Money to burn

Since the turn of the century, biofuels production in the US and Canada has soared more than 8-fold, driven by extremely favourable government support programs. In 2006, the new Conservative government announced its intention to radically accelerate and broaden the existing ethanol support system, beginning a major intrusion into the transportation fuel market. The government's stated goal was to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gasses (GHG) associated with climate change. In this report we investigate, first, whether this is likely to have been achieved, and second, whether the policy yielded benefits commensurate with the costs.