US Senate Defeats Coburn Amendment: Industry Reaction
by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) In Washington, on a cloture vote in the Senate to proceed to an amendment that would end the current ethanol tax incentive immediately, Senator Coburn’s amendment lost 40-59, falling 20 votes short of the sixty votes needed to obtain cloture.
Why did the industry oppose the Coburn amendment? Critics of biofuels have described its leaders as “living off corporate welfare.” But Genencor CEO Tjerk de Ruiter said “the [tax credit] is welcome, but we can live without it.” Qteros CEO John McCarthy opined that “I can’t think of a single important [economic] thing that would happen to the ethanol industry if the ethanol tax credit went away.”
The industry was up in arms not over the economics of the tax credit, but by the attempt by the sponsors of the amendment to hijack a year-long bipartisan, consensus-based approach to redefining the policy framework for biofuels. READ MORE and MORE (DomesticFuel.com)