OPINION:
Your editorial, “When corn rules the road,” (Web, May 22) overflows with misinformation propagated by oil companies that just want to keep Americans hooked on petroleum, with no regard for the environmental, energy-related or economic consequences of that addiction. A little independent research might have benefited your readers.
The piece notes that if ethanol worked in automobiles, the government wouldn’t have to force it on consumers. Well, ethanol does work extremely well in today’s automobiles. It is a low-cost, clean-burning, high-octane additive that is providing consumers with significant benefits today. But if there were a truly free market, consumers would have access to a much wider range of cost-competitive fuels at the pump.
For more than 100 years, the United States has subsidized oil with generous tax exemptions, lease agreements, pipelines and more, creating a virtual monopoly for oil in our liquid transportation fuels. Even today oil benefits from more than $5 billion in tax preferences and subsidies that other fuels do not. Ethanol, for example, receives no subsidies today. Moreover, ethanol only has access to the consumer through the oil companies that control the infrastructure and own the distribution. The Renewable Fuel Standard is the only policy in place designed to open that market and assure at least some competition at the pump.
In your fervor to castigate ethanol, you repeat the completely debunked oil industry’s food-versus-fuel canard, cleverly stating that while corn and leafy vegetables are good for us, they are not good for vehicles. Well, the corn used in the production of ethanol is not the sweet corn that makes any summer barbecue tastier. Rather, it is an industrial crop used for animal feed, bio-chemicals and fiber. We have a surplus of field corn today and the value-added benefits of ethanol production are helping rural communities and reducing federal farm program costs. Everybody wins.
I can understand the oil companies criticizing their own competition. I do not understand why The Washington Times helps them do it.
BOB DINNEEN
President and CEO
Renewable Fuels Association
Washington
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