> And without sufficient auditing and enforcement you'll get scams and your goals will not be achieved.

Auditing and enforcement are critical. Shipping around physical gallons does not get rid of that need. Physical gallons could just as easily be water if nobody checks. I don't see why you blame the abstraction.

The consumer can't put the water in her tank and drive her car away. Since she has skin in the game, everyone upstream from her does too. It is reasonable to blame an "abstraction" that removes consumer interest entirely, and doesn't substitute some other control of equivalent strength. The minute I heard of "cap'n-trade", which was decades ago, I expected exactly this sort of scam. Those who designed this scheme, unlike the useful fools who provide political cover for it, did so with exactly the same thought.

The consumer gets 100% gasoline in either case. Forcing the oil companies to buy biodiesel does not force them to give it to consumers. The RID abstraction is a completely separate issue from whether anyone actually wants biodiesel.

Firms will be happy to buy a product wholesale that they cannot in turn distribute to consumers? What are they, farm-aid charities? Let's try to remain focused on the plausible.

Who said anything about them being happy? But that has absolutely nothing to do with whether they are forced to buy gallons they don't want or RIDs they don't want.

Now you're talking about maintaining two sets of books, and somehow regularly disposing of vast amounts of some unknown substance that isn't fit for use in automobiles. That sort of scheme won't even get started before it falls apart, because it relies on the silent cooperation of dozens of people throughout the organization. TFA describes schemes that lasted for years, because they depended on the actions of only one or two people. You assume that liquid matter is as easy to store and transport as ephemeral ID numbers, but it really isn't.

You make it sound like anyone at the oil company cares what they're buying. They want to tick a box. As long as they buy something that has the legal weight of biodiesel, and isn't expensive to get rid of, they're happy. One set of books, no distributed conspiracy.

Or they could never even bother to ship the gallons. That's not a 'scheme' of any sort at the oil company, it's just the business focusing on the part where it makes a profit and dealing with the regulation of buying biodiesel in the most minimal way possible.

Okay, but the system isn't going to be abandoned based on one case of fraud. It's gotta be a lot more widespread than that.

It's similar to how we don't see stores abandoning credit cards despite the impressive amount of fraud we see reported on Krebs. Instead the holes get fixed (eventually, with lots of foot-dragging).

The article reports an interesting story but it doesn't seem big enough to have that kind of impact.