The Ethanol Papers - Paperturn manuscript - Flipbook - Page 219
that he only meant older vehicles then I must assume that he was making it as
a blanket statement.
Quoting from the article I published on February 23rd, here's in part what I
wrote:
"...the problem to me is that Jay didn't say "write to your legislators to
demand more freedom of fuel choice to give us old car owners easier
access to ethanol-free gasoline," he's instead calling for less freedom of
fuel choice. More importantly, as much as I hate to say it, Jay is using the
information to sway the argument that is untrue and misleading. And so,
since I think that Jay should know, and does know better, that he is lying
in the AutoWeek story.
"For example, in the new AutoWeek story, Jay states that "ethanol will
absorb water from ambient air...causing corrosion and inhibiting combustion."
"Ethanol doesn't absorb water from the ambient air. This lie is one of the
oldest and most malicious of the lies created by the oil industry to denigrate ethanol. The only thing new in how Jay used this lie is that he used
the word "ambient." I've not seen that before. I've seen quotes that use
the word "thin" to denote ordinary air that we normally breathe, but not
"ambient." Regardless, this is not what occurs.
"It seems many years ago that some clever oil industry person must have
learned that ethanol (alcohol) is a hygroscopic substance and that the
general dictionary definition for a hygroscopic substance is that it can attract moisture from its environment. What the oil industry wag then did
was to substitute the word "attract" with "absorb," and "air" for “environment.” Thus, attracting moisture from its environment magically became
absorbing water out of thin air.
"What I'm getting at is just because you can play semantic word games
with the definition of "hygroscopic" that doesn't mean that the result of the
game is relevant and correct.
"To prove that alcohol will not absorb water right out of the thin or ambient
air, I always offer this simple at-home experiment: Fill any open container
halfway with alcohol and place it on your kitchen counter. Allow it to sit
for one or more days. If alcohol absorbs water right out of the air, then
when you check the level of liquid in the ensuing days you would find that
