The article was saying a lot of things I had said that I hadn’t read anywhere else. I thought maybe somehow this writer had seen my piece so I checked out the website it was published from which supports the industrial and medical use of marijuana. I also found out that the site allows patrons to submit articles on hemp to be published on the giant Google News machine so I signed up. After a brief vetting process, “The Bad News about Ethanol you haven’t heard, yet ” was published where anyone searching for news about ethanol or hemp could find it.
Within a matter of hours I had two emails from people who had read it, which for me was a lot considering how hard I’ve worked over the previous days to get none whatsoever. One was from someone who was validating that indeed he was familiar with some of the points I had made so he was inclined to look more into what I was talking about.
The other was from, well here, see for yourself. This is from his bio page - “Larry Johnson operates LLJ Consulting and Business Development. He has been an ethanol industry consultant since 1986, including six years with Delta-T Corp.”
It was removed from the internet about the time I told him I was going to publish what transpired between us. You see I played a bit of a dirty trick the way I wrote “The Bad News about Ethanol you haven’t heard, yet.” I made it sound like I was a blog surfer relating information I’d found on the internet rather than an activist fighting against the use of oxygenates, which is what ethanol is, or started out being before it was said to be a fuel. And please don’t misinterpret why I did this. At that time, I was just an activist. As an activist, I have to fight for my position on my issue any way I can. But now that I’m writing from the perspective of a journalist, I strive to be as accurate as information and my interpretation of it allows me to be.
The reason I misrepresented myself was to hopefully get newspapers to think the truth was getting too close for them to ignore if average people were finding out about. If they had known I was one of the people who have been trying to get them to talk about it since the 90’s, they would have simply dismissed the article out of hand seeing I was trying to bluff them into telling the whole ethanol story. And if Larry Johnson had known that I was a pro, he never in a million years would have emailed me. But he did and sealed his fate by doing so.
This was his response - “Wow, what a rambling, incomprehensible, assortment of inaccurate statements and erroneous concepts. Probably the best testament against marijuana use ever written.“
It came so fast after the article was posted to Google’s news search index that I can only assume that he spends a great deal of time surfing the internet for anything related to ethanol so he can email whoever claims something different from what he wants said about it an insulting letter. What I could have done was picked a fight with him, which is what he would have wanted me to do. That way he could antagonize me into saying things to discredit myself as a serious reporter, or even break the law by getting angry and lashing out at him being as he is part of an industry I’m obviously at serious odds with.
But what I did was respond politely although flabbergasted that anyone would come away from what I wrote thinking I was a pot-head while offering to let him straighten me out on what he found wrong with my article so I could support his views if I saw he was correct over my being wrong like he seemed to be claiming I was.
I wrote back - “The last thing I want to do is be wrong. And if I am wrong about corn ethanol, I will gladly support it. But I have researched the topics I discuss quite heavily and have found no other way to look at it. If you can clarify what you mean by your comments, I will try to understand your point. I will certainly look into anything you have to say and support it if it is true.”
I knew there was no way a guy like him would not have responded if he did not feel threatened by what I wrote. But I think it was more about who he thought I was, an average person looking at the ethanol issue for the first time because of all the debate going on over it right now. So I wanted to play on what he didn’t know about me to see if I could get him to elaborate further on what he found wrong with what I wrote, try to get a glimpse inside the mind of the people behind the ethanol movement.
Sure enough he went for it, even to the point of lending his support to the industrial use of hemp writing “ I also think that Hemp could be a very valuable, renewable resource that has received a bad rap” He told me he had attached a file to the email containing a more detailed list of things he found wrong with my article. But his manner was courteous this time. He was going to help me understand what the truth about ethanol in gasoline is while explaining “There were several inaccurate statements in your article, many of which have been generated by special interests and are continually being repeated in the mainstream press.”
I knew what he had written in the attachment, all the same things I see guys like him writing everyday as other writers try to tell the American people the truth about ethanol, or at least as they perceive it. And there was no way I was going to open an attachment from him, not on my computer. He’s the enemy. The field we fight on is a dirty one. But rather than ask him to send it to me in an email without being in an attachment, I pretended I didn’t know what an attachment was acting like I had taken his support for hemp to mean he now supported my whole article. This gave me a chance to look really dumb so he wouldn’t Google me to find out who I am while I laid out more evidence for him on how to fix the ethanol industry. I acted like I saw our correspondence as a chance for change, which I did. But I know these guys better than they know themselves. They will keep going in the direction they’re going until they can’t go any further, like Enron did. But I tried to lay it out like we could be on the same team, that I’m not anti-ethanol, just anti-oxygenates, which is true.
I wrote him in part - “I see a great future for hydrous ethanol and no future for anhydrous ethanol. And I am almost never wrong about things like this. There are solutions to all of Americas problems that would only hurt Wall Street. But really in the long run, it would help them and they know it. They just lack leadership they can trust over the long term. But then the way they’re trying to survive the way they do business is by killing their cash cow, America.”
Later I emailed him again apologizing for not knowing he had sent an attachment in the last email. Then I told him I didn’t like to open attachments asking him to put it in a regular email format where I would give it my utmost consideration. Soon after I sent it, I received his arguments in a regular email. And it was what I expected although it looked like he had a few drinks while he wrote it. I really he sounded like he was throwing a few back when he accused me of smoking pot when he wrote “Probably the best testament against marijuana use ever written.“ So since he assumed I was a pot head because I published through an industrial hemp and medical marijuana use news site, I guess it’s okay for me to assume he’s a drinker since his career is based in producing 199.5 proof corn whiskey to mix with gasoline.
Here are some highlights of his rebuttal to “The Bad News about Ethanol you haven’t heard, yet.” -
Ethanol is a better fuel than gasoline in many respects. It is more efficient and burns cooler and cleaner. Unfortunately cars have been designed for gasoline, not ethanol. An engine optimized for ethanol would have higher compression to utilize the high octane content of ethanol, fewer emission controls and a smaller, lighter cooling system.
This is interesting because it is the same thing I was saying in my article. What he left out is that cars have been designed to use anhydrous ethanol as an oxygenate meaning that it is not being used for its fuel potential but to create exhaust emissions that the EPA requires. What this means is that it doesn’t burn to produce power so there is a great loss of mileage by adding it to gasoline, more even than the amount of ethanol added to gasoline. And since it’s been proven that oxygenates worsen air quality, the excuse for adding ethanol to gasoline has changed to trying to lessen our dependence of foreign oil. But moving towards ethanol over gasoline would only work if we used hydrous ethanol in the kinds of engines he’s talking about, which is what I said in my article. So he’s agreeing with me even though he is argumentative like I’m high on dope. Maybe he thinks marijuana makes a person smart and I’m misreading the intention of what he meant.
He goes on to write, which all these comments are presented in a numbered and bulleted itemized list of arguments refuting my claims like he’s ready to take the issue to trial opposing me -
The ethanol blended in gasoline burns at 100%. The idea that it “doesn’t burn at all” is ridiculous. See the distillation curve for gasoline and you will see that ethanol is near the front end. Only the heavier elements in gasoline do not burn in the engine and are incinerated in the catalytic converter or discharged as unburned carbon.
Well truly I do wish this was true. Unlike him, I don’t get paid for my lack of support of ethanol as an oxygenate like he does for supporting it by surfing the internet to discredit or discourage people like me. I got sick drinking polluted well water from the oxygenate ethanol replaced, MTBE. Now breathing the byproducts of oxygenates in exhaust fumes makes me dangerously ill. So I have no incentive for wanting him to be wrong, quite the contrary because if he were right, I wouldn’t be getting sick. But I’m not the only one claiming ethanol in gasoline doesn’t burn. In fact I never claimed it until I saw numerous reports from people saying they were loosing more than 10 percent of their mileage when switching to ethanol gasoline over plain gasoline.
The more I researched the topic, the more I found this to be true while there is a lot of common sense evidence to support that anhydrous ethanol doesn’t burn in the kinds of engines we use so it could never work to makes us less dependant on foreign oil by being mixed with gasoline, which he claims in his earlier point writing “Unfortunately cars have been designed for gasoline, not ethanol.” Validating most of what my article he was refuting was about. This is why I think he was playing a little too loose with the keyboard perhaps answering my letters during happy hour. I started out being a dope fiend. Then he supported hemp. Then he says engines aren’t designed to burn ethanol while now they burn it perfectly. He seems to being trying to support the ethanol industry the way he gets paid to while also wanting to speak his mind at the same time, which makes me think he’s not at the office but relaxing in his home talking to me over a couple drinks like I’m an old friend.
Now the biggest piece of information artillery I have to fire over the heads of politicians and ethanol industry supporters is the fact that its emissions from both engines and the refineries they produce it in causes changes in the atmosphere unlike any other pollutant, so much so that it effects weather patterns, even dramatically at times. But in “The Bad News about Ethanol you haven’t heard, yet,” I only touch base on that aspect of my agenda. But I did site the source of validation for how this could be true, the science of one of the top climatologists in the world. My professional opinion is that this is what got him upset enough about that article to contact me taking the risk of my using his words against him.
But his response to that assertion was - “Drew Shindell - I don’t know why this is relevant. I haven’t heard of his theories.”
But he did go on to have plenty to say about ethanol and pollution.
Ethanol plant emissions are closely monitored and most are classified as “minor sources.” They emit just a fraction of VOCs as compared to power plants.
This just doesn’t square with the complaints universally coming from people who live close to ethanol refineries. And in 2007, the EPA, after complaints about plant emissions were driving hopes of forcing them to comply to more strict standards, instead, ethanol refiners were allowed to pollute twice as much because it was deemed an imperative to put the nations fuel independence from foreign oil imports above air quality. And at the same time they institutionalized the change, unprecedented flooding preceded in the Midwest in the same regions where the ethanol plants are, which is happening again this year, right now.
You have to understand that a lot of what I say can be refuted by digging through the records of the government and ethanol industry to show that what I say is not actually how it happened. But that only proves my point because what I’m reporting is what we were told the story was by the government and ethanol industry, which I didn’t believe then nor do I now. So when he sets me straight on what he thinks is the truth, it’s the first time I’m seeing it. And still I don’t believe it.
So he says -
E10 emissions are lower than unblended gasoline emissions. When Minnesota went to all ethanol blends, they eliminated the requirement for annual emission testing for vehicles.
That is just patently misleading and untrue, and there are many studies that prove it. But he makes his own point clearest when talking about how Minnesota eliminated the requirement for emissions testing as if ethanol is so good that emissions no longer need to be worried about. But Minnesota is the biggest ethanol state that all the other Midwestern corn belt states follow behind on ethanol related issues. In fact they’ve been pushing really hard to add 10 percent more ethanol to gasoline making our gasoline a whopping 20% ethanol blend while the people that make our engines are saying that it can’t be done. So Minnesota conducted its own study supposedly proving 20 and 30 percent blends of ethanol gasoline actually increase mileage. But no one believed the study because of where it came from, along with the fact that it doesn’t fit with what the people who make the engines are saying.
But if I were trying to push higher blends of ethanol on the world claiming it eliminates pollution from our congested highways, I would want more emissions testing to prove how great my new gasoline additive works. But the truth is that study after study claim it worsens air quality. And just a look at the quality of our air now tells the whole story. The American Lung Association just came out with a study that shocked air quality regulators everywhere. It shows how air quality is actually far worse than they’ve been reporting, worse than ever before. And this came out just after the EPA reported how oxygenates have purified our air quality to better levels than we have ever experienced.
I’m sure he only mentioned those talking points because Minnesota totes itself as having some of the best air quality in the country. So he’s probably unfamiliar with a recent article titled “Minnesota's greenhouse gas emissions grow ”
It claims - “If the Midwest were its own country, it would be the fifth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, according to a report from the World Resources Institute, an environmental think tank.”
Perhaps not testing their emission after blending their gasoline with ethanol is why they missed this one coming at them like one of his bulleted arguments, that not testing emissions is not an argument for why it means ethanol provides better emissions.
Again with the never-ending wit and charm he writes -
As mentioned previously, oxygenates were added to reduce CO emissions, not ozone.
I don’t know what he means here. I said that oxygenates dissolve coal and diesel emissions, which is the gray and brown smog that hung over US cities in the eighties and early 90’s. It cluttered up the skylines of our urban landscapes before MTBE, the oxygenate ethanol replaced, was first added to gasoline in the nations major metropolitan areas in 1993. Oxygenates dissolve the old fashion smog into new orange smog, which is low level ozone. That is our national clean air policy. And low level ozone along with the pollutants that form it are very dangerous, worse than the smog it gets rid of, although prettier to look at.
But since the American people were not going to go along with a program to dissolve one smog into a less slightly more dangerous smog, oxygenates were sold as a way to lower carbon monoxide emissions, or as he writes “CO.” CO wasn’t a problem in our cities at the time but it sounded good when Ken Lay and old man Bush sold the oxygenate idea in the Clean Air Act of 1990. In fact if we weren’t getting ready to fight the first Bush war in Iraq distracting the American people and press from paying much attention to the details of the clean air act debate, oxygenate use would never have started. And coincidentally, the younger Bush’s war in Iraq came along at the same time congress was trying to switch oxygenates from MTBE to ethanol quietly so we didn’t have a national debate about them being worse for air quality or about how it was going to be made from corn and cause food shortages around the world.
So Larry is evidently pointing out that I have no place to complain that oxygenates increasing low-level ozone because no one ever said it didn’t. I guess he’s forgetting I’m not suing him. I just wrote about what ethanol is doing, not what it’s claimed to be doing.
Here he’s showing me how brilliantly he knows his work -
The idea that an ethanol plants affect Midwestern weather is another ridiculous concept.
Like I showed earlier where he already dismissed Drew Shindell, a scientists at NASA chosen in 2004 as one of the top 50 scientists in the US, a world class climatologist, as being, how did he put it, “Drew Shindell - I don’t know why this is relevant. I haven’t heard of his theories.”
It sounds like what he’s saying is that the whole idea of pollution effecting weather patterns, at least if it comes from ethanol plants, is ludicrous because he has never heard of Professor Shindell’s theories. He goes onto to defend his industries effects on atmospheric water vapor writing -
An ethanol plant uses about the same amount of water as a golf course; a trivial amount when compared to areas of high irrigation and even more insignificant when compared to natural transpiration and vegetation.
Greenhouse bubble settles on the weekend?? This is the kind of logic that made me question your state of mind.
This was my answer to him on that one -
“And it is no secret, like I said before, that ethanol plants emit high levels of water vapor, acetaldehyde and nitrogen oxide which are low level ozone procurers. Acetaldehyde and nitrogen oxide are fuel. All pollutants have unburned fuel potential. If VOC’s and NO’s combine in the suns ultraviolet C rays to form low level ozone, which is oxygen like we breathe with an extra loosely attacked oxygen molecule that becomes carbon that’s easily knocked off of it, then low level ozone is pollution that has nearly no energy potential left. So where did the energy from the acetaldehyde and nitrogen oxide go?
“Look at the outer stratosphere where the ozone layer protects the earth from the suns deadly ultraviolet rays. Is it the ozone that protects us from UV sun rays or the ozone formation process that happens when those rays hit natural pollutants in the atmosphere causing them and the UV rays to ignite in the upper atmosphere rather than keeping on their course for the planet’s surface where they would bake the lower atmosphere making it uninhabitable?”
“But what you are saying is that you can dump all these volatile chemicals into the atmosphere along with hundreds of millions of tons of hot water vapor from ethanol plants and it will have no effect on weather patterns even though since ethanol started being refined in such high amounts in the Midwest, the regions that produce it and those east of there have been plagued by flooding, violent storms, and drought. And if our driving habits cause us to perform that same kind of process around metropolitan regions where we push millions of tons of low level ozone forming pollutants into that atmosphere in exorbitant amounts during the work week but not on weekends, why do you claim only a dope smoker would think this would not have a weekly pattern effect on the atmosphere? “
“I mean if I water my lawn on the weekdays and not on the weekends, would it seem ridiculous to consider that by Sunday the ground would be drier than the rest of the week but by Monday, it would get wet again?”
But I really slammed him later with this little jewel of an argument in case it was the complexities of the chemical science I was talking about that had left his mind befuddled -
“But really, it’s totally irresponsible for you to think that, as you said, hydrous ethanol is what you’re producing, that you just distill it a few more times to make it anhydrous. I find it hard to believe you would even try to tell me there is no difference between hydrous and anhydrous ethanol like you have never heard of Reid vapor pressure. But the point is that your triple distilling process along with drying the leftover grains you make your corn beer from to make it edible for cattle evaporates millions of tons of hot water vapor into the atmosphere. So you’re draining millions of gallons of water a day from aquifers and clean water sheds and turning it into atmospheric gas.”
“Let’s forget about the science of mixing atmospheric H2O with a bunch of highly volatile pollutants and just look at the water vapor itself. I mean my theory is that water vapor that later becomes rain, storms, hurricanes, cyclones, etc has to have a catalyst to not only carry it into the upper atmosphere but also to give it force to react violently when coming back down.”
“Recently it’s been discovered that trees give off methane emissions while it’s been known for a long time that they emit other forms of VOCs much like you distill from your corn squeezings. So there is a manner with which mother nature provides rain the same way we effect weather patterns using the same kinds of emissions as the plants that grow from the ground do. So really if weather patterns are effected by the emissions of plant in the natural environment because of certain kinds of compounds they naturally emit into the atmosphere, then anything we do along that same line will merely effect an already ongoing process.”
“But many scientists tell us that hurricanes are fueled by nothing more than water vapor warming and cooling with regard to ocean temperatures with there being no needed added fuel to cause it to sustain dangerously high forces even after it leaves what they claim causes them to be so strong when they come inland leaving the water that is supposed to be driving them behind. So can you answer me that and still claim I am nothing but a delusional hop head?”
“What happens to all the hot water vapor you’re ethanol plants are adding to the normal amounts of cool water vapor in the regions that have been experiencing chronic flooding and violent storms since ethanol began to be refined in ever increasing amounts in those same regions? Or is your answer to everything anyone says that isn’t what you want to hear that he or she is a junky and a fool?”
“Just answer me simply, what happens to that water? Does it come back down to earth? Does it come back down in normal amounts? - How could that be true if you send so much more water vapor into the atmosphere than is normal?”
“The first law of physics says that what goes up must come back down, or was Isaac Newton high on dope too?”
On my claim that our honeybee populations are disappearing because of ethanol emissions that cause CCD, Colony Collapse Disorder, where whole hives at a time vanish after leaving their hives for what would seem a normal days work and never coming back, which begun when ethanol replaced MTBE as an oxygenate. I mean it started happening right as the new ethanol oxygenate program started in the spring of 2006 while much of it was occurring in the same regions that people are complaining about odors from ethanol refineries worrying it is dangerous for them to breath
On CCD, he writes.
Honeybees - Where did you get this idea?
Corn is not grown for the ethanol market except for those plants that are cooperatives and have member delivery agreements. Farmers plant a crop in response to price signals and sell those crops to the highest priced market, whether it be for livestock, export or industrial processing.
Like I said, he might have been tipping a few back when he wrote this, or sitting in traffic breathing in his whiskey coming for the cars around him instead of drinking it.
I got the idea ethanol plant emissions were killing the bees from a honeybee farmer in the Midwest who alluded to knowing that ethanol refineries near his honeybee farm killed his bees. But he also happened to mention that it was politically incorrect to say anything negative against ethanol in that part of the country. I even got a sense that he was afraid to talk to me about it but I had pushed him into a corner about something he had already said that I wanted clarification on. I didn’t get the impression he was the kind of person that lies even to save his own neck. He told me what I thought he had made obvious earlier but had tried to skirt from the conversation.
Back to Larry Johnson -
I believe the first ethanol was made from sweet sorghum and grain. Hemp is primarily cellulose not carbohydrate and I don’t believe it was converted to ethanol. If you have documentation, I would like to see it.
In his own statement we’ve already seen he wrote - “I also think that Hemp could be a very valuable, renewable resource that has received a bad rap.” He doesn’t say he is talking about hemp for ethanol but I assume that is what he means. But on the other end of his argument, he is supposed to be an ethanol consultant with 20 years experience while even Americans who know the bare minimum about ethanol know that everyone is hoping ethanol made from cellulose will save the starving world from making it from corn.
When I type ethanol and hemp into a google search engine, since I have never made ethanol from hemp or corn so I wouldn’t know anything about it, but apparently it’s a well known fact that ethanol can be made from hemp quite easily.
Still further he attacks my story -
Stills in the trunk?? Due to the time involved for fermentation and the bulk of the equipment, this is really an unbelievable statement.
Ethanol production for fuel was hurt by prohibition but oil and gasoline was so plentiful and cheap, ethanol was going to lose out regardless.
There are no converter kits to increase compression ratios. You can add a turbo charger , that will have an advantageous effect but there are no secret “converter kits.”
I had related in my article how the first Fords came with stills in the trunk to home brew fuel since there weren’t enough filling stations in most parts of the country to be able to make use of the vehicles without being able to produce fuel from a source other than crude oil. And I also told how prohibition made those stills useless because ethanol production and its consumption was outlawed in this and many other countries until the oil industry could build enough refining capacity to out-compete ethanol as a future fuel.
And as far as it being impossible to brew ethanol at home, there is a company that just a few weeks ago came out with a driveway ethanol production and dispensing unit to be used to run any car on that has a converter kits installed on them so they can be powered by 100% hydrous ethanol. But home brewing hydrous ethanol for use in converted engines is nothing new. There are many groups who correspond over the internet on how to best do it. In fact they have been around since long before the internet existed, something professional ethanol hacks like Larry Johnson would have had to go to a lot of trouble to miss while him and his ethanol cohorts pretend that anhydrous ethanol as an oxygenate in gasoline is the cure for our nations energy needs.
Wait a minute. My bad. I just never would have thought such a thing. I mean it’s the only way I have ever read it. When I say there was a still in the trunk of the first Model T Fords, I didn’t mean,,,. I mean how would anyone think, especially an ethanol expert, to conjure up an image of a distillery operating out of the trunk of a car dripping out ethanol drop by drop powering a vehicle down the road as it travels. No no no Larry, I apologize. I have always assumed from what I have read that what is meant by a still coming in the trunk of a Model T Ford is that a small still came with the car, one that could be set up at home, that it was packed into the trunk as a convenient place to store it when the vehicle is delivered to the customer. Man, sorry about the confusion.
He finishes the letter with this confusing statement not knowing I’m an oxygenate expert. He must have passed out just after writing it.
The rest of the article is kind of rambling about gasoline supplies and political scheming. Actually, we are not a victim of political planning but one of ineptitude. The world is finally catching up with the U.S economically and we are having difficulty competing for limited supplies of oil and other commodities. We are seeing a new order.
This is also patently false as it has been proven over and over while published daily and widely that the weakness of the US dollar has caused unethical betting in commodities futures markets which is causing the price of food and oil rise even though there is an excess of both so we should actually be paying less for gasoline and food than before this ethanol/recession/depression revolution guys like Larry Johnson and George Bush have gotten us into began, which realistically would put the cost of gasoline between 1.29 and 1.79 a gallon. What’s going on is that while Wall Street loots the worlds economy, Washington is telling us that we need to pretend ethanol oxygenates are good for our fuel economy instead of being an additive to cheat on air quality standards with.
His final response after two long letters from me with highly credible arguments why he of all people should take up the cause of fixing the ethanol industry so it will work to make us energy independent instead of sacking our economy the way they are now was -
Mr. Fontaine.
The only thing you were right about was that I don't respond to many articles.
By the way, all ethanol plants produce hydrous ethanol. It is only the last minor step of dehydration that makes it anhydrous, so they are essentially the same products.
After your last two responses, we have come full circle from where we started and I am once again convinced that you are under the influence of some mind altering chemicals.
Larry
The whole sequence of correspondences between Larry and myself can be read at www.ItCouldntBeTrue.com By Bobby Fontaine |
