The Ethanol Papers - Paperturn manuscript - Flipbook - Page 594
Bryce writes, “America is divided into two camps, the believers and the heretics.” He adds, “So far it appears that the believers are winning. And their zealotry has created a multi-billion-dollar bushel of subsidies (for ethanol)…”
Bryce runs through a series of character assassination criticisms of Bill Clinton
and Al Gore (which I don’t generally disagree with), before settling onto the
comment that “The irrational exuberance over ethanol has led investors to
dump bushels of cash into companies that produce ethanol.”
While it would be fantastic if ethanol was “winning,” how anyone could say that
ethanol and ethanol proponents are winning is beyond me. If ethanol was winning this document wouldn’t have been written. The effort to get any kind of
acceptance of ethanol into the marketplace is always met with the fiercest attacks by the oil lobby and by consumers who have been gulled (as Bryce puts
it) into believing that ethanol is the inferior fuel. Even with more than 180 years
of experience and proof that ethanol is the superior fuel Big Oil keeps screaming
that more testing is necessary.
If any group is guilty of zealotry, it’s the shills for Big Oil. People like Robert
Bryce just suck in the lines fed to them and spit them back out. I seriously doubt
that Bryce or Taylor or Searchinger or any of the other oil industry lackeys who
I mentioned have ever even tried pumping a gallon or two of E85 into their vehicles’ fuel tanks, just to see what happens. They pretend they know something
about this subject matter but all of their information is second or third hand, and
it comes from others who only received the information second or third hand.
Yes, subsidies have been given to the ethanol industry and investors have invested in ethanol companies, but remember my comments earlier about Bryce’s
acquiescence to the same types of subsidies and investments for electric cars.
As I pointed out, he and the oil lobby have no problem with the subsidies given
to electric car development because they know that electric cars are not a threat
to the oil industry. “All subsidies are equal, but some are more equal than others. Subsidies for electric is good; subsidies for ethanol is bad.” You can almost
hear George Orwell’s Animal Farm pig making that statement; it’s doublespeak
at its finest. (Orwell’s next book, 1984, coined the terms “newspeak” and “doublethink.” These are considered the predecessors to “doublespeak.”)
Let me be frank about the subsidies situation: It is absurd to think that an underfunded fuel/energy alternative of any kind could compete with gasoline without
significant government assistance. The benefits of developing a domestic altfuel industry that causes less pollution and frees us from external forces make
the effort worthwhile, even if it is no more economical than petroleum-based
