The Mail reports that EU demands for ever increasing proportions of "renewables" in liquid transport fuels mean that consumers are soon going to be using a new blend of fuel called E10. This has a higher ethanol content and therefore significantly lower energy density, which means that the motorist is going to be hit with a double whammy of fuel that is both more expensive and less efficient.
In response, the LibDem transport minister Baroness Kramer pretends that retailers have some sort of a choice about the new fuels:
Transport Minister Baroness Kramer said it was up to fuel sellers to decide how to meet EU targets.
She said: ‘Any decision to supply E10 is very much a commercial decision for fuel suppliers and current regulations certainly do not require them to do this.’
This is of course preposterous. Either you have the extra bioethanol in your fuel or you have broken EU law. Pretending that there is a choice here is fundamentally dishonest.
Readers here are well aware that the EU directive on liquid biofuels was an exercise in corruption, with Brussels bureaucrats having succeeded in undermining the policy process so as to benefit the farm lobby. The policy should be opposed on these grounds alone, but even the doubters should recognise that the biofuels directive is causing widespread hunger. Such squeamishness has of course barely shifted sentiment among the EU elite.
We have corruption, we have hunger, we have consumers suffering too and inefficiencies being introduced into the transport system. What sort of a person can bring themselves to pretend that everything is OK?