CNN Bemoans Inevitable Higher Prices for Cleaner Fuels

CNN does a man-on-the-street report on how the high price of diesel fuel is crimping the well-being of truckers. What goes totally unmentioned is that the federal government mandated a new, cleaner diesel formulation, called ULSD, that recently went into effect. ULSD is a cleaner burning fuel, but it turns out, is more expensive to produce. And since the mandate is new, the supply base hasn't caught up with demand - you don't just snap your fingers and produce the new fuel, you have to invest millions of dollars and do months worth of retrofitting. Undeniably, this is a major factor in the rise of the price of deisel, but CNN doesn't want to tell you that higher prices are brought you courtesy of the US government. You want cleaner fuels, great, but they don't come cheap, certainly not in the short run. It is called a trade-off. Cleaner burning fuel is great, but don't bitch when you have to pay more for gas. This is an object lesson too, the more intemperate among us want fossil fuels abandoned yesterday. What do you think it will cost to get around if they got their wish?

Disclosure, I have advocated ULSD on this site before, because I think it represents the best approach - making existing fuels incrementally cleaner, rather than gambling on pie in the sky replacements - given that we as a society have irreversibly bought into the speculative theory of anthropogenic global warming.