You don't have to take this lying down. There is momentum building to revisit the wisdom of the ethanol question and the more pressure you exert, the better. I emailed all the EAA chapter presidents in Oregon information about the Oregon ethanol requirement and 2 guys got very involved, many, many pilots wrote letters to the legislature. The result wasn't total victory; it was a small one, the best we could hope for at the time for various Oregon related reasons. But when the legislature held their experimental off year one month session in February, the lawmakers, including the ones who wrote the bill, admitted they screwed up and passed legislation allowing airports to sell ethanol free mogas. Not a good solution, but we have 2 airports now with mogas and one FBO is working to get it added to 2 more. It's a start.
With this an election year, make it an issue for the candidates. Issues are what they think are issues until you tell them there are other things on your mind. At minimum, push for having premium exempted and mid grade allowed at 5%. Combined, these only represent 16% of US gasoline sales.
Here are some talking points to use with the politicians:
? People are starving because of ethanol: Growing corn to make ethanol has driven up corn prices worldwide. In addition, corn demand for ethanol has diverted thousands of acres from wheat, soybean and other crops to corn, reducing production and driving up the prices of those crops. The cascade effect has caused shortages in feedstocks, increasing the price of vegetables and many other foods such as milk, chicken, beef, pork and so on. Food riots have occurred in Egypt, Cameroon, the Philippines, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Mauritania and Senegal. Our use of ethanol to fuel vehicles has been called a ?crime against humanity? by a World Food Bank official. Half the rise in world corn demand since 2005 is due to diversion of the crop from food to fuel. This year, 34% of the US corn crop will be used for fuel while poor people starve.
? Ethanol is an environmental disaster: From the Amazon to the Gulf of Mexico, crop production for ethanol has had devastating impacts. Deforestation in the Amazon has accelerated in order to grow more crops for ethanol. In the Midwest, where we grow most of our corn, fertilizer use has increased to feed nutrient hungry corn. Fertilizer runoff has expanded the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Ethanol production requires an abundance of water and water tables are lowering in many parts of the country. Lastly, nitrogen fertilizer is made from natural gas, a non-renewable resource.
? Ethanol may be increasing, not decreasing our oil dependence: No one really knows. Theory suggests 10% ethanol in gasoline will decrease mileage by 3%, since ethanol has only 67% as much energy per gallon as gasoline. Anecdotal reports suggest much greater mileage reductions, with some who regularly track their mileage claiming reductions of 20% or more. We have no scientific studies of mileage impacts. If ethanol decreases mileage by 10%, we have gained nothing with the mandate at great cost to our citizens and to the environment. The question of mileage impacts should have been studied before ethanol was mandated.
? Ethanol may require more energy to produce than it yields: The energy balance question has not yet been settled.
? We can?t grow our way to energy independence: Replacing just 10% of our fuels with biofuels would require 1/3 of all our cropland to be devoted to growing food for fuel.
? A transition to cellulosic ethanol is too far in the future to justify a mandate now: Estimates run 10 years or more before it may be practical. Costs, impacts and production potential are unknowns at this time.
) and then ship the bikes to a big metro area that mandates a special petrol coctail and BOOM... Melted piston crowns, scored pistons and bores.
