Secret history of MTBE
MTBE is an oxygenate. It’s been removed from gasoline having been replaced with anhydrous ethanol, another oxygenate. Ethanol causes the same problems for me that MTBE did but not as bad. Oxygenates are added to gasoline because they give off emissions that blend with other pollutants to create low level ozone. This is done purposely but the truth about it is not told to the American people in a way most of us can understand. Without oxygenates, we would have clouds of brown and grey smog (like Beijing) hanging over much of the country unless we cleaned up our industries (like Beijing tried to do during the Olympics).
Oxygenate produce pollutants that dissolve smog using the suns rays to ignite an invisible atmospheric fire that results in ground level ozone. The whole process is worse for the environment and our health but at the time oxygenate use began, the new pollutants they create weren’t regulated as hard as the old ones it got rid of. So on paper, it allowed the EPA to say air quality was getting better when it was actually getting worse.
In the summer of 1999, there was a bad drought where I live. It had been going on for about a year and a half. I had lost my ability to work because of my health problems. All I had left of any marketable value were a perennial flower collection planted throughout my property. I planned on using them to expand my business to include some landscaping. It was all I had left of any monetary value. I hoped one day I could use them to run a business out of my yard selling them so I could tend to my health while supporting myself at the same time. But the drought was killing them while my going outside to water my gardens exposed me to pollution. So I learned to pay careful attention to daily weather pattern to keep from watering unless I absolutely had to.
We get frequent thunderstorms here when the sun goes down in the summer. But they don’t always happen where I live. If they do, they still might not bring much relief if they rumble through dropping only small amounts of rain. By about a month or so into the summer of 1999, I had become very good at being able to tell when we would get rain and even how much. At first I thought it was my closely following the local cable TV Doppler radar station helping me heighten my instincts to be able to accurately forecast the weather. Later it dawned on me that there was another factor I hadn’t been paying close enough attention to because it wasn’t something I had ever heard of before.
What I realized was that I had been predicting rain based on how bad the air around me was making me sick. After following this line of thinking for a few weeks while learning more how to focus on this new perspective about what causes rain where I live, I witnessed how storms systems were disappearing from the Doppler radar screen as they moved through the more polluted areas. Then they would show up again as they moved back out into more rural areas. I live just outside the worst polluted areas around Northern Virginia where some days the pollution is really bad and others provide reasonably safe air quality.
One day when watching a storm system on the Doppler screen move across a stretch of road that I knew to be backed up with evening rush hour traffic like it is every weekday evening, I saw the storm disappear. This convinced me that pollution from cars were reacting with the atmosphere causing abrupt changes in weather patterns. But I still didn’t have any proof that MTBE was causing storms to be affected this way. I was actually hoping it was because the oil companies have so much power in Washington that I wasn’t able to get any relief for what had happened to me. They apparently, even to this day, have been allowed to forego testing MTBE as to its effects on human health even though federal law requires it. This is even after it has polluted most of the groundwater in the US and is likely in the water you’re drinking right now even if you filter your drinking water it because it does not filter easily it at all.
So I couldn’t prove what was making me sick and couldn’t get medical attention. Since no testing has been done, doctors don’t know anything about how to treat illnesses caused by it. In fact even after independent tests show how bad it is with lawsuits having been brought against the oil companies nationwide for the damage it has done to peoples health, the EPA still says it’s safe in drinking safe while still refusing to test it to prove their claim. It’s made from carcinogens (Cancer causing chemicals).
Proving my climate change theory
My life at that time was ruined while there seemed to be nothing I could do about it. That is until I found MTBE’s Achilles heal, that it causes dramatic changes in weather patterns. With my theory under one arm and my hopes that I was right about it under the other, I went looking for evidence. It didn’t take long to find it coming from an impeccable source, a NASA scientist, the same NASA scientist that Gore’s climate advisor Jim Hansen plagiarized in August of 2000 when he wrote his alternative theory to his CO2 global warming theory, Drew Shindell. They even worked out of the same office.
Professor Shindell’s science clearly shows that the low level ozone forming process and the reaction the pollutants that produce it have on atmospheric water vapor cause dramatic changes in weather patterns. He also says methane has as similar reaction with atmospheric water vapor. MTBE is made from methanol and ether. Methanol is made from natural gas, or methane. Ever since MTBE use first began, our climate has changed radically wherever it was used.
So I called in a favor from a friend who got a reporter, Joyce Price from the Washington Times, to call me. I told her my story and she agreed that everything I told her fit together like I said. But she told me she couldn’t write about it unless it was in a public record. Otherwise she risked The Washington Times being sued by the oil industry. So she promised she would write a story about how MTBE is polluting groundwater and making people sick while she looked around Capitol Hill for evidence she could report on for how it changes weather patterns. She further told me she had previously written MTBE articles but nothing was ever done about it. Stories in small newspapers nationwide told of the horrors of MTBE on daily basis. But major news outlets rarely brought it up.
The Washington Times is a major news source but is owned by a wealthy cult leader named Sun Myung Moon who says he is God. The paper is still respected because he keeps a distance from it. He’s reportedly not involved in its reporting, editing, or publishing, just in making money and in getting political favors from Republicans because it is a conservative newspaper while the only other big Washington newspaper is the Washington Post which is considered liberal.
But the Washington Times is not part of the elite mainstream news media society that decides what we’re allowed to know about and what we aren’t. It was still an outsider to the more discreet boards of directors from Wall Street who own the rest of the news industry who tell us they give us cutting edge information on every issue while they use their industry to protect other big industries they also own.
The MTBE bubble bursts
The article she wrote came out on August 2, 1999. It was titled “EPA concedes gas additive has polluted water supplies; Risk is greatest in high-smog regions like Washington.” I talked to her on Wednesday July 21. On July 25, on a Sunday, the EPA’s Blue Ribbon Panel on MTBE came out publically declaring that MTBE needed to be removed from gasoline immediately. Washington DC doesn’t ever move on a Sunday’s unless someone very important is backed into a corner.
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