The Ethanol Papers - Paperturn manuscript - Flipbook - Page 502
And don't get me started on flower farms. Seesh, all that water and fertilizer just
for some piece of decoration that will be dead in a few days. Just buy silk flowers, they last for years and require no fertilizer and no water. Oh, and they're
allergy-free!
At around the 2:10 mark in the video, Mr. Hilton poses the following question:
"If the ethanol industry hurts consumers, and the environment, why on Earth is
it propped up by the Federal Government?" He answers his own question by
saying that, "As usual, in Washington, it's not just lobbying, it's straight forward
out-and-out corruption - big business buying off politicians to get what they
want." The question is absurd because it incorrectly presupposes that something about the ethanol industry is hurting Americans and the environment, and
wrongly implies that the alternative to ethanol does not hurt Americans and the
environment. Moreover, his answer is ludicrous because it paints the ethanol
industry as if it were the petroleum oil industry.
If you're going to talk about big business, you can't in the same breath mention
the petroleum oil industry and the ethanol industry. The largest petroleum oil
company in America can make a hundred times more net profit in a single calendar quarter than the largest agricultural company can receive in an entire
year. You're basically comparing Macy's in Manhattan versus a 1,500 square
foot dry goods store in Topeka, Colorado (I know Topeka's not in Colorado, I'm
just testing to see if you're awake).
And if we're talking about the out-and-out corruption of buying off politicians to
get what you want, how can you compare anything to 150 years of petroleum
oil political corruption that kept ethanol from having a level playing field to compete in; or to the oil industry's collusion with foreign enemy governments and
companies (Standard Oil working with the Nazis), and then decades of lying
about tetra-ethyl lead?
The question that Steve Hilton should be posing on his "Swamp Watch" segment is, "Given the facts that petroleum oil fuels are poison, that the environment has been permanently fouled because of it, that it has been responsible
for killing untold millions of animals in the wild, that petroleum oil is the root
cause of so many wars that have killed and wounded so many millions of people, and that so many millions of others have died or been disabled because of
gasoline emissions, how is it that everyone involved in the petroleum oil industry
hasn't been arrested and thrown in jail?
At this point, I'm about 2,000 words into a response of the first two and a half
minutes of Mr. Hilton's lambasting of ethanol. There's still more than 4 minutes
