Pushing for Clean Air, Bush Takes Spin on Corn Power

Accelerating the push for his clean air package, President Bush took a test drive in a corn-powered automobile Tuesday and declared that expanded use of alternative fuels is a key to enabling every city resident to breathe healthy air within 20 years.

“We shouldn’t have to choose between clean air and continued progress, between sound ecology and sustained economic growth,” Bush told an enthusiastic audience of 12,000 at the University of Nebraska.

“The answer isn’t to shut off our engines and throw away our keys. That’s a horse-and-buggy solution to a 21st-Century problem. We can do better than that.”

Noting that scientists here are pioneering the development of a corn-based fuel, Bush said that “it’s time now to produce cleaner fuels that our cars will burn in the future. . . . What you’re doing here will mean cleaner air in Los Angeles and New York and dozens of cities in between.”

On a tour of the university’s Center for Engine Technology, the President viewed engines powered by a blend of ethanol and Nebraska corn. It is called ETBE, short for Ethyl Tertiary-Butyl Ether.

One-Hand Driver

Then, taking the wheel of an ETBE-powered white Chevy Corsica with Nebraska Gov. Kay A. Orr at his side, Bush drove two laps around a test track. He smiled menacingly, driving with one hand, and gunned the engine on the second lap.

He asked his briefers “what roadblocks” remain to broad marketing of the fuel. They responded that questions remain about ETBE’s true properties, its compatibility with gasoline-fueled cars and the cost of marketing it.

Nevertheless, in his speech, Bush hailed the fuel as a boon not only to clean air but also to grain farmers, national energy security and the trade deficit.

“Right now, ethanol-blend fuels account for only a fraction of America’s overall gasoline consumption: about 8%,” Bush said. “That’s going to change in the years ahead. Gasohol, ETBE and natural gas-based fuels like methanol, CNG and MTBE: all are going to play a role in a transition to cleaner, more efficient engines.”

Ethanol blends figured prominently in one of the anti-smog proposals unveiled Monday by Bush. High-altitude cities such as Denver, which are plagued mainly by carbon monoxide, would have to use ethanol and other oxygenated fuels to cut auto tailpipe emissions during peak winter months.

The anti-smog plan also would require by 1997 a million clean-fuel vehicles on the streets of Los Angeles and eight other cities beset by ozone. Those cars and trucks would have to burn natural gas, methanol or a blend of methanol and gasoline.

Bush essentially has made this presidential “green week,” spotlighting environmental issues while treating himself to a birthday present on visits to two of America’s most splendid landscapes.

National Parks

Before jetting to Lincoln for the alternative-fuels speech, the President toured Yellowstone National Park and Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming. Framed against crystalline vistas, he added photographic exclamation points to his sweeping proposals for cleaning up unhealthy air in distant cities and countrysides.

“Every American deserves to breathe clean air,” Bush declared to applause from a crowd of 1,500 local residents and tourists gathered in a meadow before the jagged, snow-capped Grand Teton peaks. “And you shouldn’t have to drive 2,000 miles to come out here to do it. Environmental gridlock must end.”

Bush’s proposals to curb smog, acid rain and toxic emissions were aimed at breaking a stalemate that has blocked major revision of the 1970 Clean Air Act for a decade. Warning against further inaction in his speech before the peaks at Jackson Hole, Wyo., he said that “even the Tetons cannot escape the threat of pollution.

“It comes not from steam engines and logging saws,” he continued, “but from the very West Wind that shaped those peaks, bearing the often invisible poisons that gust in from the sun-baked smog of our cities.”

Sounding a note far more aggressive than that of his predecessor, Ronald Reagan, Bush associated himself with “a new breed of environmentalism.”

“Our mission is not just to defend what’s left,” he said, “but to take the offense, to improve our environment across the board.”

Not everything at the Jackson Hole stop went serenely for the President, who had proclaimed during last year’s campaign: “I am an environmentalist.”

Shortly before he arrived, National Park Service rangers arrested six demonstrators who were carrying such signs as “Prince William Sound--Where Was George?”

Protesters Charged

The protesters, who were criticizing Bush for inaction on the Alaska oil spill and other environmental issues, were charged with failing to obtain a demonstration permit.

Besides plumping for clean air on his two-day trip, the President had some fun. With his 13-year-old grandson George P. Bush in tow, he went fishing late Monday afternoon on glistening Jackson Lake, in the shadow of the Grand Tetons.

Dangling lines from a park service speedboat, the two snagged six lake trout. They threw back four and kept two. Bush cleaned those on the dock and said that he was going to “grill them up” in celebration of his 65th birthday.