The Ethanol Papers - Paperturn manuscript - Flipbook - Page 235
I'll respond to your last point first. They also eat dogs in Asia, and I assume
you've seen photos of the air in China.
By unintended consequences do you mean the acknowledgement that lead and
MTBE are poisonous, or do you mean the rigged OPEC supply problems and
our dependence on foreign oil, or do you mean both?
NEXT, is right!
Follow on from DENNIS:
I would agree with all of your points other than the poisonous nature of MTBE,
which is still under investigation. I am still not a lover of Ethanol due to it causing
food prices to rise.
I would love to use something besides gasoline, but nothing is available yet.
Unless your electric vehicle gets its electricity from wind, solar, or geothermal,
you are just transferring the CO2 from your tailpipe to a smokestack. The consumers are not the enemy.
Reply from MARC:
Dennis, I was happy to receive this response from you. I was thinking you were
going to tell me that dog tastes good and that we should eat them here, too.
I'm also glad to see that you didn't try to argue tetraethyl lead's dangerous qualities.
Anyway, the inhalation of MTBE is dangerous and causes cancer. There is no
dispute on this. The uncertainty concerns how dangerous it is in drinking water.
Now I acknowledge that drinking water contains traces of arsenic, and yet it
doesn't routinely kill humans, and you can have minute quantities of chlorine
bleach in drinking water and it won't kill humans, but why take the chance with
MTBE?
You can argue that ethanol might also get into the drinking water supply, but
ethanol spills evaporate before it can seep down into aquifers and drains. And
