The Ethanol Papers - Paperturn manuscript - Flipbook - Page 302
individual liberty, free markets, and peace if you spout all the lies that OPEC
and the gasoline companies have fabricated about alcohol/ethanol?”
The reason for my being appalled is that you are touted as being “among the
most widely cited and influential critics of federal energy and environmental policy in the nation.” Now I understand that being widely cited and an influential
critic doesn’t require that you actually know anything about the given subject, it
may mean that you just have a good press agent. But since those that cite you,
such as Mr. Stossel, do so in a manner that would portray you as having some
expertise, then I personally feel that you should have some knowledge of the
subject.
I’ll start with two issues in generalities: Alcohol as an engine fuel, and then subsidies.
BASIC FACTS ABOUT ALCOHOL/ETHANOL
Alcohol (ethanol) as an engine fuel can be made from a variety of source materials; corn is only one, and from a productivity standpoint, that is to say, yield,
it is not necessarily one of the most efficient and economical. To take up the
issue of ethanol by limiting one’s argument to just corn ethanol – regardless of
the perspective – is ignorant and/or dishonest. It’s dishonest if the position being
argued is against the use of all ethanol. John Stossel approached the subject
of ethanol in his video story as if it could only be made from corn. Your interview
segment of the video only concerned corn. Given your overall predilection to be
against alternative fuels, your responses were dishonest. If you were honest
you would have brought to Stossel’s attention that there are other source materials that might be far more efficient and economical.
John Stossel is a practitioner of TV sensationalism masquerading as journalism. Television, being the content ravenous beast that it is, requires a steady
ingestion of stories. They don’t have to be good stories or important stories,
they just have to be stories. The talent of the presenter to sensationalize or
embellish the story is all that is needed. Stossel has become pretty good at this.
Sometimes his stories are interesting and true, and sometimes they’re interesting and highly sensationalized or embellished to give them an air of credibility.
My guess is that he may have purposely left out the inclusion of other raw
source materials for ethanol in order to create a sensationalized story. But this
is not an excuse for you if you were either honest or objective.
You smugly pose circumstances that you think prove ethanol’s impracticability
by couching its production and distribution along lines of a business model used
