Keene Sentinel October 02, 2001 Sentinel Editorial: After a small step for common sense, battle lines are drawn 10-1-01 "It's a very bad piece of legislation, and I'll do everything I can to make sure it's not enacted." So said U.S. Senator Christopher Bond, a Missouri Republican. He was commenting on a bill, sponsored by fellow Republican Bob Smith of New Hampshire, that would ban the use of the dangerous gasoline additive MTBE within four years and appropriate money to clean up the mess it has already caused. The bill passed the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee last week, and Smith was delighted. "In New Hampshire we have more than 6,000 wells contaminated by MTBE," he said. "Today's vote is a major step addressing these horrible problems that we have experienced in New Hampshire." But the committee vote is just a start and, as Bond's comment makes clear, a ban on MTBE faces stiff opposition. Many people -- including the New Hampshire families in Richmond whose wells are polluted by MTBE -- might wonder why ANY U.S. senator would oppose a bill that seeks to remove a poison from the gasoline supply, a poison that a federal study found last year has contaminated a third of the drinking-water wells in 31 states. The answer appears to be that there's something more important to certain politicians than the public health. That something is parochial politics fueled by campaign contributions. Here's where the story gets complicated. Smith's bill would allow governors to waive a provision of the Clean Air Act essentially requiring that either MTBE or ethanol be added to gasoline to reduce air pollution. In New Hampshire, Governor Jeanne Shaheen would seize that opportunity in a nanosecond. While MTBE is suspected of causing cancer, ethanol is a benign, if expensive, corn-based product produced by Midwestern agribusiness. Whether either substance actually reduces air pollution is a matter of some scientific dispute. But there's no dispute that ethanol is a cash cow for the Midwest. Yet most industry experts agree that it can't be economically transported and added to gasoline supplies far from its Midwest origin. That's why so much of the country is drenched in MTBE. If the Clean Air Act mandate could be waived on a state-by-state basis, most governors would certainly ban MTBE, but some might ditch ethanol as well, on economic grounds. And agribusiness, and its allies in Congress, can't have that. Incidentally -- or maybe not incidentally -- it turns out that the oil industry knew of the MTBE hazard as far back as 1981. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was aware of the problem by at least 1987. And yet Congress was apparently not aware of the MTBE menace when it passed the Clean Air Act in 1990. We say "apparently," because Congress certainly knows about the problem TODAY, and it's in no rush to do anything about it. Who knows what individual members knew in 1990? Meanwhile, MTBE continues to be pumped into our cars and leaked into our groundwater. Smith said last week, "It's a shame, because it's basically greed over health." More than a shame, it's a scandal. And, if we were dealing with anything but Congress, it would be classified as a crime. THE KEENE SENTINEL, Phone: 603-352-1234, Fax: 603-352-0437, 60 West Street, Keene NH 03431-0546 Email our Webmaster:  webmaster@keenesentinel.com © 2001 Keene Publishing Corp - All Rights Reserved