One of the ideas mentioned in the oft-mentioned Taken-for-a-Ride by Doyle is that Bush Sr. did seem somewhat to support Ethanol, as has seemingly Bush Jr. While ethanol proponents will argue that Political Support of "Big Ethanol" does not amount to competent support of ethanol in general, I think that generally the Bushes seem to at least want to support ethanol to the extent they can win Midwestern votes. I don't know how to guage whether they've been good supporters of the general biofuel cause. I personally would initially say no.
A major theme in Doyle's book is that in the various stages of the clean air wars, the Oil Companies and Refiners and auto companies would be under years of pressure to improve things, would constantly cry that they were being treated unfairly and the technology could not be forced, and so on, and then, lo and behold at the 11th hour they'd come out that indeed they might be able to come out with some previously non-doable or never-mentioned-thing, like Reformulated Gas. I mention it here because in my view the Oil company arguments that they would be better off with RFG rather than oxygenated gasoline were another example of this last-minute "we have a *better* solution" idea. This idea of mine is mitigated by a conversation I had with an official who as part of a team on behalf of Cal. taxpayers had flown to the Midwest, tried to research things, etc. My extremely imperfect recollection is that his belief (not the official belief of the team, just his informal comments to me) was that in some ways, if clean air was the goal, that there is an argument for both RFG or Ethanol, but that ethanol had limited value and was, in his words, an older technology. I, personally, think it was *extremely* important to get some steady inclusion of ethanol in our gasoline. The oil refiners and companies have it good enough. Let them sell us some of this other much-touted stuff, and let's see how it goes. So far, it seems like it is going *much* more smoothly than we were all lead to believe with the doomsday predictions of the WSPA et. al. for the damage this would supposedly cause our pocketbooks. There was also some very obscure claim I heard once as to supposed bad effects to the air from ethanol mixture use, and I have heard nothing locally recently about setbacks in progress toward clean air from ethanol or otherwise. So, everything seems to be going pretty well for some ethanol mixture use in one of the world's more watched driving markets. At least, if anything is going awry, it has not yet been covered that I'm aware. I'd like to keep my eye out for confirmation as to your statements about 76 using 15% and the other gasoline stations staying with the end-of-2003 guidelines. The 76 use I do believe, I was just keeping in mind that their pump stickers say it "might" include ethanol. I was disappointed to still see the MTBE stickers on one of the other big stations I was recently in. Don't recall which company it was. On Wed, 12 Feb 2003 16:55:28 -0000, you wrote: >Union 76 were the first California company to switch from MTBE to >Ethanol (I believe that they use 15% ethanol). By now most other >companies have also switched and the rest will be using ethanol as >their oxygenate by the end of this year. > >California asked for a waiver from using an oxygenate as gasoline can >be produced that burns just a cleanly without it. However, the Bush >administration said no. In this case I think I agree as this does >also help reduce dependence on foreign oil. Biofuels at Journey to Forever http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuel at WebConX http://webconx.green-trust.org/2000/biofuel/biofuel.htm List messages are archived at the Info-Archive at NNYTech: http://archive.nnytech.net/ To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
