Washington Pays Mills to Pollute

The Nation's Chris Hayes encounters the law of unintended consequences:

I've come to expect that even nobly conceived laws will be manipulated and distorted for private ends. But once in a while I hear a story that gives me the queasy feeling that I'm nowhere near cynical enough. Such is the case with the tale of the paper industry and the alternative-fuel tax credit.

Thanks to an obscure tax provision, the United States government stands to pay out as much as $8 billion this year to the ten largest paper companies. And get this: even though the money comes from a transportation bill whose manifest intent was to reduce dependence on fossil fuel, paper mills are adding diesel fuel to a process that requires none in order to qualify for the tax credit. In other words, we are paying the industry–handsomely–to use more fossil fuel….

In fact, the money to be gained from exploiting the tax credit so dwarfs the money to be made in making paper–IP lost $452 million in the fourth quarter of 2008 alone–that the ultimate result of the credit will likely be to push paper prices down as mills churn at full capacity in order to grab as much money from the IRS as it can.

The provision, passed in 2005, pays 50 cents a gallon "for the use of fuel mixtures that combined 'alternative fuel' with a 'taxable fuel' such as diesel or gasoline." Naturally, this encourages the mills, which had been using a fairly clean and efficient process before, to add some diesel to the mix, just to get the credit.

"You use the toilet every day," said one hedge fund analyst who's been closely following the issue. "Imagine if you could start pouring a little gasoline into the bowl and get fifty cents a gallon every time you flushed."

[Hat tip: the innominate one.]