The Clean Air Act of 1990
In 1989, the environmentalist movement reached its peak of success before its popularity started to dwindle later as left wing liberal politics took too much control of their issues. What drove their success was smog that hung over most of the nation, especially around metropolitan areas where it clouded the skies even on sunny days with brown and grey smoke screens. This caused average Americans to overlook the more nonsensical political stances that came out of the environmentalist community in hopes they could get the smog issue dealt with.
About the time they had the Bush administration pushed to the wall on the smog issue, an idea was floated around Washington about an additive to gasoline that increases emissions of formaldehyde that would mix with the smog and dissolve it in the suns rays. Then it would become low level ozone and be carried out over the Atlantic Ocean by the jet stream to be dumped mixed with rain. I wasn’t surprised when I didn’t hear anything more about it. It sounded like a horrible idea and I was surprised anyone would even bring up such a thing. But since I lived so close to a heavily trafficked highway, I hoped other ideas would come up for how to clean up the air I breathed.
Sure enough a few months later, an article in the Washington Times came out talking about a gasoline additive called polyisobutylene (PIB) that would make gasoline burn more efficiently giving 20% more mileage with 70% less pollution. I was very pleased with this idea and wasn’t surprised at all to see the Clean Air Act debate that had been evolving on a political back burner become an issue of central importance after pressure from the environmentalist community was put on the Bush administration to force the oil industry use this additive.
The oil industry however wasn’t about to start producing gasoline that gave more mileage. That would have been like taking a 20% cut in sales. But with Bush wanting to be elected for a second term, he decided he was going to makeover his image to become an environmentalist president and force the oil companies to add PIB to gasoline anyway. After a lot of wrangling around Washington that concluded with the oil companies acknowledging they were not going to use this additive without being forced to, they hinted they would agree to use another additive called MTBE which was said to be almost as good as PIB and even had PIB in it.
At that time, gasoline was so cheap that the only concern for wanting a gasoline additive was air quality. So the increase in mileage wasn’t considered important. These days, having 20 percent more mileage would be heaven sent even if it happened to pollute more. But since pollution is simply unburned fuel, getting more miles means less pollution.
It should have sent up red flags when it came out that MTBE causes a loss of mileage. In fact it did raise deep concerns for the scientific community weighing in on the Clean Air Act debate. About the time the legislation was heading to the congressional waste basket, Bush announced he would appoint a special task force to the EPA to look into scientists concerns about MTBE. He promised if the scientists concerns turned out to be valid, he would support forcing the oil industry to use PIB instead. So scientist gave the Clean Air Act their blessing in hopes it would lead to PIB being added to gasoline. But the EPA never conducted the studies. Instead the MTBE program was given a full head of steam and now has polluted much of the groundwater in the US. It was replaced with ethanol in May of 2006 which is how the EPA began administering fuel programs instead of making sure they work without polluting.
When the switch from MTBE to ethanol was taking place, the state of California took the EPA to court and proved that MTBE and ethanol worsen air quality. Then Bush and Cheney stepped in claiming the ethanol requirement wasn’t about air quality standards anymore but about replacing imported oil with domestic renewable fuels. The thing is that the kind of ethanol required by the EPA’s oxygenate program, anhydrous ethanol, is not a fuel and causes a larger loss of mileage in most engines than the 10 percent of it that is added to gasoline. The kind of ethanol that is used for fuel is hydrous ethanol.
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