<<Getting rid of the ethanol mandate is another reg that needs to go..>> In 1987 I was responsible for gasoline for BP Oil International [product development] including such things as ethanol. A friend who worked for a chemical company in Antwerp told me ethanol had a great future. I said it didn't because at $10 a barrel for crude oil, all the alternatives BP had worked on did not make sense. He was pretty confident. I was surprised at his confidence.
At the time the silly "energy balance" arguments were being used to justify ethanol from farms. My argument was that energy balance was a load of bollocks and what matters is the price for a rail-car of the stuff. At the time, energy balance didn't even include CO2 hysteria "externality" so the ethanol gang could have made it even more justified if they had added dead polar bears and sea level rise to the cost of gasoline.
While ethanol didn't get a grip everywhere, the USA certainly got excited about it and megatons of money have been poured down that drain over the decades.
30 years of stupidity.
But at least it didn't cause damaged brains in everyone as lead in gasoline did, as well as damage to engines and exhaust systems. Blood lead levels in children are now way down from what they were in the 1970s when nearly a gram per litre was put in gasoline. It was mad! And criminal in the case of Associated Octel who like tobacco producers, lied about the neurological effect in a "hide the decline" way as done by the CO2 fraudsters [I have stashed in my attic some documents and the name of the person, who has probably died in the intervening 30 years].
The damage to brains by lead in gasoline was on average about 0.2 IQ points. Since people have 100 or maybe 130 of them, the less intelligent could think that is insignificant. But calculating* the value of IQ points shows that the cost greatly exceeded even the nominal savings from using cheap and nasty components in gasoline instead of high octane components. Add in the damage to engines and lubricants and it's was MADness as in mutual assured destruction.
Not as MAD as attacking Russia to get them out of Crimea, only to find Crimea became part of Russia again and it all went wrong, along with an airliner shot out of the sky with all killed. It's time the Kissinger and Zbig WWII revenge on Stalin maniacs were put out to pasture.
Mqurice
* Incomes by IQ are well known [Google can provide such studies]. As intelligence goes from IQ 80 to 100 to 130, to 170 incomes go up. An IQ 80 person is very limited in what they can earn as they can't be an engineer, lawyer, doctor and neither can IQ 100 people. IQ 80 are minimum wage people. IQ 100 can aspire to be teachers of women's studies or ethnic blather but not maths or science [even for 12 year olds]. So a graph of income vs IQ is easily found. I forget the cost of a lost quarter of an IQ point but it far exceeded the purported value of lead in petrol.
Say IQ 100 = US$40,000 per year and IQ 130 = $130,000 per year then the extra 30 IQ points = $90,000 or $3,000 per year per per IQ point or $800 per year for quarter of one [the lead damage]. The purported saving on gasoline cost by including lead was NOT $800 per year.
Suppose gasoline costs $4 per gallon or $1 per litre with 2,000 litres per year used, that's only $2,000 per year. Adding lead was supposed to be something like $100 per year in value. But it actually did DAMAGE to engines - octane requirement increase, the need for carcinogenic lead scavengers, lubricant damage due to the burden of carrying the lead - old timers will remember grey paint in engines, spark plug fouling, exhaust system damage. Because lead deposits protected cast iron valve seats, hardened inserts were not needed but that's not much benefit.
$800 per year in brain damage over a working life of 40 years = $32,000 which invested at 4% return would be a reasonable retirement fund. For the loss of that value, no advantage was gained by putting lead in petrol.
200 million people x $32,000 = $6 trillion
And that's not getting a zero in the wrong place. That's a BIG blunder. And perhaps crime scene. |
