Should Anyone Be Surprised?

Just read this.

Does this surprise anyone? Scratch the surface of any government-mandated ecological pie-in-the-sky program and you will get the usual: graft, incompetence and, apparently in this case, sheer stupidity.

The government gives ethanol producers lots of money to produce the stuff using new technologies, it turns out that these don't work, then the government mandates the usage of non-existent products and fines companies for failing to use what the suppliers can't supply them with.

Ye gods.

Wonder what the track record of other government-funded ecological-wonder-programs that are based on untried technologies and wishful thinking are like.

I doubt that they are much different.

Oh, and as an aside: the way things look right now, the EPA will mandate buying massive amounts of ethanol from Brazil, rather than changing its targets, spending the money originally mandated for domestic production - which can't be generated - on foreign suppliers, subsidizing them to increase their market share, making it more difficult - you guessed it - for domestic production to ever get up to speed.

Gotta love the unintended consequences here...but should anyone, really, be surprised?