In this era of political polarization, particularly on matters involving energy and the environment, if Democrats and Republicans in Congress agree on a bill and the president signs it, the bill must be largely meaningless. That explains how the recent energy bill came to pass, one that will cost lots and do nothing for energy independence, greenhouse gases, or the environment. And in the highly unlikely case that the bill’s targets are actually met, the end result may be that it does a lot more harm than good.

Many pundits have written about the new fuel efficiency standards for automakers and the gaping loopholes in those standards. I will focus only on biofuels.

Congress mandated that by 2022, biofuels will contribute 36 billion gallons per year to the country’s energy mix. None of these fuels will ever make any market-based sense without government subsidies. Of the total, 15 billion is to come from conventional biofuels (read: corn-based ethanol), with the accompanying impact on food prices and contamination of ground and surface water. The bill suggests that the share of these fuels should increase to about 5.7 percent of the total transportation fuels by 2022 (15 billion out of 260 billion gallons total) from about 4 percent in 2008 (9 billion gallons out of 220 billion total).

That is not even accounting for the multiplier of 0.7, the percentage by which an ethanol gallon must be multiplied in order to get a comparable volume of gasoline. (Ethanol contains about two-thirds as much heat energy as gasoline.) The astonishing fact is that most of the remaining mandated 21 billion gallons will have to come from cellulosic biofuels, and there is no technology, now or on the horizon, to produce them profitably. The biofuel mandate is like mandating that all children born in the U.S. grow to be 6 feet tall, because it would be better for them as adults. Some day, some technology, as yet unknown, may be able to do that.

Second, let’s address the “energy independence” issue. According to a forecast from the Energy Information Administration, by 2022 U.S. demand for conventional transportation fuels (gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel) will increase by more than 40 billion gallons. That is about twice as much as the mirage amount mandated for cellulosic biofuels. America will still need to find oil supplies, and if drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or federal offshore waters continues to be outlawed, imports will be the only answer.

But there is a third important issue: China. I understand that environmentalists and ideologues ignore it, but where are the pragmatic geo-politicians? By amazing coincidence, at about the same time the energy bill was being signed, a think-tank associated with China’s CNPC released its forecast for that country’s energy demand. The forecast only extends to 2015, but that’s sufficient for our purpose. Extrapolating to 2022, here is what I gleaned China’s transportation fuel demand will look like.

China’s demand will grow to at least 130 billion gallons per year by 2022, from the current annual consumption level of about 60 billion gallons – an increase of 70 billion gallons, or to about twice the E.I.A.’s estimate for America’s increased demand.

Spending all that money to produce more corn-based ethanol, and even more to chase the elusive cellulosic biofuels, is not just a subsidy to special U.S. agribusiness interests, it’s also a subsidy for China. The subsidy will allow that emerging superpower to seek oil resources unhindered, and with diminished competition from the current reigning superpower. The U.S. is poised to relinquish a large swath of power by giving China a bye in the world of superpower competition. In theory, it will also reduce U.S. oil demand, thereby lowering the price of oil for buyers in China and elsewhere. Such a voluntary giveaway is unprecedented in modern history.

And consider this fact: those 21 billion gallons of biofuels that are unlikely to ever materialize are equivalent to 1.4 million barrels of oil per day. This is well within the most conservative estimates of what the U.S. can produce from ANWR and a modest increase in offshore oil leases within its own waters.

There are solutions to America’s transportation predicament, such as long-term electrification, but biofuels are not even close to being the answer.