Energy, Ethanol & Politics
Questioning is the foundation of all learning.
The first step in rejecting not knowing is to ask, why?
Sweetland
Straight Jacket of Hormuz
We Were Warned in 1973.
Fifty Years & Trillions of Dollars Later, Middle East Oil Is Still Destroying Our Finances, Our Health, & Our Children
By Brent Lambi
In October 1973, OPEC turned off the spigot. Gasoline lines stretched around city blocks, the economy convulsed, and every serious person in America understood that Middle Eastern oil was an existential threat to the Republic. That was fifty-three years ago. What followed was not energy independence. Not a national ethanol program. Not a wind buildout. Not a serious solar mandate. What followed was five decades of choosing the oil lobby's quarterly earnings over the national interest. Every consequence America now faces every war, every soldier dead, every trillion borrowed, every child breathing carcinogenic exhaust; was foreseeable in 1973. The warning was given. It was ignored. That is not a policy failure. It is amoral one.
The Strait of Hormuz-twenty-one miles wide between Iran and Oman carries twenty percent of the world's oil supply daily. Britain, France, and Germany are not on board with American military escalation toward Iran. They carry war memory that Washington's political class apparently does not and they understand that a Hormuz closure collapses the global economy, triggers cascading recessions on every con- tinent, and creates the precise conditions under which world wars ignite. Any leader confronting Iran while blocking wind, solar, and ethanol is either serving interests that are not America's, or has learned nothing from a half century of catastrophic, entirely preventable evidence.
"The 1973 embargo was the warning. $8 trillion borrowed, 7,000 Americans dead, 50,000 wounded, and poisoned air in every city was the price of ignoring it."
THE ETHANOL SOLUTION: CLEANER, DOMESTIC, READY NOW
The antidote is growing in Iowa,Nebraska, Kansas, and Indiana right now. Brazil stopped being strangled by oil markets decades ago its fleet runs on E27 or higher as a national standard. Ford,GM, and Chrys- ler once built E85 flex-fuel vehicles at scale. Millions remain on American roads today. A pump modification costs a few thousand dollars. Washington let that infrastructure atrophy and chose Big Oil's margin over na- tional leverage. Mandate E20 immediately. Bind E30 into law within 36months. Restore E85 nationwide. The infrastructure exists. The farmers are ready. The only thing missing is the will. And ethanol is not merely a strategic substitute for oil it is a cleaner one by every measurable standard.
Corn ethanol reduces lifecycle green- house gas emissions 40 to 50 percent versus gasoline. Cellulosic ethanol cuts them by up to 90 percent. At the tailpipe, carbon mon- oxide drops 30 percent. Particulate mat- ter-the microscopic soot that penetrates lung tissue and drives asthma, cardiovascular disease, and early death falls sharply. Most critically, ethanol eliminates the BTEX compounds entirely: benzene, toluene, ethyl benzene, and xylene, the carcinogenic fingerprint of petroleum combustion. Benzene is an EPA and WHO Group 1 human carcinogen no safe exposure threshold, a direct cause of leukemia released by every gallon of straight gasoline burned near every school, playground, and hospital in this country. Ethanol contains none of them. Moving from E10 to E30 is not just energy policy. It is the largest preventable public health intervention available to this government. Period. Full stop. No asterisk.
THE COST OF FIFTY YEARS OF WRONG DECISIONS
Every wind turbine built and every ethanol blend point gained is a direct, permanent reduction in the leverage Iran, Russia, and OPEC hold over American decisions. No foreign regime can embargo Nebraska wind No cartel can price lowa corn. No tanker through Hormuz carries American sunlight. These are not green talking points. They are geopolitical facts and the American people have been paying in blood and borrowed money for the refusal to act on them since 1973. TheUnited States has spent a conservatively estimated $8 trillion on Middle East military operations since 1990. The Gulf War. Afghanistan. Iraq. Carrier strike groups permanently stationed in the Persian Gulf at $10 billion per group per year. More than 7,000 American service members killed in post-9/11 wars. More than 50,000 wounded, limbs gone, traumatic brain injuries, PTSD that never fully heals. Every one of those dollars was borrowed. Every one of those deaths was preventable. The corn that could have powered American cars sat at below break even prices in Midwest bins. The wind that could have lit American cities blew unharnessed across the Great Plains. Good decisions in 1973 and E30 standard, a wind buildout, a serious solar program would have made most of those deployments unnecessary. The failure was not ignorance. It was a choice, made repeatedly, by politicians collecting oil money in the morning and sending young Americans to the Middle East in the evening.
"Middle East oil is America's financial demise and physical health demise. Both were entirely preventable. Both were chosen. It is time to collect the accounting that was never given."