Highway Robbery

My wife and I just returned home from a road trip that took us 4500+ miles. We live in Oregon, where gasoline now includes 10% ethanol and is over $4.00 per gallon. When we left we filled at our local station at $4.09 per gallon and drove to Caldwell, Idaho where gasoline is still just gasoline with no ethanol in it. Idaho and Wyoming were the only two states we traveled in that had no ethanol in the gas.

We drove through South Dakota, Minnesota, and Nebraska and saw corn fields flooded from heavy snow melt and torrential rain. The fields that were planted were mostly ruined from the rain and many fields that had not been planted would not be for some time due to the muddy conditions in the fields. Much of Iowa has been flooded and a lot of the corn crop in that state will also be lost, along with thousands of homes.

I kept close records of our gas mileage and kept my speed to a consistent 55 mph on the highway. I was amazed at the difference between the mileage of straight gasoline and 10% ethanol. We averaged a little over 26 mpg on straight gasoline and just less than 23.5 mpg with the ethanol blend, a difference of a little more than 10%.

Gasoline with ethanol where regular gasoline was also available cost about ten cents a gallon less than the regular gasoline, so if a motorist opted to use the ethanol blend he would be paying one dollar less for ten gallons than the motorist using straight gasoline. However, the motorist using straight gasoline, under the same driving conditions would get the same mileage with only nine gallons of fuel, compared to the ten gallons used by the ethanol user. Considering that each gallon was near the four-dollar mark ($3.79 for ethanol and $3.89 for straight gas, for example), that left the ethanol user paying $2.79 more in each ten gallons for the same mileage under the same conditions (the $3.79 per gallon minus the ten cents per gallon difference).

We have been told that ethanol is a renewable energy source, and will help us off of our dependency on foreign oil. How can that be when we can get the same miles from nine gallons of regular straight gas as we can from ten gallons of gasoline with 10% ethanol?

We have seen the price of food, from cereal products to chicken, beef and pork skyrocket. Anything that uses corn as part of its process has had to go up in price, as less corn is available for human and animal consumption and more and more is used to add to our gasoline, doing absolutely no good. Even where other grass and vegetable products are used to create ethanol, they are grown at the expense of corn and other grain crops. There is now a worldwide shortage of grain, the main staple of third world countries, and in the places where people can least afford it, they are starving to death due to increased prices and lower supplies.

I have written to both of my U.S. Senators and my representative in the U.S. Congress as well as my state senator and representative and asked them to push for ending the ethanol project and to allow drilling in ANWR and the continental shelf where we have ample supplies to last us for at least sixty years according to conservative estimates. If government is serious about wanting to end the dependency on foreign oil, ethanol certainly is not the way to do it. Drilling in our own country will send the immediate message to OPEC that we will soon be out from under their thumb, and that alone will reduce world oil prices and increase supplies. The OPEC nations now have a monopoly and as soon as that monopoly is threatened, the prices have to fall. When they can no longer dictate the price per barrel of oil, they must be competitive.

Write to your representatives in congress both at home and at the federal level. If they hear from enough of us they will listen. Regular snail mail works best; phoning is better than email, but email is good as well. Find out who your representatives are if you don’t already know. Write them or call them. We have been bamboozled for too long now and it is costing us hard earned dollars. If we don’t do something to stop the use of ethanol and to increase the drilling in our own country we have no right to complain about the high price of gasoline. Remember, the first three words in the Constitution are “We the people"