Why Not Make Gas Without Additives?
Re “Bush Rejects State’s Ethanol Waiver,” June 13: As I understand it, the Clean Air Act specifies that an oxygenator must be used in areas (such as California or parts of California) where air pollution is at certain levels. Therefore, President Bush and Environmental Protection Agency chief Christie Whitman make their pronouncements that California must replace MTBE [methyl tertiary butyl ether] with ethanol.
Gov. Gray Davis and California’s gasoline refiners say they have the technology to meet EPA standards without adding an oxygenator. But Whitman says tests do not show the reformulated gasoline without an oxygenator to be any cleaner than gasoline with ethanol. Is our government so inept and hamstrung that it cannot interpret a law’s language logically? If we can produce gasoline in California without an oxygenator, why not?
Don Marone
Rancho Palos Verdes
It looks like the farm lobby and the cow counties win again. The decision by the Bush White House to force California to use ethanol in gasoline is just another example of the petulant revenge against our state for not voting for Bush. There are other ways of meeting federal standards to combat automobile emissions, but California can’t use them because Dubya’s folks say so.
It is looking more and more like the East and West coasts were a couple of steps ahead of the rest of the country in their voting. It’s going to be a very rough four years (not to mention expensive), but you folks who voted for him got him.
Tom Reinberger
Glendora
It appears that the federal government is going to require us to use ethanol as a gasoline additive instead of MTBE. It is anticipated that this will occasion a further rise in prices at the pump. In spite of this, I support the policy since it is a move toward renewable sources of energy. Use of alcohols (methanol and ethanol) produced from growing annual plants contributes no net increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The growing plants take in carbon dioxide from the air, building most of their solid structure from it, and when the alcohol they produce is burned, that same carbon dioxide is returned to the air. Contrast this with fossil fuels, in which carbon that has been locked up for eons is newly released into our air.
We need to become able to obtain a large percentage of our energy needs from such renewable, clean, agriculturally produced fuels, thereby kicking the petroleum habit.
Charles E. Hendrix
Pacific Palisades
