I have seen something like it. I will allude to it. I hope we can fix it at a later date.…”

“I appreciate the question. I have seen something like it. I will allude to it. I hope we can fix it at a later date. That deals with the renewable portfolio standards that are also in this bill. To show you how similar they are, in that particular section of the bill, there is a mandate that 10 percent of the electricity be produced from renewable fuels. Incidentally, if you can't do that, you can buy a credit for 3 cents per kilowatt hour. That is the price of electricity in the wholesale market today. In some cases, it is a lot less than that. You can get out of that mandate by giving the government 3 cents per kilowatt hour. Wow. That is expensive. That is the equivalent of about a 5-percent increase in the electricity bill. I see this as very similar. This says: OK. Buy a lot more ethanol--up to 5 billion gallons--more than double what we are buying right now. And, oh, yes. We are going to subsidize that, too. We are going to mandate that you buy it and subsidize it. But consumers are going to pay for it. They are going to pay for it by having a shortfall in the highway trust fund to the tune of over $2.5 billion a year. Obviously, if you are exempting 3 cents a gallon and mandating that you manufacture 5 billion gallons, the trust fund is coming up $2.6 billion short per year. As consumers of fuel, users of the highways are coming up short. That means other fuels or general revenue is going to have to make up the difference. It just doesn't fit.…”