...you try to ram through something you couldn't get in WTO talks, brilliant!

The import tariffs on biofuels can be a good thing.  We don't need a gigantic load of rock-bottom cheap corn-ethanol and other biofuels to suddenly become available.  Especially when it comes from countries with little or no environmental regulations to ensure it's refined and manufactured properly.

The tarrifs are not stopping imports of corn ethanol which is almost exclusivly a north American product but sugar cane ethanol which is much cheaper and the indicated choice for an automobile fuel additive if subsidies are left out of the question.  Although in the short run this would benefit Brazil the most (and why not?) soon production will be up in countries who are closer to us and who are good trading partners and friends.  
The worst thing to do is make these same countries hungry by making our own ethanol at great expense and removing food from the marketplace.

Dewolfe

The WTO negotiations on liberalizing trade in environmental goods and services (EG&S) have been going on since 2002, as part of the broader Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations. The environmental community, for some inexplicable reason, has largely ignored the issue until now.

Countries like the USA and EU truly wanted a "win-win" outcome on the environment -- so that they could say that trade liberalization was good for the environment also -- and so they slipped in this negotiating mandate into the November 2001 Doha Declaration at the last minute. Countries like NZ, who produce things like monitoring instruments, were also genuinely concerned about high tariffs and non-tariff barriers that were making it difficult for them to export their goods. Most of the goods that the OECD countries had proposed for liberalization were rather generic, by the way: pumps, pipes, filters, meters and other material for controlling or measuring pollution.

The problem was that many developing countries -- led by India -- took a mercantilistic view towards the proposal and only looked at it from the perspective of an exporter. Yet one can make a strong case that it is in any country's interest to look at environmental equipment more as a potential user. But the real politics of this is that developing countries (not all of them, but some of the more influential ones) have refused to sign onto an EG&S deal until and unless they get what they want on agriculture.

Regarding biofuels, the USA and the EU are only half right. Although the negotiating mandate says nothing about the negotiations being restricted to industrial goods, because the "modalities" (how quickly and how deep tariff reductions will be made) are being discussed in the group that deals with industrial products, OECD countries have maintained that no agricultural products should qualify as "environmental goods".

That interpretation would exclude ethanol (classified in chapter 22 of the Harmonized System) but not biodiesel (classified in chapter 38 of the Harmonized System), which is considered an industrial chemical. In fact, in 2005 biodiesel made it onto the composite list of possible environmental goods being considered by negotiators, but was taken off when the list was slimmed down from over 400 to around 150 tariff lines.

The U.S. stance on fuel ethanol being an agricultural good stands in contrast with its own tariff treatment of the good. Whereas ethyl alcohol destined for beverage or industrial (i.e., medical or chemical) use is subject to a mere 2.5% tariff, fuel ethanol is classified in Chapter 99 of the USA's tariff code and subject to an additional specific-rate tariff of 54 cents per gallon.

By the way, I agree with Dewolfe and disagree with Tasermons Partner. Tariffs on imported ethanol do nothing to address the displacement effects of producing ethanol in the United States. As many have pointed out, more corn means less soybeans. And where is that soybean deficit being made up? In part in the Amazon. More to the point, it is awfully rich for people in the United States to lecture other countries about the environmental performance of their agriculture, given the amounts of pesticides, fertilizer and (in the High Plains) irrigation water used to grow corn.