COOL For Fuel

COOL for Fuel. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.
Buy American! We have heard that for years but in honesty it is difficult to do. Growth Energy wants consumers to know where their oil came from - and ultimately - how much money is spent on imported oil. Co-Chairman General Wesley Clark says the group is calling for country-of-origin labeling for fuels.

CLARK: The reason we’re doing this is because we think this is absolutely central to helping the country get a grip on its dependence on foreign energy sources and the need for American energy independence. We’ve talked about it for 35 years, we’ve labeled energy bills with moving toward American energy independence but we’ve never quite connect the dots and we know in this economy that consumers are a very powerful force and we believe the American people will get it very quickly if they realize what the real effects of America’s dependence on foreign oil has been.

When it comes to importing foreign oil - Clark says there are a lot of hidden costs.

CLARK: The truth is the neighborhood filling station is not pumping neighborhood gas; it’s pumping a byproduct largely from overseas sources. It costs the consumers and taxpayers billions of dollars every year, it distorts our foreign policy, it’s deeply related to the issues we’ve had in the Middle East where were spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year working our national security and national defense and it even distorts the economies of the countries that are gorging themselves on these petro dollars.

Clark says the total cost to the American economy is enormous.

CLARK: The U.S. Department of Energy found that U.S. dependence on foreign oil has cost our country more than $7-trillion dollars over the last 30 years and some years it’s almost $500-billion dollars a year we’ve been sending overseas for oil. It’s just a massive transfer of wealth and it’s really a distortion of the economy. This is an economy that’s 70% American consumer and American’s love their automobiles, they love the freedom, they love the travel, it’s made our civilization. And we’re the kind of people that when we see facts we can take action and we think the facts need to be out there for the American people; where’s this oil coming from?

Clark says boosting the blend rate to E15 would save about a million barrels of imported oil a day. Clark believes the American consumer would like to participate in that.

That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.