Doug Ose: “I rise in support of the Cox amendment to repeal the ethanol and MTBE mandate. The reason I do is very clear. Number…”

“I rise in support of the Cox amendment to repeal the ethanol and MTBE mandate. The reason I do is very clear. Number one, I do not want to drink polluted water; I do not want to drink water that has poison in it. Now, the studies we have done in our subcommittee indicate very clearly that as we phase out MTBE in California, between now and the time we phase it out, there is no way ethanol production can come up to the level we need to meet our gap. No way. Plenty of corn, plenty of farmers growing it, but no way to process it to ethanol to get it to California to address our needs. One of the interesting aspects that I have discovered across this country is that we have 38 different types of fuel used to propel our vehicles, 38 different formulas. Some use ethanol, some use burn rates that are higher or lower, some use reformulated gasoline. There is no guarantee here that we are going to buy more corn to make ethanol to ship to California. All we are asking for, plain and simple, is the opportunity to use science and technology to address our air quality concerns in the chemical composition of our fuel and how it affects our air quality. That is all we are asking for. We are not asking for special treatment. We are still going to comply with the air quality requirements in the Clean Air Act. The fact of the matter is the clean air requirements that exist in California exceed the clean air requirements in the other 49 States. We have a higher standard.”