What Is LCFS?
A. Low Content Fuel Surcharge
B. Loads of Credits For Sale
C. Less Competition for Foreign Suppliers
D. Lots of Confusion, Few Savings
Answer: All of the above.
Sold to the public as a way to clean up our transportation fuels sector while cutting down on CO2 emissions that come from our tailpipes, in reality the low-carbon fuel standard (LCFS) doesn’t put forth a single, solitary rule seeking to make the fuel in your car today better, cleaner or more affordable than it already is.
What does an LCFS seek to do? Make the fuels we rely on today scarcer, more expensive, and less available — for starters. Achieve that, the logic goes, and newer, lower-carbon fuel options will be forced to materialize in the future – since the American people won’t be able to afford the fuel available to them right now.
Here’s how the system would work: Bureaucrats from the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in Washington, D.C. would determine the amount of carbon not only in the oil needed to produce the fuels our country needs (that number is constant), but the amount of energy it takes to find those critical sources of energy, produce them, transport them, refine them, and ultimately use them in our vehicles.
You know what they’ll find? That so-called “light” crude (often found in some of the least-hospitable, most unstable places on earth) requires less energy to produce than “heavy” crude reserves from Canada and Mexico – and even from Colorado and California. Never mind that each barrel of crude contains roughly the same number of carbon atoms – no matter where it comes from.
So what options are available to producers charged with making the fuel that Americans need to get to work in the morning?
They’ll have two choices: Either cancel their contracts with suppliers in Canada, Mexico and much of the United States and start bringing in more Middle East oil, or buy government-issued “credits” for the right to remain in business – credits that will be bought, sold and traded, packaged and re-packaged on the stock market. Not even Bernie Madoff ever had it that good.
Just as its proponents prefer, the vast majority of Americans have never heard of LCFS — and even the ones who have struggle to remember what the acronym stands for. Now you know: LCFS means higher prices at the pump, fewer good-paying jobs for Americans, complicated trading schemes, and expanded dependence on dangerous, unstable energy.
LCFS? How about “Little Chance of Fooling Society”? Or at least we hope.
