Op-Ed: Ya gotta believe

Source: By Orrie Swayze, Capital Journal • Posted: Thursday, June 22, 2017

Ethanol supporters and other patriotic Americans would do well taking lessons from baseball. The 1973 miracle Mets ace reliever Tug McGraw’s motto was “ya gotta believe” as he lead Yogi Berra’s unlikely Mets to the 1973 World Series championship. If we want to bust petroleum’s 90% gasoline monopoly by creating ethanol as a robust, unbridled market competitor we first must believe we can.

Believing we can obviously requires us to communicate truth rather than timidly parroting oil interests/Epa’s fraudulent spin such as: “It’s illegal to fuel standard autos with ethanol’s most researched and optimal blend or E30 “. Nebraska Governor Pete Richetts recent description of E30 as ethanol’s sweet spot also agrees with many thousands of pioneering standard auto owners’ conclusion derived by using E30 or half E85 these past ten plus years.

Until recently, SD pioneering citizens, institutions, governments, farm organizations have not blindly succumbed to fraudulent spin by oil/EPA: We successfully defied conventional “It’s illegal” wisdom to create our nation’s first operational flex fuel vehicle or simply filled a 1988 Corsica with E85: We then took the very popular ‘corn car’ to the DC capitol building front lawn for show and tell. We defied conventional ‘its illegal wisdom’ again to create the nation’s first blender pump locations and created the E30 challenge: research proving E30 is the most cost effective blend for standard autos delivering the same mileage, more power and lowering maintenance costs.

Yet today’s SD leadership is shrinking from our historical precedents to join the fraudulent ‘ its illegal chorus’: A disappointing example is our corn checkoff board benching our penny/bushel, 8 million dollar annual corn checkoff’s marketing potential by claiming E30 is illegal. Our SD economy, standard auto owners and our children are the biggest losers when also considering the unwarranted additional health risks.

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