The Ethanol Papers - Paperturn manuscript - Flipbook - Page 163
"Inasmuch as the body develops no tolerance to benzene, and as there is a
wide variation in individual susceptibility, it is generally considered that the only
absolutely safe concentration for benzene is zero."
Zero, as in NO safe level. As in there shouldn't be any concentration of benzene
in the air we breathe. As TACH's editor-in-chief, Mark Fulmer, says about this,
"Benzene is what helps give gasoline it's unique odor...it's the smell of death."
There are some who claim that we (the editorial "we") owe a debt of thanks to
petroleum oil fuels; that we wouldn't have enjoyed such advanced living conditions without petroleum oil fuels. Their underlying supposition is that the cost of
achieving such advanced living conditions is the price of an insignificant number
of humans (100 million dead, for example, is statistically meaningless compared
to the 100 billion that have lived since the invention of petroleum oil fuels).
The problem with that kind of thinking is that we don't owe any gratitude to petroleum oil fuels or the people who make them, we owe all the thanks to the
people who invented the machines that use the fuel. The people who invented
the original machines didn't invent them to be powered by petroleum oil fuels.
Samuel Morey's internal combustion engine - perhaps the first internal combustion engine - was powered by a mixture of wood turpentine and alcohol. Rudolph Diesel didn't invent diesel fuel, he invented the diesel engine, which was
powered by peanut oil. Nicholas Otto's more advanced internal combustion engine was also powered with an alcohol fuel.
It's only because petroleum oil fuels were given huge financial advantages that
kerosene, gasoline, and petroleum diesel fuel became the primary fuels. They
were not needed to advance the state of engine technology. In fact, gasoline
could not and cannot be safely used in advanced engines (high compression
engines) without the inclusion of ethanol or some other additive that emulates
ethanol's anti-knock characteristics.
And what are those non-ethanol additives? Tetraethyl lead, MTBE, benzene,
and toluene - all poisons. The oil industry would like to turn back the clock on
how and why ethanol was re-introduced into common use in America; they want
to replace ethanol with more benzene and toluene (incidentally, there are
equally alarming studies about how dangerous toluene is, such as:
https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2014-03/documents/toluene_toxicology_review_0118tr_3v.pdf.
The bottom line is that petroleum oil fuels were never needed; alcohol fuels
could have done the same job and without all the loss of life attributed to the
