The Market Ticker - Politicizing The Environment: Bad Science, Bad Economics

I’ve long maintained that ethanol as a fuel is a scam.  It’s one that has gotten amazingly popular in farm belt America, but it’s still a scam.

It’s an inferior fuel to petroleum. It’s original purpose as an additive was to replace MTBE, which is extraordinarily poisonous in groundwater, so if you spilled some gasoline containing it the MTBE would persist long after all the volatile compounds that make up the gasoline had evaporated.  (Gasoline, by the way, is not one substance — it’s a distillate fraction and not a distinct molecular thing) made up of carbon-hydrogen chains of between 4 and 12 carbons. There is a small amount of benzene in it (about 1%), incidentally, which is quite carcinogenic all on its own.)

MTBE’s purpose was to enhance the release of oxygen during combustion.  In the…….

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