How Kansas, Missouri can wean US off gasoline — without more electric cars | Opinion

Since there are roughly 8 billion people on the Earth spread all over the place, global warming can’t possibly destroy humankind. What it will do, though, is cause a financial catastrophe worse than 2008, as ocean levels creep higher on beaches. If just 1% of the Antarctic icecap melts, oceans will rise 2.6 feet and millions of coastal property owners will have to declare bankruptcy as there will be no buyers. After all, who is going to take out a 30-year mortgage on a beachfront property if they know it will be worthless at mortgage end? No one.

Furthermore, there are likely going to be major problems with flood control along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, including Kansas City, as the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers will have 2.6 feet more seawater height to overcome as they flow into the Gulf.

So what to do? We simply have to stop putting net new carbon dioxide or CO2 into the atmosphere. The CO2 level on Nov. 23 was 426.96 parts per million — the highest in more than 800,000 years.

Where does all this CO2 come from? According to the Oct. 28 EPA Monthly Energy Review:

• Gasoline: 3.4 trillion pounds or 137 billion gallons per year
• Natural gas for electricity: 1.6 trillion pounds per year
• Coal for electricity: 1.6 trillion pounds per year
• Natural gas for industrial: 1.2 trillion pounds per year
• Diesel for Class 8 trucks: 1.1 trillion pounds per year

Bottom line: Utilities are replacing coal on their own initiative, regardless of what the government does. Natural gas for electricity will eventually die out as on-shore wind, solar and storage battery technology improves. Large Class 8 diesel trucks can go to green hydrogen — but to really stop global warming, we need to replace gasoline as the primary motor fuel in the U.S.

Electric vehicles are great for local delivery trucks, since they go back to a central charging depot at night. But as recent sales have shown, American consumers have no appetite for EVs as a total replacement for ordinary gasoline powered vehicles. It makes no sense to ask people to spend hours to obtain 300 miles of range, when gasoline provides 300 miles in 5 minutes at the gas station. This is a huge loss in work productivity.

The solution? Kansas and Missouri’s representatives need to introduce a bill in Congress simply to ban the sale of new gasoline powered vehicles in the U.S. — and leave existing vehicles alone to carry out their useful lives. If such a bill passed, the car companies would immediately begin offering E100 ethanol-powered vehicles with engines that can’t burn gasoline, in addition to their EV and hydrogen offerings. They all know how to do this using the same engine lines and the same workers used now for gasoline engines.

E100 is a renewable fuel that contributes no net addition of CO2 to the atmosphere. Furthermore, E100 uses the same distribution infrastructure as gasoline. The farm economies of Kansas and Missouri would prosper as never before, as agricultural waste would become a feedstock for ethanol, in addition to the current use of corn.

The result: Twenty years after that ban, we would be gasoline free. The ethanol industry would be producing around 100 billion gallons a year for the majority of light duty vehicles with the rest being electric and hydrogen vehicles, and global warming would be a thing of the past.

This is precisely the strategy we used to get rid of lead in gasoline. President Richard Nixon and the Environmental Protection Agency didn’t ban leaded gasoline. They banned the sale of new cars that burned it beginning with the 1976 model year — and over a 20-year period, as the fleet wore out, we finally had totally lead-free gasoline.

We can avoid disaster. It simply requires leadership. The Missouri and Kansas congressional delegation should take the initiative now.

Don Siefkes is executive director of the domestic nonprofit Michigan corporation E100 Ethanol Group. He is a retired General Motors Design mid-level executive with an engineering and economics background. Ethanol Producer Magazine has called him “The E100 Evangelist.”