11/27/07 Alcohol Can Be A Gas

Alcohol can be a Gas. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. In the past few years we have been turning the heat up on the renewable fuels topic. More and more we seeing renewables coming online as oil prices soar. One answer to the problem is actually a step backward. Alcohol. And according to author David Blume it's really where it all started. BLUME: Of course the first vehicles all ran on alcohol and gasoline wasn't even a twinkle in anyone's eye at the point that cars started coming around. According to Blume, gasoline's take over was prompted by the U.S. Government after members of the Washington Grange came back from Germany with plans for small scale distilleries. BLUME: Paul Fetterer from the Washington Grange went to Europe to srudy this and when he was unveiling those at the Grange Rockefeller had arranged for state police to come in and arrest all the farmers because they were spouting dangerous German terrorist ideas and the plans were confiscated and destroyed and the farmers marched off in handcuffs. And Blume reminds us that prohibition wasn't about drinking alcohol. BLUME: When it comes to like, why don't we have more alcohol, its dirty tricks politics right from the get go. Prohibition was funded by Rockefeller to the tune of $4 million dollars. This was given to the Women's Christian Temperance Movement. That would be the equivalent of $80 million dollars now days and they proceeded to go out and buy Congress to have them pass a constitutional amendment, not against drinking alcohol but against the production of alcohol for any purpose and it passed so it took alcohol off the market as an auto fuel for about 15 years and during that time gasoline became the national fuel. That was then and today we are still having the same problems with government but now it's the frustration of getting Congress to pass certain bills. BLUME: This last summer we tried to pass a renewable fuel standard that would have increased the amount of alcohol to about 40% of the total gasoline and you saw what happened in the press. The oil companies came out there with both guns blazing with propaganda about alcohol that was completely untrue, blaming farmers for the price of corn going up which was totally not the case when they doubled the price of the fertilizer, etc. So when you try to make policy changes at the government level, now you playing the game that the oil companies are really strong in, Tomorrow we talk with David Blume about why alcohol is a good fuel source and producing it yourself. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.