In a previous article for National Review Online, I reported on how easy it is to enable the flex-fuel capabilities in modern automobiles, allowing them to run equally well on methanol, ethanol, or gasoline, thereby giving the customer fuel choice and, with it, a substantial opportunity for savings. For example, at current gasoline and methanol prices, the miles per dollar achieved by running my 2007 Chevy Cobalt on methanol is 40 percent higher than that possible with gasoline. This is not new technology: As extensively documented by Ford’s former director of alternative-fuel vehicle research, Roberta Nichols, the Big Three produced tens of thousands of highly successful methanol-gasoline flex-fuel cars for the state of California more than 20 years ago.
At one time, adding flex-fuel capability to a car increased its production cost by about $100. That is no longer true. Currently, all new gasoline-powered cars sold in the U.S. are flex-fuel cars, but only about 5 percent are being sold as such. The rest are being marketed with their flex-fuel capability disabled by their manufacturers.
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This is a very curious situation. One may well ask, why should an automaker choose to disable a useful feature that it has built into its cars? It seems to make no sense for any company to take measures to degrade its own product. Furthermore, given the fact that the auto industry has a fundamental interest in low fuel prices — consumers have only so much they can spend on transportation, and it either goes for cars or for gas — why should it choose to cripple a capability that otherwise could serve to erode prices at the pump? It seems like a very bizarre policy — until you look at who owns and controls the auto companies.
The problem is that the automobile companies are not independent entities capable of pursuing their own interests. Rather, they are owned and controlled by organizations that are much more heavily invested in oil.
The largest automobile company in the world is Volkswagen. Who owns it? The answer is the government of Qatar. That’s right, the sovereign wealth fund (SWF) of Qatar, an OPEC emirate, owns 17 percent of Volkswagen — potentially a controlling interest — as well as 10 percent of Volkswagen’s Porsche subsidiary. One of the Qatar SWF board members, Hussain Ali Al-Abdulla, accordingly sits on the supervisory board of Volkswagen AG. Elsewhere in Europe, the same story holds. For example, the Kuwait SWF owns 6.9 percent of Daimler/Mercedes, 20 percent of Spyker/Saab, and 100 percent of Aston Martin, which it acquired from Ford for $450 million. The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the sovereign wealth funds of the United Arab Emirates, owns 9.1 percent of Daimler/Mercedes and 40 percent of Mercedes-Benz Grand prix, and has a $2.7 billion investment in Chrysler. In addition, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority has a major position in Fiat/Ferrari, on whose board it is represented by its managing director, Khaldoon Khalifa. The government of Libya also owns 2 percent of Fiat/Ferrari, which in turn owns 52 percent of Chrysler.
What about the two biggest American auto companies, GM and Ford? The dominant positions in these companies are held by major Wall Street firms whose collective energy holdings exceed $700 billion. Thus, while the $9 billion these funds have invested in GM and the $24 billion placed in Ford are of great weight to the auto companies, the funds themselves are far more concerned about protecting their investments in oil.
It is thus futile to hope that, left to their own devices, these companies will do anything to endanger the ability of OPEC to loot the world. Rather, they will continue to protect the monopoly the oil cartel holds on the world’s vehicle-fuel supply. If the auto companies were free agents, they would act to break the fuel monopoly that is so damaging to their own interests and those of their customers. But they are not, and so they won’t.
Ford Motor Company shares are divided into Class A and Class B shares. Class A shares are publicly traded, and the Ford family owns and keeps all of the Class B shares. Class B shares have a disproportionate voting power with regard to elections for Board members. It's blatantly false to claim that Ford is run by oil company interests, it's clearly dominated by the Ford family.
Looks like we'll need some more conspiratorial nuttery to explain why Ford doesn't take advantage of the cartel-driven self-crippling competition. Perhaps the two men behind the curtain pulling all the strings are Mr. Supply and Mr. Demand.
Because conservatives are not libertarian fanatics. Because proper conservatives place national security first, traditional values second, and economic non-intervention third and last, in that order of priority. Because even Adam Smith, the founding father of free market economics, favored intervention in favor of Britain not being dependent on its enemies for sail cloth, that era's strategically vital source of transportation motive power. Because stalwart conservatives like Rep. Allen West have signed on to the Open Fuel Standards Act. Because oil is not free market or American; it is permanently dominated by a gang of foreign socialist regimes that are either our open foes in the War on Terror or play a double game. OIL IS JIHAD JUICE. WAKE UP.
Of course it will. You're reacting in knee-jerk emotional fashion to the M word, mandate, and don't WANT to admit anything good could ever come from one. But since methanol is cheaper than gasoline without subsidies, and is made from resources we have in abundance (unlike oil) such as natural gas, coal, and biomass, most people would switch to methanol instead of sticking with more expensive, more polluting, economy crashing, terrorist funding jihad juice.
Actually that's exactly what we need. If you want to be a blinkered zealot who refuses to see the forest for the trees, we could do a compensatory cancellation of some other mandate, like the mandate to include an FM radio (a 1970s civil defense measure), for no net gain in big government. But the point is, doing nothing is helping the enemy.
Yes, even though this mandate is not damagingly intrusive, it could be made more palatable by combining it with the repeal of another mandate that actually is damaging to the industry. This is not a fuel mandate and it's not expensive. Not passing 1687 would continue to delay the free market from creating fuel competition.
Mandating a conversion that won't work, to use fuels that have been rejected by the market, in order to enrich a small handfull of politically powerfull.
It's not a "conversion", it's including a capability from the get-go at the factory. And of course including it will work. Read Zubrin's book "Energy Victory" - methanol cars were tested for years, by the thousands, it the brutal real-world conditions of California stop-and-start commuting, and passed with flying colors. Finally it's farcical to claim that breaking the fuel monopoly and opening it up to competition is meant to "enrich a small handful of the politically powerful". Quite the contrary - it breaks the death grip and cash cow that the handful of OPEC regime tyrants has over the entire world, enabling countless small town entrepreneurs to make alcohol fuel from many different sources and sell it to ordinary drivers.
My prediction:
1. This bill will pass with the votes of enviro-zealot Democrats (but I repeat myself) and farm-state Republicans.
2. It will do nothing but add another brick to the already crushing weight of regulo-blather imposed on the economy.
3. Zubrin will never, ever, ever admit that he was entirely wrong in every respect, nor apologize for the damage he has helped inflict on people's economic well-being.
I hope you're right that it passes, but more likely rigid mindless opposition to any mandate will kill it and keep us a helpless captive market of our mortal enemies instead. Mindlessly resisting even the most obviously necessary intervention is a classic case of missing the forest for the trees, like shrieking about "tyranny" over gasoline rationing during World War 2 when there were REAL tyrannies to fight.
My guess is that the auto companies don't want to warrant an engine that runs primarily on alcohol. That would explain why they don't market all of their vehicles as flex-fuel capable.
How hot is alcohol combustion, vs that of traditional fuels?
1. Flex fuel use is not such a big thing. Old carbureted vehicles can be run on straight alcohol with an adjustment of the carburetor. There are issues because alcohol attracts water and this can cause some problems. But that is the users problem.
2. If the statement is true that all new US vehicles are flex fuel capable already, I do not have trouble with legislation to force the manufacturers to turn the capability on if it is disabled. When I say this, I am assuming Mr. Zurbin is correct and that it does not cost any money to turn it on. This would allow users to experiment with whatever fuels they desire at no cost to the manufacturer and I don't consider that to be an overbearing regulation.
3. Prohibition was a big boon to the use of oil as opposed to other fuels. I asked one of my grandfathers years ago once if prior to prohibition people used a bigger variety of fuels. He had not given it any thought before, but he said that when he thought about it they had out in farm country. My other grandfather stated that when he logged waayy back in the day they mostly used gasoline but if they ran out, they would hit up an old local moonshiner and use alcohol in a pinch until they could get some more gas. Or they would mix and match as the circumstance dictated. Whether we are talking a conspiracy (unlikely IMO) or an unintended consequence (like IMO) or a mixture of both capitalized on by oil (maybe), oil was given a leg up, so we really don't know what could be done with other fuels.
4. I don't want my fuels regulated. But if these new cars will run on alcohol, I would like the option of if nothing else distilling my own whiskey and if it tastes awful burning it in my car. In other words, open things up for the hobbyist or small scale inventor to at least have some fun and fool around. Again I am assuming this would cost the auto companies no additional money as Zurbin claims.
If it would cost them more money, then all bets are off.
I would also like to say that I am not a enemy of big oil. I think they have done immense good for the world for the most part and have a lot of parasites attacking them. That being said, they are just people and people need reigned in a little (not too much) now and then. And I would like to reduce our consumption of Middle East oil, primarily through opening up more domestic fields. I think we should try to give less money to radical Islam. Alternative energy could help this a little, but in reality most of that has to come from domestic oil, coal, natural gas and nuclear power. Nothing else is ready for prime time yet. But leave the door open for tinkerers as long as the costs are negligible.
If, as Zubrin states, the flex-fuel capability is already there but turned off, how difficult can it be to turn it on? If methanol is such a great idea, why aren't people turning on their flex-fuel capability and clamoring for more methanol?
One must conclude that most people don't think it's in their interest to do so - which means it's not Zubrin's place or anyone's right to use force to compel them.
Yeah, that's the question that Zubrin has never really answered in his dozen plus articles on this site pushing this mandate. This conspiracy theory represents his first real attempt - fairly pathetic if you ask me.
You call it "pathetic", but name calling is not a rational response to facts. If the largest automakers in the world are owned by oil regimes or financial interests that are much more heavily invested in oil than cars, then the automakers are mere tools to sell oil.
Even if you reject this logic, there's an obvious "you go first" dilemma among the automakers. Nobody wants to be the icebreaker, the one to spend the money, whether it be $1 or $130, for a few years, before the capability being provided with that money can actually be used by customers, before the capability is an industry standard. So even if the automakers WERE free agents rather than oil-interest puppets, they'd be dithering for decades on this, nobody wanting to dive into the pool first.
I think it's fine that the NRO allows environmentalists and progressive space to air their thoughts. However, I really do wish the NRO would do some fact checking before publishing something that is incorrect.
It is not simple, nor cheap, to make all cars flex-fuel capable. Yes, a car can be converted to a certain extent, but that's not the same as designing the car correctly.
If you want a car that maximizes the use of the available energy in the fuel, the car has to be designed for that fuel. If you make a car completely flex fuel capable, it won't get as good of petrol mileage as it could, nor will do as well on methanol as it could. You can't design for both without compromise. This is a basic principle and it's a grievous error that the author omits this fact.
Second, where is all this flex fuel? We can easily drive up grain prices even more for methanol. But what's the point of that. It's more expensive and less efficient.
Third, we wouldn't need to worry about what the middle-east circus was doing if we were allowed to exploit our own resources.
All of these ideas scare liberals and global warming alarmists. They don't want cheap oil because it destroys the forced use of green energy. I'm a fan of cheap, renewable energy. But, it must come when it's ready and can't be forced.
