The Ethanol Papers - Paperturn manuscript - Flipbook - Page 492
referring to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address as irrelevant "silly remarks."
(http://blog.pennlive.com/gettysburg-150/2013/11/lincoln_gettysburg_address_har.html)
There is no "ethanol mandate," there is a "biofuel mandate." Ethanol emerged
as the primary substance to use because it is the best, least expensive, and
safest substance to use for the job it is intended to do. This is not an insignificant
point.
Now, what is the job that a biofuel mandate was intended to do? Peter Grossman, writes that it was simply because Congress was besieged by the public
for a solution to rising gasoline prices. Two of Peter's advanced academic degrees are in economics, and he's an economics professor with a specialty in
economic history. For him to dumb down the RFS and make it as if it's just a
way to lower gasoline prices ignores three very important events: The 1973 Oil
Crisis, rising fuel and food prices over the past couple of decades, and the
deadly health consequences of the gasoline additives (tetraethyl lead and then
MTBE) that ethanol replaces. If you ignore these three events, you are untrustworthy as a professor of anything, except perfidy. Hmm, does any school award
a Ph.D. in Perfidy?
Peter Grossman might as well argue that if we could all just do away with
breathing we wouldn't have to worry about the health problems caused by
leaded-gasoline.
Using gasoline in a high-compression internal combustion engine requires an
additive to mitigate engine knock and to keep the price of gasoline relatively
affordable. With tetra-ethyl lead and MTBE out of consideration, the only options are increased aromatics or ethanol. Aromatics (benzene, toluene, xylene)
are far more expensive than ethanol and they are poisonous. If we only consider
the cost issue and forget about the health issue, we are left with: ethanol-gasoline blends that cost $2 to $3 per gallon, or ethanol-free gasoline with increased aromatics that cost $4 to $8 per gallon. You don't have to be an economics Ph.D. to appreciate the difference in costs. But if you are an economics
Ph.D. and you don't understand what that difference means, then you should
be stripped of your degree.
The 1973 Oil Crisis happened. Yes, it was a manufactured crisis, in that it did
not occur because of any true oil shortage or worldwide depletion of resources,
however, the effect of the crisis (the control of our economy and lifestyle) were
real, and it's precisely what we want independence from. If the consequence of
oil independence results in having ethanol fuels or ethanol-gasoline blended
