Re: A european question : RoHS


"Joerg" <notthisjoergsch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:ay%ne.1614$IE7.621@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Hello Graham,
>
> > Nice of them to research stuff after making it law !
>
> Nothing new in Europe. In Germany they started to make it nearly
> impossible to hire people for those part-time flat-tax jobs, probably to
> squeeze out more taxes. So the jobs simply vanished. Afterwards
> unemployment really shot up. Duh. But we do that, too. In California
> they absolutely had to have oxygenated gasoline. So they mixed MTBE into
> it. This lowered the gas mileage by at least 10% (I get 25mpg on CA gas
> and 28mpg on NV gas) but the whopper was the serious environmental
> damage caused by seepage into ground water. Once it's there it's too late.

The way I heard it, the use of MTBE was a compromise so that Big Oil
wouldn't fight too hard. The purpose of the regulation was to get a minimum
level of oxygen into the components of gasoline to improve emissions by more
thorough burning of the fuel. Ethyl Alcohol was the originally-intended
oxygenator, which meant it would get political support from Big Corn states.
The oil producers showed they could get the same oxygen benefit from MTBE,
which was easy to make in the refineries, and cheaper than EthA. Of course,
if the ground water had ended up being contaminated with ethyl alcohol, few
would be complaining.



.

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