Don Nickles: “I think we are having a good debate. I think it is informative to my colleagues. I thank and compliment my colleague…”

“I think we are having a good debate. I think it is informative to my colleagues. I thank and compliment my colleague from New York, Mr. Schumer, and my colleague from California, Senator Feinstein, for their leadership in bringing out an amendment and exposing this for what it is. It will greatly increase costs, a couple of costs. I haven't heard too many people talk about what is very obvious. We have already agreed to an amendment that extends the ethanol subsidy in the Tax Code. That is just a fact. We have extended it, I believe, for 10 years. Ethanol now receives a subsidy of 53 cents per gallon. It doesn't pay an excise tax that goes to the highway trust fund. That is already the case. That is present law. We just extended that for 10 years. Presently, we are producing a little less than 2 billion gallons of ethanol a year. So that costs the trust fund a little over $1 billion. The trust fund loses that because we give ethanol the advantage over all other fuels. That is about $1 billion. OK, that is present law. What the bill does if you look on page 189 of the bill, is increase the ethanol mandate. Right now, we are producing about 1.9 billion barrels per year. It says in the year 2004 it goes to 2.3 billion. It doesn't sound like a lot, but that is about a 20-percent increase. Then, over the period of time to the year 2012 it goes to 5 billion. We go from 1.9 billion to 5 billion. That is a little less than a 200-percent increase in ethanol.”