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 I drive a flex fuel vehicle. It is my primary mode of transportation. I've bought many a gallon of E-85. Traveling around North Dakota, it's a pain in the backside to find E-85. There's a Cenex in downtown Minot. There's a car wash place on 13th Avenue South in Fargo. There are two stations that I know of in Bismarck; the C Store by Central Market and the Stamart just north of the Capitol building. In my glove compartment in my car I've got a list of other E-85 selling stations around the state. On the card, none of the E-85 stations are west of Bismarck or Minot. Since that card was printed, stores in Richardton and New Town started selling E-85.
There's a scathing assault on the ethanol industry in the latest issue of the Rolling Stone. Here's a cut. The great danger of confronting peak oil and global warming isn't that we will sit on our collective asses and do nothing while civilization collapses, but that we will plunge after "solutions" that will make our problems even worse. Like believing we can replace gasoline with ethanol, the much-hyped biofuel that we make from corn. Ethanol, of course, is nothing new. American refiners will produce nearly 6 billion gallons of corn ethanol this year, mostly for use as a gasoline additive to make engines burn cleaner. But in June, the Senate all but announced that America's future is going to be powered by biofuels, mandating the production of 36 billion gallons of ethanol by 2022. According to ethanol boosters, this is the beginning of a much larger revolution that could entirely replace our 21-million-barrel-a-day oil addiction. Midwest farmers will get rich, the air will be cleaner, the planet will be cooler, and, best of all, we can tell those greedy sheiks to fuck off. As the king of ethanol hype, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, put it recently, "Everything about ethanol is good, good, good." Rolling Stone (Title: "Ethanol Scam: Ethanol Hurts the Environment And Is One of America's Biggest Political Boondoggles") [Editor: Pardon his French.]
The article goes on several paragraphs later to suggest that the ethanol "boondoggle is largely a tribute to the political muscle of" Archer Daniels Midland. Rolling Stone is usually pretty good about printing fairly accurate stories. I'd read other articles critical of the ethanol push, but never anything that grabbed me by the throat like this Rolling Stone article does. I don't claim to be an expert on the advantages and disadvantages of ethanol, but it seems to me like there must be an "other side of the story" to this. I think I know what some of them are, but I'd like to see someone from North Dakota who knows what they're talking about write a response letter to the editors of the Rolling Stone. If there are flaws in the Stone article, I'd like to know them. If there are truths, I'd like to know that too. I'd like to see a meaningful debate on the issue. People obviously feel pretty strongly about it. But I'd like to have the other side -- and not necessarily an ADM P.R. person's perspective -- presented when I read the letters to the editor in the next issue of the Rolling Stone. What's the other side of the story?
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