Ethanol in gasoline, not such a hot idea?

I'm all in favor of weaning America off foreign petroleum, but the following is not the way to do it. The EPA and the state of Minnesota in separate but related stupidities have decreed we will have 15% Ethanol (E15) in our gasoline (EPA) and 20% Ethanol (E20) in our gasoline (Minnesota, starting August 2013) -- both before the testing results of what that would do to automobiles came in.

Well, the test results are now in, and it's a crap shoot for car owners -- CRC final report for project CM-136-09-1B, Intermediate-Level Ethanol Blends Engine Durability Study (PDF).

Those cars older than 2001 stand a good chance of fuel system damage from the lower 15% version. We here in Minnesota will be seeing this version in our pumps very soon, if I understand the Minnesota statute correctly (I may not, since it's very obtuse: https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/?id=239.791). The rest of the country is likely to see E15 as a result of the EPA ruling, as well.

For cars newer than 2001, some may be ok with 15%, while others the manufacturers (e.g. Ford) specifically disclaim warranty if used with 15%, while others specifically label their gasoline caps to say NO gasoline with more than 10% ethanol.

20% ethanol is, of course, even worse than 15% as far as risk of damage to fuel systems and engine metals (CRC testing showed damaged valves, for example).

While the Minnesota statute is obtuse in its many subdivisions and references to federal law, and numerous special interest exceptions (ATVs, airplanes, boats, etc.), one thing is clear. The law was not written using science, engineering, or with the purpose of reducing air pollution or dependence on foreign oil. It was instead written with one purpose, political payback. It benefits Minnesota corn growers and ethanol industry members who helped elect former governor Tim Pawlenty and the legislators who pushed the law. This is made obvious in that decisions regarding expiration of the law are based on determinations made by the commissioner of agriculture.

Ed Welsh, Oneida County Legislator (New York) and Central Region General Manager for AAA New York, has written a good editorial about the ethanol situation and the CRC study results.  It's very worth reading. My favorite passage says:

If we examine how the federal government mandates certain products we would find that it occurs in one of three ways. In no particular order, the first is to subsidize it , the second is to protect it from competition and third is to require its use. Corn Ethanol as used in our gasoline has the remarkable distinction as perhaps the only product that enjoys all three.

Ask yourself, who would purposely buy fuel that’s more costly, gets worse mileage and increases carbon emissions? Due to government mandate, the answer is: All of us!

Start saving money for car repairs now, folks.

The real reason gasoline is so expensive

This article was eye opening for me. I knew there were a number of reasons our gasoline was nearly $4 a gallon, and always seeming to get more expensive over the years. But I had forgotten that "[c]artels, by definition, exist to maximize the profits of their members." And OPEC members are exactly that, a cartel. For the most part, OPEC countries don't export anything of significance, other than oil. According to the linked article, every time we fill up, we are sending 35 cents per gallon to the "fund" to save the Saudi Arabian king from having unhappy citizens storm the palace -- that is, he is using the "extra" money to pay them off through billions of dollars of spending since the Arab Spring got his attention.

The only way around this is to stop using so much petroleum.  OPEC sits on 80% of the world's reserves. As long as we keep using petroleum, we will keep paying oil monarchs to stay on their thrones.

Big Ag redefines feral, criminalizes Michigan pig owners

Always follow the money, and always follow the greed, it seems.  Big, industrial pork producers and their industry have managed to lobby, cajole, bribe, or do whatever it takes to get a new Michigan law passed which essentially redefines the word feral when used with pigs.

The commonly understood meanings are in a wild state and resembling a wild animal especially when referring to a domesticated animal having escaped from captivity or domestication, e.g. a feral cat.  But now in Michigan, it apparently will mean any pig not raised on an industrial hog farm.

Small farmers, raising pigs of other breeds than those used on industrial hog farms, will become felons under the new law, passed in 2010 and scheduled to take effect April 1, 2012.

Here's a good article describing the situation in detail:  http://www.alternet.org/story/154752/

Where did that food come from?

While traveling, eating healthy, good-tasting food is harder than at home.  Even when you buy something that should just be reasonably safe and normal, it can be fraught with peril.

At one gas stop, we bought some apple juice.  The front label said "all juice".  But reading the fine print written sideways on the rear, it turned out that it was not all apple juice.  Filtered water, malic acid, ascorbic acid and of course, apple juice concentrate were the actual ingredients.  This erosion and perversion of names allowed by federal regulators has spread far and wide.  Standard names like "apple juice,"  "chocolate," "milk," and "meat" no longer mean what they once did, nor what the consumer often expects them to be.  When a container says "all juice" a reasonable person, perhaps even most people, would tend to imagine juice produced from the fruits in question ("juiced"!) was what was bottled.

Additionally in the above product, the apples from which the apple juice concentrate was made were potentially from Austria, Germany, Spain, Turkey, Brazil, Argentina and America.  Now, it's likely that there are growers in all of those countries who grow good quality, even organic, apples.  But those are not  likely the apples bought be some multi-national company looking for the cheapest apples it can find from a dozen different countries to make its juice.

This was really an industrial beverage, containing some small amounts of real apple juice from locations unknown.  I don't object to such products being available.  I do object to regulators allowing manufactures to cheapen, distort and abuse the language in order to trick consumers into buying something other than what they imagine.  Pink slime, anyone?

Some legal success for organic farmers

"Wafting poison makes fertile ground for suit in Stearns County" reads the Minneapolis - St. Paul newspaper's headline.  Despite the bad pun, the article reports some good news for organic farmers in Minnesota, as well as in other states around the country.  From the article:

Oluf Johnson's 1,500-acre farm in Stearns County is an organic island in a sea of chemically treated corn and soybeans.

Improperly applied pesticides repeatedly drift over from neighboring farms, often with dire consequences for Johnson. But now, thanks to a new court ruling, he and other farmers can sue to recover their losses.

Since the pesticides make Johnson's crop unsalable in the organic market, he is entitled to damages from the company responsible for the pesticide application.

Recently a similar damage award was made in California, where an organic farmer won $1 million in damages.  According to Alexadra Klass, a professor of environmental law at the University of Minnesota, this Minnesota ruling puts the state in line with the majority of jurisdictions around the USA in finding that pesticide drift is a trespass.

This is good news for organic farmers and consumers.  In the bigger scheme of things, it should mean the price of conventional, pesticide-sprayed produce will go up, and organic producers will have an easier time of maintaining their organic status and economic viability.  I say "hooray" for this ruling.

Goiter, Water, and Dew

Just the other day, one of my sisters was diagnosed with goiter. This seemed pretty strange, because she has always lived in Minnesota, not in a "developing" country. Her doctor advised her that goiter can run in families, so I started researching.

Goiter is a swollen thyroid gland. Generally, goiter is caused by too little iodine in the diet; the thyroid gland grows larger, trying to do its job, making sufficient thyroid hormones to keep the body running smoothly. But, you may say, "Our salt is iodized!" So it is. Digging further, I learned that in the periodic table of elements, iodine sits on the same column as fluorine, chlorine, and bromine. These are called the Halogen Family, and all have similar chemical characteristics. The human body gets fooled, and fluorine, chlorine and bromine can slip like skeleton keys into the locks made for iodine. Once the lock is filled up, the iodine can't get in, and passes out of the body.

So, how does a thyroid get locked up with weird chemicals we don't need?

The first question the doctor asked my sister was, "Do you drink a lot of Mountain Dew?" She thought the doctor was being silly, but answered truthfully that, yes, she had until a few weeks before. Mountain Dew is one of many citrus beverages with bromine (it stabilizes the color). Bromine is also used in flour ("bromated"), and can be found in many processed foods. Bromine is used in pesticides, flame retardants, gasoline additives, swimming pools and hot tubs.

Fluorine/fluoride is put into our drinking water and toothpaste, to prevent cavities. Almost all processed foods use fluoridated water in manufacturing - juices, soups, jam, pasta sauce, etc...

Chlorine is used in sanitizing food preparation surfaces, in drinking water, and in many cleaning supplies.

We are surrounded by chemicals ready to displace the iodine our bodies need. We eat them, drink them, bath in them, and breathe them, and we are not warned of their effects.

I've switched to drinking spring water, and have begun taking iodine drops.

Because almost all processed foods contain fluoridated water and some form of bromine as an additive, it is important to read labels. Just about any food with "water" on the ingredient list has fluoride. My family drinks raw, unprocessed milk from a tiny farm, so we are not getting milk tainted with fluoride.

My sister has begun to really work on her diet. She and her kids are really becoming thoughtful about what they eat and how their food is prepared. Where once she let her kids drink lots of soda pop, they now drink milk and water - spring water. She's hoping her symptoms will begin to resolve, and in a year at her follow-up appointment, she can show a smaller thyroid gland and a healthier body to her doctor. I hope she makes it.

I hope to make enough changes in my life that I won't need to meet her doctor!

Acrylamides in Food

A few years ago, the popular press began reporting on a new danger in some foods.  The danger was a chemical named acrylamide.  The initial theory was that it was caused to form in food by high temperature cooking of foods high in carbohydrates and containing certain amino acids.  A negative opinion formed against fried, roasted and baked foods, especially things like French fries.

This chemical was first observed in foods in April, 2002, although it's probably been present a lot longer.  "Acrylamide belongs to the group of chemicals thought to have no reliably identifiable ‘threshold’ of effects, meaning that very low concentrations will also result in very low risks, but not in zero risk: some risk is always present when the chemical is ingested. However, for these carcinogens, risk is thought to increase with increasing exposure," according to the World Health Organization.


While the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does not think there is any danger, the U.S. National Institutes of Health sees things a bit differently, stating "high levels of acrylamide in the workplace have been shown to cause neurological damage, e.g., among workers using acrylamide polymers to clarify water in coal preparation plants" and "consider acrylamide to be a 'probable human carcinogen.' "


In January, 2008, Science Daily reported the following breast cancer link to acrylamide in food:

“Animal tests have shown acrylamide to be a carcinogen, but until recently no studies have demonstrated a link between acrylamide in foods and cancer in humans. Ours is the first epidemiological study using biological markers for measuring acrylamide exposure, and the first to report a positive association between acrylamide and breast cancer,” says Henrik Frandsen, senior scientist at the National Food Institute, Technical University of Denmark. 

The Danish study found that "[t]he findings show a positive association between an increased acrylamide-haemoglobin level and the development of breast cancer after adjustment for smoking behaviour. The risk of breast cancer doubles with a tenfold increase in the acrylamide-haemoglobin level. A tenfold increase in the acrylamide-haemoglobin level corresponds more or less to the difference measured between the women with the lowest and highest exposure."

Nine years later, the FDA and Health Canada are still assessing the danger of acrylamide in foods, and whether they will then make the political decision to actually label it as a health hazard and take some regulatory action.  Meanwhile in 2010 the European Chemical Agency added acrylamide to the list of substances of very high concern.


The World Health Organization (WHO) is somewhat less optimistic.  The WHO notes in their extensive FAQ on acrylamide in food, that it's not known for sure how acrylamide is being formed in foods.  They are likewise cautious about the danger of cancer or other harm.


As is often the case, the picture becomes clearer with time and better research.  Unfortunately, the picture has gotten considerably worse.

As if the herbicide Roundup were not bad enough by itself, Roundup and other herbicides contain polyacrylamide, which breaks down into acrylamide when exposed to heat and light -- say, crops in field on a warm, sunny day.  Professor Joe Cummings points out this problem in a report at the Institute of Science in Society.


It looks suspiciously like Roundup and similar herbicides which use polyacrylamide may well be the primary source of cancer-causing and otherwise toxic acrylamides in food.