The Ethanol Papers - Paperturn manuscript - Flipbook - Page 553
Britain. And the report should conclude with a statement like: 'E10
to E30 blends provided us with a cleaner, safer, more powerful, and
less expensive fuel for more than half a century. There's no reason
to think it won't do the same now.'
"I'll be sending an email to the Department of Transport about this..."
As I stated at the beginning of this editorial, the Auto Express article is a good
example of how bad information gets passed along about ethanol, and how it
can propagate more insidious bad information. At the bottom of the webpage
that hosts the AE story are comments from readers. Other than my comments
about the story, there are several comments from other readers who use the
allusions of the AE article to tee-off on ethanol with additional illusionary negative comments about ethanol, such as:
"There are hundreds of 1,000's of classic cars from all eras that would
suffer from this fuel; you only have to read the comments on any number
of Facebook group pages to read the havoc it's causing in the USA to
know it'll do huge harm to classic cars."
In point of fact, although there does seem to be "any number of Facebook group
pages" that claim ethanol is causing problems, the havoc is caused not by ethanol itself, but by the routine empty, ignorant lies and exaggerations about the
ethanol-boogeyman that were invented and promulgated by the petroleum oil
industry long ago
The final result is that we're left with an Auto Express story that only alludes to
problems caused by ethanol, and instead of specific examples to prove the
problems they rely on "fresh research" provided by RAC Foundation that offers
no specific examples of how or why damage from ethanol is caused. Auto Express then backs up all the rumors of ethanol damage with a UK government
report that simply refers to unspecified concerns that ethanol can cause problems. And, we get to read a vacuous comment left by an unknown reader that
there are Facebook pages in the U.S. that claim ethanol is harmful to classic
cars.
Meanwhile, because of this chain of bad information, you know that there will
be people running around blabbering that hundreds of thousands of otherwise
perfectly good cars will just not operate on any gasoline that contains 10% or
more ethanol.
