I have been following the ethanol debacle for quite a while now.

This article is a glimpse of what has yet to be said about it by the louder voices on the internet, the creaks and squeaks coming from the lowly blogging peanut gallery that inevitably will surface in the national news media after there is no other way to circumvent talking about it. 

Hemp has been proven time and again as a viable alternative to gasoline by way of bio-fuels, or ethanol. But today I'm hearing there is not 1, but 2 different types of ethanol? Talk about throwing a spanner in the works..

1 – There are two types of ethanol – anhydrous and hydrous. Brazil has used hydrous ethanol made from sugar cane to become largely energy independent without encroaching on its food crops.

We use anhydrous ethanol. Anhydrous ethanol was not designed as a fuel. It was legislated as an oxygenate in the Clean Air Act of 1990. It doesn’t burn well in most engines and wasn’t designed too, as wasn’t MTBE, the other oxygenate that it replaced in 2006. Oxygenates add emissions into the atmosphere that mix with smog to form low level ozone. In 1990, smog was a threat to Americans health as well as unsightly as it hung in grayish brown clouds over cityscapes nationwide. There wasn’t as much known about low level ozone back then. MTBE was used to get rid of the smog where the EPA took great credit for it’s oxygenate requirement programs for regions of non-attainment of federal air quality standards, crowded cities with smog.   

As more was learned about low level ozone, Washington grew increasingly silent on the truth about it because both Democrats and Republicans overwhelmingly supported mandating the use of oxygenates in the Clean Air Act of 1990.

When MTBE was banned, their collective fear was how to explain why the visible smog had come back.

So ethanol replaced MTBE even though it worsens air quality.  Then California took the EPA to court proving that oxygenates worsen air quality. But the EPA came back saying that the requirement for ethanol to be added to gasoline was no longer regarding air quality but a national imperative to wean the US off foreign oil while siting Brazil’s successful ethanol program as a precedent.

2 – Anhydrous ethanol lessens mileage.

The EPA and Energy Department both claim it has a lesser energy value of about a third of that compared to gasoline. So when it is added to gasoline as it is now at 10%, there is supposed to be a 3.3 percent unnoticeable loss of mileage.

But what they are saying about energy values is irrelevant to mileage. Brazil does not lose mileage per gallon of hydrous ethanol over gasoline because they understand that hydrous ethanol burns at a different compression ratio than gasoline so they have either installed ethanol converter kits on their vehicles or drive vehicles with higher compression ratio engines.

But our vehicles are designed to burn gasoline and no one is telling us about the converter kits. They just say that our engines can still run with ethanol in the gasoline as long as it isn’t added at a rate above ten percent.

So the ethanol mixed with the gasoline largely doesn’t burn at all.  But even with reports coming out nationwide since ethanol began to added to gasoline that consumers are loosing ten percent mileage from gasoline when ten percent ethanol is added to it, but not loosing mileage when using regular gasoline, still it is reported that E10 ethanol only causes a minor not noticeable loss of mileage.

And no one is questioning where the ethanol that is not burning is going, as they didn’t with MTBE which is made from ether and methanol, both carcinogens and neurotoxins, as is ethanol and its emission byproducts.  

3 – A NASA scientist named Drew Shindell was awarded as being recognized as among the top 50 scientists in the country in 2004, the first NASA scientists to ever be admitted into this elite group.

He has since testified on Capitol Hill that the Bush administration has appointed oil industry lobbyists to censor his work to reflect a message that has nothing to do with his science. And even then, the Democrats running the committee he testified before interrupted him when he tried to explain what his science truly represents where they only wanted to hear the dirt dished out on Bush. 

What Professor Shindell says is that there is no such thing as global warming being caused by carbon dioxide but that we are experiencing global weather changes regionally caused by pollutants we emit as we emit them, where we emit them.

He says that emissions of non CO2 pollutants cause weather pattern changes as we pollute on the day they are allowed to escape into the atmosphere. Specifically he sites low level ozone and its precursors, along with methane and water vapor as the culprits. And he can prove his science unlike the CO2 theory of Al Gore.  

4 – Ethanol plants that populate the Midwest emit high (unprecedented in the past by any industry), amounts of water vapor, acetaldehyde, and nitrogen oxide, the necessary ingredients needed to change weather patterns dramatically in Professor Shindell’s theory.

Vehicles using E10 ethanol/gasoline emit high amounts of acetaldehyde and some nitrogen oxide. When MTBE was used, it was formaldehyde.

Nitrogen oxide is already a prevalent problem in our air quality indexes from coal burning and diesel fuel.  Nitrogen oxide in smog is what oxygenates were designed to dissolve. The truth about how oxygenates work has never been discussed openly with the public.  

Since ethanol plants began producing billions of gallons of ethanol after it replaced MTBE in May of 2006, storm systems that cross the line of ethanol plants that run from Texas through the Midwest to the Great Lakes turn violent when they reach the high emission of water vapor mixed with the volatile gases that come from powering the plants and from refining ethanol. 

And while no one objects to the argument that millions of gallons of water vapor are being evaporated into the atmosphere along with volatile gases that when combined, burn in the suns rays to form low level ozone, a volatile act in itself, they’re also not willing to speculate publicly about how what goes up must come down even as the Midwest has been plagued by flooding and violent storms since ethanol started to be produced there in such high volumes.

But the evidence is written quite clearly in NOAA’s, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s, recordings of our weekly weather patterns, which can be accessed easily on the internet.  

The ethanol we burn in our vehicles actually causes our nation's weather systems to follow a weekly pattern because we don’t clog our highways with rush hour traffic on the weekends. This allows the greenhouse gas bubble we pumped up through the weekdays to settle allowing storm system to form moving across the US while temperatures rise and fall from Sunday to Monday as if Mother Nature has a job working 9 to 5 where the only time this pattern deviates is around national holidays.

5 - And about ethanol’s relationship to honeybees disappearing nationwide from a mysterious disease called CCD, Colony Collapse Disorder  - What's killing honey bees is byproducts of making and using ethanol mixed with gasoline.

But this being an election year, the government is pretending ethanol isn't the problem because farmers are making too much money from growing corn for ethanol.

So anyone who says anything bad about it in the farming community becomes a pariah where they live. But they all know ethanol refineries are the cause of CCD because it started happening when ethanol production plants started polluting the Midwest along with vehicles using ethanol for fuel, both pumping out millions of tons acetaldehyde into the local atmospheres, which all began in the spring of 2006, when CCD first struck honeybee populations around those same ethanol plants and communities using ethanol in their gasoline.

Acetaldehyde is what causes a hangover after getting drunk. It builds up on plants when settling near to the ground in cold or cool weather. It kills honeybees when they come out for spring cleansing flights. That’s why sterilizing hives doesn't work, it isn't a disease. They get drunk and sick and die from the pollution that has built up on plants they come in contact with.

6 – Henry Ford first ran his personal Model T Ford on ethanol made from hemp.

His vision was for an America that was energy independent.

Industrial hemp, or roadside marijuana was plentiful then. It doesn’t have properties for getting a person high like marihuana people smoke. It grows in wastelands that have no agricultural use while ethanol is easily made from it.

In fact the first Fords came with stills in the trunks to produce ethanol with, because there were very few gasoline stations back then.

But the oil industry had plotted its growth in gasoline products to reflect their projected market growth for automobiles, which before Henry Ford developed the first assembly line that made cars affordable for the average person, automobiles were something that only the wealthy were supposed to be able to afford.

But with cheap cars with stills in the trunks flooding the market, the future for gasoline was looking grim.

Then a cure came out of nowhere in 1920, prohibition against the making of or consumption alcohol products, which came in conjunction with many other countries who were insuring that the fuel markets of the future depended on gasoline and diesel over ethanol by temporality outlawing the personal consumption of alcoholic beverages until a gasoline supplying infrastructures were built to out-compete ethanol.

And coincidentally, the lessening of the availability of alcohol made smoking hemp grown by Mexicans for it’s drugging effect more popular, which also coincidentally, since Americans didn’t know about marijuana, campaigns against it educated them so they started to use it, which lead to it being outlawed just before prohibition ended.

And even now as industrial hemp with no drug inducing potential could be a valuable resource to support our economic growth while lessening our dependence on foreign oil, as is done in many countries, it stays outlawed because medical use marihuana can be grown along side with it where authorities would have no idea what crops are illegal because they claim they look the same.

When prohibition was finally lifted 13 years after it started, gasoline was plentiful while our markets had adjusted to it as an only fuel source.

It’s no wonder that the same political parties that have ridden the gasoline band wagon for so long have made such a mess of using ethanol today where if the true story of ethanol surfaced, it would leave Americans never wanting to hear the word spoken again in the same sentence when talking about fuel even though hydrous ethanol is still a relevant solution to some of our energy problems.

And all this is happening while the prices of gasoline skyrockets even as it is reported that the price of gasoline should be less than half what it is except that speculators are running it up passed unrealistic prices as Washington sits on the fence pretending there is a shortage.

And wouldn’t you know it, the same people happy with the price of gasoline because it’s forcing us to emit less of the so called greenhouse gas CO2 by us not being able to afford to drive as much, these being people that are rich enough to buy gasoline at any price, their policies of forcing us to use ethanol are causing the very same weather pattern changes they are calling global warming while claiming that ethanol itself reduces emissions of carbon dioxide which isn’t in any way true.

Of course their solution to global warming is to tax everything that CO2 is a byproduct of producing, which is everything we consume, at rates that will force us to live in squalor beneath them while I assume they will be getting very rich taxing us for a problem that doesn’t exist.  

Our thanks to Bobby Fontaine

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