I have long questioned gubmnt policies requiring the use of ethanol. They do little more than increase the demand for corn, driving up the incomes of corn farmers and driving up the price of corn for consumers all over the world. Furthermore, ethanol is downright harmful to the environment and possibly harmful to some internal combustion engines. From a recent entry at Snopes:
At the end of 2013, the EPA announced it was reducing the amount of ethanol that must be blended into gasoline in 2014 (in part because the overall demand for gasoline in the U.S. has dropped), requiring transportation fuel companies to blend 15.21 billiongallons of ethanol into the nation's fuel supply in 2014, down from 16.55 billion gallons in 2013. Critics of the EPA's blending requirements pointed out that the announcement came just four days after the Associated Press published a lengthy investigative article documenting substantial environmental harms caused by ethanol which concluded that "The ethanol era has proven far more damaging to the environment than politicians promised and much worse than government admits today":
Ethanol mandates have spurred farmers to grow corn on relatively unproductive land that remained undeveloped prior to the mandate, the Associated Press observed.
“Five million acres of land set aside for conservation — more than Yellowstone, Everglades and Yosemite National Parks combined — have vanished on Obama's watch. Landowners filled in wetlands. They plowed into pristine prairies, releasing carbon dioxide that had been locked in the soil. Sprayers pumped out billions of pounds of fertilizer, some of which seeped into drinking water, contaminated rivers and worsened the huge dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico where marine life can't survive," the Associated Press reported.
“The consequences are so severe that environmentalists and many scientists have now rejected corn-based ethanol as bad environmental policy. But the Obama administration stands by it, highlighting its benefits to the farming industry rather than any negative impact."
But this next bit is what prompted this posting. Here is a photo from a collection sent me by Marc that shows a gas station selling gasoline with 10% corn alcohol back in the 1940s (?).
Who knew ethanol had been around for so long?