The Ethanol Papers - Paperturn manuscript - Flipbook - Page 338
paid to the first editorial and that it needed to be spiced up with a more dramatic
headline. Or perhaps the first was a test to see if the AAA editorial would create
undue backlash, and upon not receiving any great blow-back, they decided to
take a harder stand. Or perhaps, if I were to be really cynical, which I often am,
I would say that maybe the petroleum oil industry paid AAA more money to
repeat the accusations of engine damage – all of which, by the way, are lies
and/or gross distortions.
When the first of the two AAA editorials was made public via a press release on
November 30, 2012, TheAutoChannel.com published the story. We merely
published the story, rather than offer any counter information, because it
seemed to us to be just another attempt by Big Oil to fight the EPA’s recommendations that E15 fuel (a blend of 15% ethanol with 85% gasoline) be allowed to be sold for use in vehicles manufactured since 2001.
BACKGROUND
On May 16, 2012, the American Petroleum Institute (API) staged a telephone
press conference in which they set forth a retinue of negative assertions related
to the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision on E15. API claimed everything from insufficient testing to the decades-old oil industry lies that ethanol is
inferior to gasoline and that it damages vehicle engines.
On that same day, TheAutoChannel.com published a fairly comprehensive
story I wrote that covered the API press conference, in which we generally described the API assertions as “Gross Exaggerations and Misinformation.” Actually, this short description was just a polite overall criticism as compared to the
specific comments that we set forth within our report. (My story, along with the
complete audio recording of the API press conference and the earlier EPA
press conference can be found earlier in this book and at:
http://www.theautochannel.com/news/2012/05/16/036507-big-oil-s-anti-e15campaign-filed-with-gross-exaggerations.html.)
In addition to my May 16th story, we published several other opinion pieces that
responded to claims made against E15 and the EPA decision by third parties,
apparently on behalf the oil industry. Links to three of these items can be found
immediately below. However, I'd like to especially point out the first story link
because it covers the U.S. Court of Appeals decision against the oil industry
lawsuit to stop E15. In its decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals stated that there
is "No proof that any engine has been or would be damaged by E15..."
