Here's what I just emailed to Rob Bradley about the book:
Hi Rob -
I just finished reading your book "Energy - The Master Resource." As with many topics, in fact too many topics, people can use some good resources to help get them acquainted with a subject. Energy may be a lot like weather and the old quote, "everyone talks about it but nobody does anything about it." Your books provides lots of very good basic information about the general subject.
Unfortunately, the problem with basic information is that it is usually just simplistic general information, designed to superficially cover the subject rather than delve deeply into it; like placing a Band-Aid on an open wound rather than treating the infection.
There's an enormous amount of information in your book that I have no complaint with, and in lots of areas there is no contrary information that I can offer, nor that requires any disputation. For example, New York did experience two major electric blackouts in the second half of the 20th century. I was present for both, so I know for certain they occurred.
Another example, one that's not so flippant, is the definition and history of British Thermal Unit that you present in your book. I completely agree that BTU is the measurement unit/system used to describe how much energy is required to heat water by one degree. I also wholeheartedly agree that gasoline has a higher BTU rating than ethanol.
In reading your book I found nothing to suggest that you approached the co-authoring of it more than a decade ago with the intention to unfairly castigate alternative energy and fuels. By contrast, I point to Robert Bryce's book "Gusher Of Lies," which was obviously created to specifically attack alternative fuels and alternative energy from the outset.
However, regardless of the original intention, your book is now clearly being used by you and others as a tool to do what Bryce's book does. I say this because of your reliance on the book to help support your pro-fossil fuel position and defend your anti-alt fuel position: It is a primary resource cited on your Institute for Energy Research website ([...) and in your emails to me.
There are a great many false statements and conclusions presented in Bryce's book, which was published in 2008. I suppose a portion of the erroneous information can be excused as having been based upon the only data that was available at that time. The problem, however, is that in the years since publication, Bryce continues to use the same wrong information every time he writes or speaks about the subject at seminars and conferences. To be sure, there already existed lots of better information that Bryce could have relied on if his intention was to write an objective book, but being objective wasn't what he set out to do. The worst part of what Bryce did was to not leave any room for change due to technological or agricultural improvements, or more conclusive studies. With the conclusion of his manuscript, he made it seem like the conversation was over; that the results would never change. It was not a scholarly work, it was a hit piece.
As it turned out, in addition to Bryce not using better available information that was available at the time, things have changed considerably since then: there have been technological and agricultural improvements, and additional studies were conducted that rendered his wrong information that much more incorrect.
In reading your book, which does have a more scholarly air to it, I come to the same conclusion: There was better information that you could have used (even though your book preceded his by four years), and there certainly is better information available now. Your book also left no real room for evolving improvements, and the current information that you present via your website is devoid of any of the better or newer information.
Knowing the genesis of your book isn't really important or relevant to the current discussion between you and me that was begun in response to an email that I sent to the authors of a New York Post article about man-made climate change ([...]). What is important is the correctness of the information contained in your book. The area of contention between us is how it is being used today and the viability of alternative solutions to the dominant fossil fuel industry.
Where your book errs is in its understanding of two of the most basic precepts of the total energy market: How petroleum oil fuels became so dominant, and to what do we owe petroleum oil fuels. While engine fuels is just a portion of the overall energy issue, it is the hot button issue - it is the issue that has at times crippled our economy and led to the deaths and permanent injuries of hundreds of thousands of Americans.
Your book takes the position that the industrialized world owes our present quality of life to fossil fuels. You have cited Alex Epstein’s The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels as a source of this opinion. You may have arrived at the same conclusion independently, but that's beside the point. By the way, radio talk show host Dennis Prager expresses the same view. As I've told him a couple of times, "I enjoy listening to your show, but you are wrong on this point."
The internal combustion engine was not invented because there was lots of gasoline and diesel fuel being stored and no one knew what to do with it. The internal combustion engine was invented as a result of steam engines, and steam engines were also not invented because of a plethora of petroleum oil based fuels. Both the invention of the steam engine and internal combustion engine predated the invention of petroleum oil based fuels (the former by a couple of hundred years, the latter by a couple of decades). So we owe our present quality of life to the invention of the machines, not the fuels.
I think an interesting comparison can be made with electricity (as the fuel) and the light bulb (as the invention). Humans knew about electricity for thousands of years, and studied it seriously for hundreds of years. But no one knew exactly what to do with it, or how to harness it until the 1700's and 1800's. So by comparison to fossil fuels (particularly petroleum oil based fuels), it could rightfully be said that thanks to electricity (the fuel) we have working light bulbs and electric motors (the inventions).
Moreover, there is no alternative fuel source for light bulbs or electric motors than electricity. This brings me to the second precept: Internal combustion engines did not need gasoline or diesel fuel or even kerosene. They could be powered by other fuels, most notably alcohol (ethanol) or ethanol-turpentine blends.
In addition, alcohol already provided an excellent fuel for interior lighting prior to the age of electric light. It's often been stated that interior lighting fuels went straight from whale oil to kerosene. This is not really correct; alcohol was used as the fuel after whale oil became too expensive and hard to come by. Kerosene followed alcohol.
There is one reason, and one reason only why kerosene became the dominant fuel for lighting: cost. Kerosene was not better; it did not smell better (kerosene literally stinks); it was not easier to produce; it was just a whole lot less expensive. The reason why kerosene was less expensive is because the U.S. government (and other governments, too) placed high taxes on alcohol production. The U.S. government had been taxing alcohol production since the birth of our country, but as the American Civil War entered its second year, alcohol was taxed $2.08 per gallon (regardless of whether the alcohol was for drinking or lighting/heating). This meant that instead of alcohol and kerosene competing at about two-bits (25 cents) per gallon, alcohol was nearly ten times more expensive than kerosene. Now to be "fair" I have to acknowledge that kerosene was also taxed to help pay the costs of the war: a tax of ten cents per gallon was levied on kerosene. Yes, it's quite laughable.
The onerous alcohol tax remained until 1906 when Congress voted to repeal the tax. The years between the Civil War and 1906 were critical years in the invention and evolution of the internal combustion engine and the vehicles it would propel. Yet, despite the high cost of alcohol, alcohol was the preferred fuel by the inventors.
When the alcohol tax was repealed in 1906, corn based ethanol became cheaper than gasoline. Among other developments and endorsements of ethanol fuel, Thomas Edison produced the Model T automobile that was designed to run on multiple fuels: ethanol, gasoline, and kerosene. For the next fourteen years ethanol was a serious competitor to gasoline, and it was the only fuel that could be safely used in high compression internal combustion engines (gasoline could be used safely, provided that it had ethanol blended in to it). The years of the First World War and the years that immediately followed were a crucial period as Americans were adopting a whole new mobile lifestyle that was created because of the urgent need to build faster, more powerful machines to help win the war. They were heady days, and ethanol went toe-to-toe against gasoline.
Then the competition between ethanol and gasoline came to a screeching halt with the passage of the National Prohibition Act. This law, and not consumer choice, was the reason that petroleum oil based fuels became the dominant ICE fuels in America.
Amazingly, even after the passage of Prohibition, and the outlawing of alcohol production in the United States, the country's top automotive scientists and engineers still favored ethanol and ethanol-gasoline blends; they cited it as superior to ethanol-free gasoline. Ford, Edison, Bell, Thompson, and General Motors' top scientists (Kettering and Midgely) were among those who favored ethanol. Britain's Harry Ricardo felt the same. GM's Kettering and Midgely only changed their minds a few years after the start of Prohibition when they invented leaded gasoline and realized that the GM patents would be worth billions of dollars (the economic power of one billion dollars in the 1920's is like hundreds of billions today).
In the preface of your book, page xiv, you wrote "Ethanol, an agricultural product, was a viable, even popular, fuel a century ago, but it was displaced by fossil fuels. The reasons for the switch to gasoline and diesel still remain relevant."
I agree that the reasons for the switch were and still remain relevant, but you never present the reasons why ethanol was displaced. In fact, in your entire book you never mention "Prohibition," "Volstead Act," "National Prohibition Act," or "Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution." You gloss over the entire history and instead present information and innuendos that explain the switch to petroleum oil based fuels for internal combustion engines because the fossil fuels were superior. That's like trying to present an accurate history of the United States and then leave out the events that occurred between 1760 and 1820.
The absence of this information, on top of an absence of the tax history, from your book, as well as the continued disregard of this information in your current published works is inexcusable. I'm not saying that the omission renders your discussion of the history of coal as false, for example, but it certainly discounts your book as being "The Master Resource," unless your definition of master resource denotes a very low threshold of acceptance.
Rob, in your second email to me you wrote "I am very interested in the gasohol (ethanol) argument and taxation that you refer to...I have not studied it as much as you have. I need to." I was surprised to read that you didn't know about how ethanol had been taxed and its effect on why gasoline and diesel became the dominant fuels, but I declined to comment at that time pending the reading your book. To now see that you also didn't know or consider as important the national prohibition on the production of alcohol/ethanol, is absolutely puzzling.
In chapter 2, page 57 of your book, you list six problems with ethanol - problems that by inference make it inferior to gasoline and/or diesel fuel. These "problems" are:
1. Lower BTU content
2. Difficulties with transporting via pipelines
3. More expensive to produce
4. Insufficient available land
5. Negative EROEI versus gasoline/diesel production
6. Cost to manufacture ethanol-optimized vehicles
In chapter 5, page 129, you add a claim of ethanol's negative EROEI versus MTBE, as well as a claim of increased air pollution due to ethanol's evaporative characteristics as two more problems with ethanol. Then, on page 131, you rebuke corn farmers for Congressional lobbying efforts.
Every single "problem" you identified is either completely false, misleading or irrelevant. It may be that given the information available to you more than a dozen years ago that there was some justification for including those "problems," but with the passage of time that justification has disappeared. Any continued reliance on what you published in 2004 is wrong. Any conclusion you continue to make about the mythical superiority of petroleum oil based fuels is dishonest.
For the sake of brevity, I'm not going to set forth in this letter my rebuttals to your "ethanol problems," instead I'll direct you again to the 60+ page report I published in 2013 on Robert Bryce's book "Gusher Of Lies." It can be found online, free of any cost, and you don't even have to wait for Amazon to deliver it ([...]).
The one issue that you included, that I didn't cover in my report on Bryce's book is the cost to manufacture ethanol-optimized engines and flex-fuel vehicles versus the cost to manufacture gasoline-optimized engines and vehicles. One study that answers this point can be found at [...]. Let me know if this doesn't satisfy you as I can offer additional resources.
I hope you read my report, and comment on it when and where you see fit. Incidentally, it may be a fair question if you were to ask why my company and I are such strong proponents of alternative fuels in general, and ethanol in particular. The answer to that can be found at [...].
Thanks for your time and attention.
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