This week, Tesoro Corporation, a Fortune 150 company, one of the biggest oil refiners in the world launched a lawsuit against the state of California alleging that new rules for air quality will worsen pollution rather than make it safer. Central to their complaints is the raising of the rate ethanol added gasoline from 5.7 percent to 10 percent. Ethanol is the only true threat to the monopoly fossil fuels have over our transportation industry so a lawsuit by them against ethanol has to be viewed carefully.
I applaud anyone who stands up publicly declaring in a court record that ethanol worsens air quality because it truly does. It’s supporters say it lessens emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) but even that is nowhere near true. Instead it creates far worse emissions of other pollutants than plain gasoline causing extreme harm to the environment and human health. In fact according to a recent report released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), it’s causing climate change.
This new science outlined in “Climate Projections Based on Emissions Scenarios for Long-Lived and Short-Lived Radiatively Active Gases and Aerosols” has been adopted by the Bush administration as a new guideline for how to view climate change. In it, professors Hiram Levy and Drew T. Shindell along with a litany of other greenhouse gas scientists outline how carbon monoxide (CO) and Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC’s) affect water vapor in the atmosphere to cause regional weather pattern changes where the pollutants occur.
The difference between what they’re saying and the long held belief that CO2 is causing global warming is that CO2 is a long term gas while CO and VOC’s are short term gases. What this means is that the weather pattern changes we’ve been attributing to CO2 global measuring standards are actually being caused by short lived gases regionally with carbon monoxide from gasoline and volatile organic compounds from the ethanol being mixed with it.
I was told by one of the administrators of the report, who wished to not be named, that after congressional investigations into why the Bush administration and Dick Cheney have been systematically altering these scientists work to reflect science not resembling their beliefs, it’s become much easily for them to publish their work. But still there are political roadblocks. If you read the full report and know how to understand it, clearly it tells a different story from what we are being told is the cause of climate change. But on its face, it looks like Shindell and Levy are saying that weather pattern changes we’re experiencing now especially in the Midwest are being caused by soot emission from coal and wood burning in Asia.
Of course this is helpful in being able to get the administration to stand behind their work since it allows Bush to blame one more of our problems that are his responsibility on China like he’s been doing since he came in office. But in truth the report only speculates on the potential that soot from Asia has for giving us problems by the year 2050 based on inconclusive computer modeling. Up until now, scientists have thought soot causes global cooling.
But the report clearly and conclusively states that we need to get our CO and VOC emission under control now because it is already a problem. It says CO causes atmospheric methane to fail to break down and that VOC’s lead to higher levels of lower level ozone formation, both of which result in having dramatic effects on atmospheric water vapor.
However what all this has to do with the Tesoro lawsuit is excessively complicated so I will try keep it simple so you can have a better idea of what the lawsuits and the complaints against it by the ethanol industry are really all about.
Tesoro played a central role in lobbying for oxygenates to be added to gasoline along with Enron, EXXON/Mobile, and Halliburton in 1990. Oxygenates in theory are supposed to be good for air quality but they actually worsen it significantly. But since near a hundred percent of congress in 1990 voted for an oxygenate requirement that was supposed to produce better air quality, that is what we’re still told oxygenates do.
The Kettle
The ethanol being added to gasoline now is an oxygenate, not a fuel. It’s actually called anhydrous ethanol. It replaced an oxygenate called MTBE in 2006 because MTBE was polluting groundwater nationwide and around the world. When the state of California took the EPA to court proving that oxygenates worsen air quality by increasing VOC emissions, the Bush administration stepped in and said that ethanol was no longer being required as an oxygenate but as a fuel to lessen our dependence on foreign oil.
The problem with that argument is that anhydrous ethanol is not a fuel, it is an oxygenate. It causes many engines a greater loss of power than it gives back meaning it doesn’t offer any mileage but also produces a loss for the gasoline it is added to. Even in a best case scenario, there is still a 3 to 5 percent loss of mileage caused to the gasoline. For it act as a replacement for fossil fuels, we would have to be using hydrous ethanol like the state of Louisiana is studying how to do successfully adding it to gasoline with a no mileage loss of increase in VOC emission.
What Louisiana is doing at the state level could be streamlined much quicker by the federal government but the politics of energy and the environment in Washington are preventing a national debate over how anhydrous ethanol is stressing our economy now. Its seems our leaders are well aware that talking about switching hydrous ethanol would lead to a better understanding of anhydrous ethanol and the oxygenate program that it road the coattails of into our gasoline supplies pretending to be a fuel.
The MTBE oxygenate that ethanol replaced was the brainstorm of Enron and Tesoro. They came up with it as a way to increase VOC emissions knowing it would mix with nitrogen oxide (Nox) smog in heavily polluted metropolitan regions and form into ground level ozone. Low level ozone is less visible a smog than Nox smog caused by diesel engines and coal burning. So MTBE was sold as better for air quality even though low level ozone is more dangerous to our health, the environment, and causes changes in climate.
Although the evidence that proves oxygenates cause climate change was not part of our environmental policy in 1990, the science was available. In fact its backers voiced their concerns about MTBE causing the problems that it later did to congress who seemed to have been made deaf by Enron’s doling out of millions of dollars around Washington. Of course the idea of dissolving heavy pollutants into smaller particulate using exhaust pipes as delivery systems for deadly gases that mix in the suns rays with the unsightly smog forcing it to burn in an invisible fire as it turned it into low level ozone would seem to be obvious enough to anyone to be fraught with negative consequences. But to the producers of MTBE and our political leaders, it was simply a way to get us to stop complaining to the EPA about the more visible Nox smog. And it worked.
Actually for those who stood to benefit from MTBE’s sales like Tesoro, it was a great way to get rid of highly toxic isobutylene, ether, an unwanted plentiful byproduct of refining crude oil that was costly to dispose of legally. Refiners hated having to lose profits managing it responsibly while releasing it around refineries made the local populations mortally ill. It was a time when Houston was being said to be the most polluted city in the world with the higher cancer rates than anywhere else also. So they figured since the country wanted crude oil products at the same time it wanted Houston to clean up its act, they would spread the pollution around so everyone was breathing their fair share of it while at the same time getting rid of smog complainers. That was the mentality of the first Bush White House. The second Bush president has done nothing but try to hide the truth about what his father did by forcing MTBE to be added to our gasoline.
The MTBE mandate also created a market for our huge natural gas inventories that there was a lack of demand for at the time. Old man Bush, Enron, and Tesoro all have historical interests in the natural gas industry while in 1990 they prided themselves on how efficient they had become at finding and extracting it from the ground although they lived with the daily frustration of not having a market they could sell it all in. MTBE solved that issue for them.
The Pot
The Tesoro lawsuit is not saying anything about ethanol’s VOC emissions or how it causes weather pattern changes. They can’t. They and the ethanol industry, as well as our leaders in Washington, know it is an issue not open to public consumption because it would backfire on all of them if any of them raised it. I don’t doubt that the lies told by all of them form the greatest conspiracy of all time. But they have used their catty manipulation of the truth about oxygenates do dig our planet and economy into a hole we will be very lucky if we ever get out of it trying to cover it up.
All the Tesoro lawsuit addresses is the fact that in order for ethanol to be added to gasoline at 10 percent rather than the 5.7 percent, since they haven’t been given enough time to convert their refineries to be able to produce enough of the special more expensive blend of gasoline that ethanol requires in order for it to work properly, it will result in ethanol being added to gasoline that is not made for ethanol. This they say will worsen air quality even though they are well aware that nothing they can do to their gasoline will make an oxygenate do anything less than worsen air quality. They also add that they shouldn’t be required to invest in upgrading their refineries to produced this special gasoline at a time ethanol’s future is questionable because it’s straining food markets around the world being made from corn.
What they mean is that they see ethanol going the same way their dream child MTBE did and would prefer not to lose any more money over its downfall than they already have. But then if they were really serious about their intent of getting rid of anhydrous ethanol, all they would have to do is run a public relations campaign exposing the truth about its effects on the environment and we could be done with it. But not only would that lead to exposing the truth about MTBE, the ethanol industry is now so deeply embedded in our economy that it wouldn’t just be abandoned, especially when there is a way to use ethanol that will work without all the problems it is causing now.
That’s where the real problem lies, in the truth about hydrous ethanol. In fact today is a kind of anniversary for hydrous ethanol. On Oct. 1, 1908, Ford Motor Company came out with the Model T Ford. It was designed to use ethanol and gasoline and run for a million miles without needing the engine replaced. It even came with a still to home brew ethanol with in the trunk. Henry Ford had a vision for this country to not only remain forever independent of foreign oil sources by using roadside hemp that thrives in soil that food crops are not able to grow in to produce ethanol from while creating millions of jobs to support his program. Dr. Rudolph Diesel designed the first diesel engines with the intent of them being powered by fuel made from hemp seed. So the original dreamers of our transportation industry saw the future being ripe for hemp and a locally dependent fuel economy rather than the globally dependent one we have now run on fossil fuels.
Big oil in those days didn’t plan for anyone but the upper class to be able to afford cars. But Ford’s assembly line innovations made the Model T afFordable enough for anyone to have one. Since the oil industry only had filling stations set up around wealthy communities, they feared they would loose their rural market to ethanol. So along came prohibition which outlawed the production liquor including ethanol made for fuel because hydrous ethanol and booze are one in the same. Once the oil industry had time to establish a monopoly on the fuel industry, the liquor laws was repealed and Americans were allowed to get drunk again.
The oil industry however never stopped their campaigns against hemp with their continued persecution of marijuana smoking that started around the same time prohibition ended. Marijuana is hemps medicinal herbal cousin. So for all these years we’ve been being told that the reason hemp is illegal is because it is too easy to grow marijuana next to and fool drug enforcement agents. But the truth is the oil industry still fears challenges from hydrous ethanol to the markets they very strictly control. Even today after many study’s confirm how beneficial marijuana is as an effective herbal healer, the same political factions that support all the oil industry’s whims are the same people adamantly outspoken against even the medicinal use of marijuana by AMA approved doctors while still rejecting growing industrial hemp that has no drug properties basing that position on their stand against marijuana
So the last thing Tesoro would ever do is make an honest claim about air quality problems related to anhydrous ethanol while opening up their refineries to hydrous ethanol as a solution to the problem. But I wonder if they’ve thought through their reasoning with an objective clear thinking mind. I mean sooner or later the anhydrous ethanol bubble is going to burst where the ethanol industry will have no choice but to exploit how hydrous ethanol is actually a much better the way to go for everyone especially them.
Hydrous ethanol works just fine on its own after minor alterations to an engine without adding it to gasoline. And there’s no way they’re going to be able to bring back prohibition to stop it from being produced as fuel once Americans learn how easy and profitable it can be if we buy locally produced fuel rather than bring it from half way around the world after it has been pumped out of the ground in the Middle East. So really they’re fighting a loosing battle.
But if they exposed the real problems with anhydrous ethanol and offer up the solution of mixing gasoline with hydrous ethanol, then instead of buying oil from the Saudis, they would be buying cheaper locally produced good-ole American hydrous ethanol to mix with their gasoline. Then there would be no need for the ethanol industry to teach this nation that we don’t need gasoline at all, that we can just switch over to 100 percent hydrous ethanol. If they did this, not only would much of our climate change problems disappear, we would be getting more mileage for all the wasted effort we’re putting towards adding anhydrous ethanol to gasoline now. With corn prices now causing the price of food to go up being the last thing we need next to the high price of gasoline, even getting back a small percentage of mileage would help strengthen the dollar again.
In fact it was when we switched from MTBE to ethanol in May of 2006 that our dollar started to slip over the edge of the economic abyss we’re finding ourselves at the bottom of now. The strain ethanol puts on our grain markets along with the loss of mileage it causes, to say nothing of all the damage to property and American lives resulting from the dramatic climate changes it causes, particularly around the refineries where it’s produced that emit huge amounts of VOC’s, Nox, and especially water vapor, causing extreme drought in some areas and unprecedented flooding in others, is what caused our dollar to weaken.
A weaker dollar means we pay more for oil. Paying more for oil means higher gasoline prices which weakens the economy and further weakens the dollar. As the weak dollar started to effect the value of hedge funds on Wall Street, speculators started using crude oil futures to hedge against the it driving the price of oil up even further to over $4.00 a gallon. The spiraling ping-pong effect between all these factors has landed us where we are today.
But even as the value of the money Tesoro makes selling us their overvalued gasoline declines daily, they still don’t seem to be able to just come out with the truth about anhydrous ethanol because they actually supported it in the beginning. They knew that without it, if oxygenate use had stopped altogether, then the weather pattern changes MTBE was causing would have ended just as easy as they started when MTBE use first began. If they had simply stopped using oxygenates rather than replacing MTBE with ethanol, it would have been all people like me needed to make our case that MTBE was the cause of climate change in the 1990’s and first half of this decade, not El Nino.
Personal note to Tesoro
Dear Bruce,
Just in case someone from Tesoro is reading this and taking it seriously, let me offer up a bit of advice. Things are getting so bad these days with American worries about climate change and the economy, any good news like hydrous ethanol will be so well received that guys like me would have a hard time exploiting the dire circumstances that forced you to give up blocking its use where no one will want to hear what we have to say. The only reason you’ve been able to keep the truth from getting out up until now is because Americans don’t like bad news. But right now what they want is some heads to put on the ends of stakes and plant them all over Capitol Hill where any bad news that leads to criminal convictions of politicians or CEOs is readily received.
Good news however would neutralize the vengeful effect your past actions have instilled in the average American citizen while also acting on it would push the value of the dollar back up. So although you might make less of it in the future, what you make would be worth more and you would still have your head about you when you spend it.
And if you really want to do yourself a favor, there is a way to refine gasoline with polymer additives so it gives a lot more mileage with almost no emissions that was almost forced on you in 1990 before your company and Enron converged on Washington and gave us MTBE instead. Diesel fuel can be refined the same way. And it cost no more for you to be able to so, in fact less, than what it costs you to prepare your fuel for ethanol. You can find out more about it from this article I wrote titled “Gasoline with 20% more mileage, 70% less pollution”
Viscon USA who makes this polymer additive has found a receptive audience to this technology in the same polluted regions of Texas that MTBE was dreamt up. It is being used successfully there today to bring air quality standards into compliance with EPA rules. It appears polymers additives are good enough for Texas municipal diesel engines as long as the mileage gain it offer remains a secret where the same people that polluted the rest of the country with oxygenates use it to fend off the same strict environmental policies they helped get mandated. And it just so happens that your refineries are being used to produce it for one niche market while you sell the rest of us poison.
So as long as I’m advising you the best way to get rid of me is to start supporting the use of hydrous ethanol in gasoline, I figure it’s only fair to tell you about the other shoe I have hanging over your head so you can dodge them both with one move. If you crunch the numbers after considering adding polymers and hydrous ethanol to your gasoline and don’t like what you see, then you‘re reaching the conclusion that it would be bad for the business you have with the American people to solve our economic, air quality, climate change, and foreign dependence on oil problems in one swift and easy move. So run those number down until you can find a way to make it work.
I can personally think of dozens of ideas right off the top of my head for how to make you more money than you are now solving those problems this way. If you don’t have anyone who knows how to figure it out, let me know and I’ll work you up a new prospectus that will have Wall Street and the American consumer beating down you doors with hundreds of billions of dollars to throw at you. Oh yeah, you invested all your profits in cancer research and pharmaceutical companies so if the American people were allowed access to any level of better air quality, the bottom fall out of them.
In fact ethanol, as bad as it is, is not near as bad as MTBE is it? So the empire MTBE built you is already turning belly up because ethanol is not making Americans as sick as MTBE used to. And then there’s the trillion dollar loan you guys took out to build MTBE refineries that was instead used to build the Wall Street house of cards that’s crumbling now, the one everyone in Washington is trying to hide the truth about with a 700 billion dollar expense account written against the Americans peoples credit card. You people never got that trillion-dollar loan paid off in time did you, because of people like me who wouldn’t shut up about what you were doing. And you’re paying extreme penalties for it now to the Russians too aren’t you, which really upsets everyone on this side of the equation. At least the Russians are happy so it hasn’t been a total bust. I mean they had a pretty tough time losing the cold war and all that.
So you people in quite a pickle aren’t you? You are damned if you try to fix what you broke while it will be worse if you don’t. Maybe if the whole economy collapses or World War III starts, you can slither out the back door of a failed world.
Hey? - and this is a good one –
Maybe if the people responsible for this mess can facilitate the end of the world purposely, they can create circumstances that will allow for them to come back out on top of the game. Then you can go back to selling us MTBE and the cure-alls for what it does to us. Now that is an idea you might be able to work with.
Oh yeah, it might not work with my having posted it here where the whole world can see what you are up too. I mean in order for it to work, you would have to make the world believe whatever you told them about what happened. If we don’t believe it, you would be right back where you are now, looking at pitch forks and shovels outside the castle walls.
I’ve given you some great ideas anyway. I hope it’s helpful. And have a great day while you think it all through. Watching Joel Osteen http://www.joelosteen.com/Pages/Index.aspx is great when dealing with pressure or a crisis. It’s how I get through the week. Try it, you might start to see the world differently. It might help even though your problem is how the rest of us see you. Just remember what Joel says, that it’s only important how God sees you. Oh yeah – that might be so hot right now either would it?
Well good luck anyway. I know you have a lot on your plate right now so I better let you go. Man - I hope you wife and kids don’t read this.
If I got any of my facts wrong, feel free to sue me. I would love to discuss it with you in front of a jury of my peers. Perhaps you can set me straight on a few details of this story. I am always open to learning new things.
Sincerely, Bobby Fontaine
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News and Views with Bobby Fontaine - http://bobbyfontaine.blogspot.com/
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