Response to article courtesy of  Debbie Baron, Secretary of the Mendo Alcohol Fuel Group

"According to this article, the shale oil industry is in big debt and is having trouble paying off its interest on its loans. Evidently, fracking companies, whether fracking for oil shale or natural gas, keep going deeper into debt to keep themselves solvent. Remember the Greater Recession and how so many people lost their homes because they kept floating bigger and bigger home equity loans when the bubble burst? Why am I having the horrible sinking feeling that this is going to happen again, courtesy of Big Oil?

Friends, tell me how I can impress upon you that any kind of ethanol, methanol, hydrogen, or battery powered vehicle running on Big Oil's fracked fossil fuel or Big Mining's rare earths are not sustainable, and are certainly not worthy of the word, "alternative". When one considers the life-cycle carbon dioxide of these "alternative" fuels, one realizes it is just another way Big Oil is trying to "sugar coat" itself in order to secure more loans and more taxpayer kickbacks and incentives, while conducting business as usual as a profiteering, predatory polluter.

Take for example ethanol. Yes, ethanol can be distilled from gasoline, as well as from industry's CO2 carbon dioxide wastes. But this is not how you make ethanol sustainable and carbon neutral. This ethanol is not only coming from unsustainable fossil fuel sources, the companies trying to extract this fossil fuel are going broke doing so. And let's not forget those greenhouse gas emissions still being generated from the fracking and the distribution processes for this kind of ethanol. In no way is this kind of ethanol alternative, renewable, sustainable, or carbon neutral: no matter how little the carbon dioxide generated from this kind of ethanol and coming out of a vehicle's rear end.

Tell me, how can I convince you that fermentable ethanol is the answer? How can I explain that local community food-&-fuel farms, practicing agricultural husbandry and stewardship, are the way to go?  How can I secure the right for local retailers to buy and blend in their own blender pumps the locally produced ethanol from the fuel farms? How can I make mechanics have the right to install E-85 conversion kits on vehicles already owned and operating on the road? How can I mandate that 50% of the new car fleet in America be manufactured with optimized, efficient ethanol engines in them? How can I give the right to consumers to choose at the pump blends of ethanol fuel from E-15 to E-98 denatured with denatonium benzoate and isopropyl alcohol, a carbon neutral fuel. How can I explain that, if all this was done, that within 10-years our local economies and our world would be well on the way toward recovery, instead of careening toward a non-renewable, unsustainable fuel future with Big Oil going broke? Please, tell me how?"