06/09/09 The Jeff Rense Show (38:40)

TRANSCRIPT

JEFF RENSE: David Blume is back with us tonight. He's the man who has been leading the charge for a long time about trying to make alcohol a fuel, because alcohol is a fuel. Gasoline is trash. We're going to find out a lot more about that now in this hour. Are you there, David?

DAVID BLUME: Oh, yes I am, Jeff.

JEFF RENSE: Welcome back.

DAVID BLUME: I'm always glad to be here.

JEFF RENSE: Well, thank you. The issue of gasoline is one that continues to actually leave most people in the dark. They think it's the best fuel we can come up with. They think it's mandatory and necessary to run our automobiles and other types of petroleum-powered transport vehicles. And nothing could be further from the truth. Tell us about gasoline -- what is it, how toxic is it, and all the rest.

DAVID BLUME: Well heck, Jeff ... gasoline has not been around as long as alcohol. The first vehicles, as you and I have had a fun time discussing, really all ran on alcohol to start with. In fact, I recently was at Ford Motor Company world headquarters, and they had a Model T right there in the lobby, so we threw open the hood, and we showed how the original Model T was originally designed to run on alcohol and could run on gasoline in a pinch. So basically, alcohol was what we based internal combustion engines on. And gasoline came along later. The industry that was refining oil, Rockefeller's Standard Oil, was primarily trying to displace alcohol as a heating and lighting fuel. Because back in the middle 1800s and earlier, if it got dark, you had a couple of choices: you could use candles made from beeswax or animal fat, or you could go to sleep. So the alternative was actually alcohol lamps, which were invented in the middle of the 1800s and were extremely popular because they burned clean, they had a nice bright light, and gosh -- making moonshine was no big deal back then.

Well, Rockefeller was replacing that with kerosene, because heck you didn't have to grow anything. You didn't have to ferment it like beer or distill it like whiskey. All you had to do was pump it out of the ground, heat it up, and the heavy stuff that was left after you heated it up, and evaporated the light stuff was what we used for oil lamps. And it was dirty and foul, but gosh could he ever sell it cheap, compared to something someone had to actually grow and make. But that lightweight stuff had to be disposed of. Because if you put it in an oil lamp, which is nothing more than a glass bowl with a wick in it, right? You light that wick and it's full of really volatile stuff, well now it's a Molotov cocktail. So no more cabin if you light that wick. So no one wanted that stuff. And Rockefeller used to flush it into the rivers at night when no one was looking. And that volatile stuff is what we nowadays call gasoline. So it's the toxic waste byproduct, originally, of the kerosene business, which he eventually sold for use in cars as a better way of getting rid of it than flushing it into rivers. Making a little money on selling it was better than making no money and flushing it into rivers. So that's the origin of the competition between the original auto fuel, alcohol, and the late-comer, gasoline.

JEFF RENSE: What's in gasoline?

DAVID BLUME: Oh, gosh. You never know on any given day. It's like you're out there at the refinery. You're making linoleum and fiberglass resin and pesticides, and whatever's left over from the process you've been working with is thrown into a big tank, which they call gasoline. On any given day, there might be 400 different inputs into that gasoline tank from different chemical processes at the refinery.

JEFF RENSE: You're kidding?

DAVID BLUME: Oh, no. And up to 450 different distinct highly toxic chemicals are in gasoline in any given day. All kinds of stuff -- everything from supervolatile things that barely are liquid at room temperature. In fact, some things aren't even liquid at room temperature. They use natural gas condensates now, stuff they chill out of the natural gas, that would kill you if you burned it in your oven. So they liquefy it barely, and when they mix it with gas, they just hope it doesn't boil out. Because it boils at such a low temperature, even as low as 80 degrees. And some of the other stuff in gasoline is basically tars and varnishes, and those don't even boil until maybe 450 degrees. You've got --

JEFF RENSE: Excuse me, you're saying that this trash, these deadly liquid toxins, are just essentially randomly dumped into the gasoline manufacturing process and mixed up, and they call it gasoline? It's not -- people have an idea that gasoline is carefully refined from raw petroleum or crude oil, and it's an end product, and it's pure.

DAVID BLUME: No, it never has been. Never, never, never has been. The Bureau of Mines used to define gasoline as a mixture of hydrocarbons with a wide range of boiling points, from indeterminate sources, that were used in internal combustion engines. That was the definition of gasoline even way back then. And nowadays, it's far more of a Wild West of ingredients than it ever was.

JEFF RENSE: Amazing. Now, you said something in one of your lectures that I caught onto a long time ago. It's summertime. People are out using two-cycle engines all over the place, right?

DAVID BLUME: Ooh, yuck.

JEFF RENSE: Lawn mowers.

DAVID BLUME: Well, lawn mowers are four cycle. For people who aren't gear heads out there, there's a difference between two-cycle and four-cycle engines.

JEFF RENSE: A big difference.

DAVID BLUME: Yeah, a big difference. A four-cycle engine is what your car has. Or, actually, your Briggs & Stratton lawn mower motor. And those things tend to be a lot quieter, if you're just looking at the outside observation. You don't see usually huge amounts of smoke coming out of the back. And then the two-cycle engines are like the ones you hear on leaf blowers, or chain saws, or

JEFF RENSE: Or weed trimmers. String trimmers.

DAVID BLUME: Yeah, weed trimmers.

JEFF RENSE: Now, by the way, I switched away from those, because I used to get a headache from the fumes from a two-cycle string trimmer, even half an hour.

DAVID BLUME: Oh yeah, you're not the only one. A lot of people react like that.

JEFF RENSE: Takes a while to detox. A lot of that you're breathing, I found out, unfortunately is benzene, which is a deadly carcinogen. But they do now make four-cycle string trimmer or Weedwhacker engines. I don't mean to give commercial preferences, but I happen to have a Stihl (s-t-i-h-l) four-cycle string trimmer, and the exhaust is no problem now. Not compared to that two-cycle.

DAVID BLUME: Well now, here's the reason why. In a four-cycle engine, there are four phases that the engine goes through. First you fire the spark plug. That ignites the fuel. It drives the piston down. Then, the piston comes back up, goes back down again, and then on the fourth stroke (remember, this is down, up, then down), and pushes the exhaust out. So, the intake, the bringing in of fuel in the first stroke, is very separate from the exhaust stroke at the end. So that's good. Because with a two-stroke engine, it's down and up, and that's it.

JEFF RENSE: And the unburned fuel goes right out the exhaust.

DAVID BLUME: That's right. There's a moment at which both the intake valve and the exhaust valve are open, and some of the fuel just escapes across and goes out unburned. Now as you pointed out, benzene is one of those chemicals. And actually, there's a family of these things called BTEX, or benzene, toluene, and they also include ethyl benzene in there, and xylene. You notice they all sound alike. They have the same ending, which is that "ene." If you looked at it at incredible magnification -- you looked at the atomic structure -- they look like rings. Rings with a couple things missing here and there. But these rings are incredibly carcinogenic. They also do other things. They destroy your nervous system; they can destroy your respiratory system. Way, way bad.

DAVID BLUME: Now, in California (because I live here, so I happen to know a little more about the formulation of gas here), of regular gas, 25% of our gasoline is this BTX. But premium--41% of our gasoline is BTX. You can't even use benzene anywhere in California really, for any industrial process -- it's considered such a horrible carcinogen. And yet billions of gallons of it are run through our cars every day. Now, you were just bringing up the two-stroke engine, how disgusting they are. When you don't burn the fuel and some of it escapes across, that goes raw into the air for people to breathe. So it's no wonder you feel sick after half an hour of use. And most people don't like to use two-strokes very long unless there's a lot of wind around. So when you're looking at a chainsaw, just imagine the pollution coming out of six or seven SUVs, and that's what that chainsaw's putting out in the same amount of time the SUVs are riding. So that's why Stihl came out with the machine you're using now. Because in Europe, they're starting to say, "Wait a minute, we made benzene illegal a long time ago. We can't just let people make machines that spew it into the air -- that's ridiculous.

JEFF RENSE: Well, what about waterways? What about lakes and rivers and things? Two-cycle jet skis, for example?

DAVID BLUME: Motorboats, outboard motors, all of that. There's a transition going on now that's going to solve all that for us, but up until now, two-stroke engines where you mix the oil with the gas were standard in outboard motors.

JEFF RENSE: I was told that something on the order of 20% of the fuel at times can go right out the port into the exhaust, into the water, unburned -- depending on the engine, depending on its load and what it's burning.

DAVID BLUME: Yeah, when you're really kicking it and really accelerating, that's true.

JEFF RENSE: Wow, no wonder you see lake water with a filmy texture on top of it.

DAVID BLUME: That's also due to the oil mixed in two-stroke engines, because the lubrication comes from the fuel and not from an oil reservoir, like it does on our cars.

JEFF RENSE: Very good. David Blume is my guest, we'll be right back.

JEFF RENSE: Okay, we're back. David Blume's website, alcoholcanbeagas.com. Alcohol is a gas!

DAVID BLUME: Well, yes it is. It's not just a possibility anymore. We can go out and produce our own. We can even buy it at the pump in a lot of places now. And around the world, people are beginning to substitute alcohol for both gasoline and diesel.

JEFF RENSE: There are some facts/factoids that came from another website ... you own the permaculture.com website?

DAVID BLUME: Oh that's us, yeah.

JEFF RENSE: Okay. The original automobiles, as you mentioned, ran on alcohol, because when they were invented gasoline was not available. We covered that. Rockefeller spent $4 million that we know of -- this is way back when?

DAVID BLUME: Nineteen teens, Jeff.

JEFF RENSE: That'd be worth ... a hundred million now?

DAVID BLUME: Oh, let's see. I did the calculation on that once. A few years ago it was $50 million. It was like a lot of money.

JEFF RENSE: Yeah, $50 million used to be a lot of money. Not anymore. Trillions.

DAVID BLUME: Yeah, right.

JEFF RENSE: ... to promote prohibition. A ban on alcohol manufacturing in the U.S. had started in 1919, just as the car industry was taking off. So you see a link there?

DAVID BLUME: Oh, it's well documented. There's been great historians like Hal Bernton who have dug into this and found that about that point in history, it was about half alcohol, half gasoline in terms of the market. So in cities you had gasoline, but still most of America in 1919 was rural. Over 60% of the people had farm-related work of some sort. So a lot of people did not live where it was practical to have a gas station, meaning in the city. So cars ran on alcohol when they were out in the countryside (like the Model T). And then when you came back into the city, if you wanted to run on the cheaper gasoline, then you had to adjust the car's timing and the carburetor to deal with the problems of gasoline and get it to run. Gasoline was only like 50 octane back in 1919, and alcohol then and now is 106 octane.

JEFF RENSE: That exceeds almost any supreme gasoline that I've seen at the pump.

DAVID BLUME: Oh, it's even good enough to run aircraft. In Brazil, guys run super-high-horsepower crop dusters on nothing but alcohol because they get so much more power out of alcohol than they do on gasoline. And when you're flying like nine feet off the ground with a huge tank of liquid in front of you, you don't want to stall. So, the farmers in Brazil, the bigger farmers, all use alcohol to run their planes.

JEFF RENSE: So Rockefeller shuts down home alcohol manufacturing, mmm ... 1919, just as the car industry was taking off. Prohibition ended in 1933. By then gas stations were ubiquitous everywhere, and most engines ran on gasoline. Well, folks, I think you can see what's going on there. Alcohol can be manufactured locally, and on a community level, from renewable plant material, for a dollar a gallon. That's it -- we've covered that with David in the past. The growing of plant material for alcohol will have no effect on the price of food, of course, and the growing of plants for fuel would more than neutralize the carbon created by burning alcohol for fuel.

DAVID BLUME: Right.

JEFF RENSE: Interesting.

DAVID BLUME: Well, that's because plants breathe in carbon dioxide when they're growing. So let's say we're growing sugar beets. Let's get away from corn for a minute, because corn is nowhere near the best crop for making alcohol. So let's just pick something else to talk about, which would be, say, fodder beets or sugar beets, which -- that's what they feed dairy cows in Europe. They don't feed them grain. So fodder beets, they're like 15 pounds a piece. This is not your little red ruby beet in the store for your salad. This is a big, honking beet. So, you grow that ... where did all that sugar come from? Well, sugars are carbohydrates. Well, "carbohydrates" really tell you where it came from. Carbo (carbon dioxide) and hydrate (water). So, plants take carbon dioxide and water and sunlight, and in photosynthesis glue it all together and make sugar. Sugar then can be made into starch, or cellulose, which is plant fiber. So every bit of the plant came from the air and water, and a few minerals. Now, when you burn alcohol in the car, we've taken that sugar, fermented it, distilled it. But it's still originally that sugar that we've now converted. And when we burn it in a car, well, what goes out the tailpipe? Not a bunch of toxins. What goes out the tailpipe is almost entirely water and carbon dioxide -- the very same things needed to grow the next crop to make the next batch of fuel.

JEFF RENSE: Got it, yeah.

DAVID BLUME: Now, when you burn gasoline (ignoring the toxins for a minute, but we'll certainly talk about them a bit more), the carbon dioxide that goes out the tailpipe doesn't have an absorption cycle like alcohol does. There's no oil plant that is absorbing CO2 out of the air and making the gasoline. That happened millions of years ago when it was algae in the ocean, and that's what we get oil and gasoline from now. So without that cycle, without that absorption, the CO2 builds up in our atmosphere and causes the problems we're having. Or it causes a lot of problems. I mean, you can debate what the problems are, but there's no doubt about it: alcohol removes CO2 from the air, where gasoline just accumulates it.

JEFF RENSE: Alright, now, we've discussed this in the past, David, but let me just touch it again, briefly. It is very easy to get a permit to set up a still at home now. It's not a problem.

DAVID BLUME: Well, yeah. I mean, Jeff, you and I have done this show, and I've done a couple other shows, and now the revenuers -- the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms people have been so overwhelmed from your listeners and some of the other listeners, and readers of the book, that they go, "Oh, alcohol can be a gas again, you've called us. Tell you what? You don't need to send in an application for a permit. Build your still and let us know when you've got it running. That's like building your house and telling the building department, "I need a building permit when I'm done." So that's how we've overwhelmed the government.

JEFF RENSE: That's hilarious.

DAVID BLUME: Oh, it's great.

JEFF RENSE: That is really good. Alright, when we come back with David Blume, we're going to talk about the flex fuel aspect of American automobile manufacturing, such as it still is. But this is interesting, so stay tuned.

JEFF RENSE: Our guest is David Blume, back again to talk to us about alcohol. What a scam, gasoline. Destroying the planet. Destroying lives. Benzene. Tens of millions of cases of cancer over the decades around the world, quite probably.

DAVID BLUME: Well, there's other things too, you know. It's not just benzene. It's like, one of the big problems with gasoline is hydrocarbons. In other words, the tiny tiny soot that is released when you burn, basically, oil -- gasoline. And the hydrocarbons bury themselves deep in your lungs, these little particles. And they cause lung cancer. They cause other kinds of disease. So, a study that came out just last month, and these are rare, these studies, because who's going to criticize oil? So, it's interesting, because this study was actually mostly funded by BP, and this study said that basically looking at the base line of the misery caused by gasoline burning and what would happen if you started to introduce alcohol? How much suffering would you relieve? They were saying that basically it would probably reduce -- just 10% alcohol mixed with gasoline in the U.S. -- would reduce what they call 20,000 "DALYs," and a DALY is an acronym which basically is disabled something, um, living years. And so basically, 20,000 years of life that are either ended short or severely disabled because of vehicle emissions of hydrocarbons -- this is very narrow, right? -- would be relieved with only 10% alcohol added to the gasoline. So we're really talking about hundreds of thousands of people a year losing their life or disabled, as the scientists measure it, with only the most limited data they can get their hands on. And that was done with funding by the oil companies. You can imagine if a fully independent outfit did that study. And this was -- never hit the news waves, no one's heard about it. It came out just the end of May, and it came out with major universities -- U.C. Berkeley, Lawrence-Livermore Lab -- and no one's talking about it.

Now, the whole subject of the study was what would happen if we go to biofuels, because alcohol has almost none of these emissions whatsoever. We were talking about boats just before the break. Carbon monoxide is a big problem, as opposed to carbon dioxide with the global-warming gas. Carbon monoxide is Dr. Kevorkian's suicide gas, right. So you breathe carbon monoxide, it grabs onto your blood, and blocks oxygen from hooking onto your blood. So that means you are being starved for oxygen. And when you don't have enough oxygen, it damages all your organs, your brain, etc. So when you're boating, you're always at the bottom of the canyon, right? The water's at the bottom.

JEFF RENSE: Sure, I get it.

DAVID BLUME: So here you are in the Glen Canyon Reservoir, and all these boats are running around burning two-stroke, and the bottom, just above the water, the top 10 or 20 feet above the water is a soup of hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, and benzene. So they started looking at that, saying, "Oh my god!" And they pretty much are phasing out all two-stroke engines for outboards right now. But there's another kind of canyon, and that's in every city. You walk through the big buildings downtown, and those deep canyons made by those buildings are full of all that exhaust. And so carbon monoxide turns out to be, as we all know, very deadly. In fact, you can commit suicide with it. You just put the hose in your garage from the exhaust pipe and kill yourself with it. And so they're finding kids in the city having lower IQs because they don't have enough oxygen, because carbon monoxide is toxifying their blood. None of that comes with alcohol.

JEFF RENSE: By the way, city oxygen levels often approach 18%, sometimes less. In the country you get 21, 22.

DAVID BLUME: That's right.

JEFF RENSE: The oxygen percentage in the atmosphere used to be in the thirties not too many thousands of years ago.

DAVID BLUME: Yeah, but that's kind of dangerous. You get too much oxygen and things just light on fire spontaneously.

JEFF RENSE: Lots of fires.

DAVID BLUME: But with alcohol, we don't have any carbon monoxide. In fact, in California we add alcohol to gasoline to drop the carbon monoxide emissions, because what it carbon monoxide? There's not enough oxygen to burn the fuel, so it comes out partly burned, which is carbon monoxide. Alcohol is 30% oxygen, so when you burn it with -- by itself especially -- but if you burn it with gasoline it reduces the toxicity dramatically. And there we go. So, if we were running alcohol like Brazil is, here's the city of Rio de Janeiro -- 20 million people, and 85% of the people are running on alcohol now in cars. If they were not doing that, basically that city would be a ghost town right now ...

JEFF RENSE: It'd be dead. Like Mexico City.

DAVID BLUME: ... because the pollution would be so over the top. You know, I'm glad you brought up Mexico. I'll be going there in September to be the keynote speaker at the big Mexican solar industry fair that's put on by the government. And they want to go to alcohol in a big way, because they just figured out that their big oil fields are going away. They're losing like seven, eight, nine percent a year. Well, in ten years that means they're 90% gone. So Mexico's going to have to stop exporting oil and just save it for itself. And that's where all their money comes from, a lot of their money comes from. So they want to start making alcohol in their own country and export the gasoline to us, where we can kill ourselves with it.

JEFF RENSE: Ridiculous. Alright, looking at your website, there is somebody very special there, pictured with you.

DAVID BLUME: Oh yeah, that was fun.

JEFF RENSE: What's the deal with Daryl Hannah?

DAVID BLUME: Oh, Daryl Hannah, boy she's just great. Daryl Hannah has been a booster for ecology and biofuels, especially biodiesel, for a long time. And she and I some years ago did a panel up at the solar living festival in California, and we got to talking about alcohol and how much more potential there was for change with alcohol than there was with biodiesel. Because biodiesel is fine too -- it's made from vegetable oil. It replaces diesel, which is horribly filthy. But plants don't make vegetable oil very well. Plants really make carbohydrates really well. So she and I started talking about it, and she said, "You know, I have this great car, but I don't drive it. I drove it in Kill Bill, which is this T-top Trans Am. And I remember that car. That was -- I mean, here I am admitting I like really horrible Hollywood movies. But Kill Bill was great, and this car was great. And she goes, "I still have that car. Tarentino gave it to me. And I don't drive it, because it runs on gasoline, and I can't run it on biodiesel." So we just picked up the car from her a couple of weeks ago, and we're going to convert it to run on alcohol. And she's going to be driving that around and showing it off all over the place.

JEFF RENSE: Fun. Well, I'd like to have her on the program with you at some point, to pick up her interest in all this, too.

DAVID BLUME: Oh, she'd love to do it. Once we have the car running, we'll be back.

JEFF RENSE: Very good. Alright, and we'll be back in just a couple minutes with David Blume.

JEFF RENSE: Okay, and we're back. Talking with David Blume about alcohol. Flex-fuel vehicles -- what are they? How many of them are there out there? And, if yours isn't a flex-fuel car, how tough is it to convert it to run on alcohol?

DAVID BLUME: Well, you know, we cover this in a lot of detail in the book, because flex fuel is -- my book is Alcohol Can Be a Gas!, of course, which you kindly mentioned earlier -- but ...

JEFF RENSE: Oh, it's a fabulous book.

DAVID BLUME: You know, flex-fuel vehicles are the easy way to go to alcohol, because you can run either on gasoline, or alcohol, or any mix of the two. So there's about 2000 stations in the U.S. where you can buy alcohol at the pump.

JEFF RENSE: That's great.

DAVID BLUME: And Detroit has been making vehicles that will run on both alcohol and gasoline since -- get this -- 1994.

JEFF RENSE: Okay now, this is 100% alcohol?

DAVID BLUME: Well, it's not, because ... it's a complicated story, but the standard got set at 85%. In Brazil they sell 100% at the pump, but here they sell 85%.

JEFF RENSE: Yeah, what if you put 100% alcohol in a flex-fuel vehicle?

DAVID BLUME: Well, that's what I do now. I run my little pick-up truck, my Ford Ranger (it's a 2000 Ford Ranger), and I've been running it on 98% alcohol off and on now for, oh 110,000 miles.

JEFF RENSE: What's the extra 2%, Diet Coke?

DAVID BLUME: Nah, unfortunately it's gasoline. Because this is moonshine. So in theory you could drink it. So to make it undrinkable, you have to add 2% gasoline to it, by law.

JEFF RENSE: Is that the law? To keep people from drinking the alcohol, you've got to make it toxic?

DAVID BLUME: It's called denaturing, or making it unnatural. Now, you know, I noticed your ad earlier for allicin. The stuff they take out of the garlic, which is allil mercaptan, it's the stinky stuff that's in garlic and that's not in your product that's on the air?

JEFF RENSE: Correct.

DAVID BLUME: That stuff would make a really good denaturant, because when you put it in in small quantities, even as little as 2%, it is so strong that you can't possibly drink it, but it's not deadly toxic like gasoline, and it comes from a renewable source, which is the leftovers from making garlic pills. So you only need a very small amount of it, and that's what's left over when you make garlic products. So the byproduct could actually be used to denature our alcohol without our having to give any money to the oil companies. That's one of the projects that our Alcohol Can Be a Gas project wants to try to accomplish, in the next year or so, is getting a new legal denaturing formula for all of us home producers, so that we don't have to even buy 2% gasoline to be legal.

JEFF RENSE: David, what do you make your alcohol with at home? What do you use?

DAVID BLUME: Well, I've got to tell you -- I'm going to be honest with you, Jeff. Right now I'm living in town, so I'm buying alcohol from the pump. But I've made it from donuts and tortillas and candy and ... I mean, the list goes on and on. I have all these different crops, and all these different raw materials, in the book, that run on alcohol.

JEFF RENSE: Yeah, sorghum you mentioned was one of the better ones. Now, my question to you is, is it economically viable? Let's say you've got two acres. How much, approximately, can you get from a crop of sorghum, from an acre or two, to run a car?

DAVID BLUME: Well, we just had a great talk today with a group that helps cooperative farmers in the south, and they were talking about this very subject today, about sorghum. And most people need 500 gallons of fuel a year to do their average driving. You can get almost a thousand gallons from an acre of sorghum, and it's like sugarcane: you can literally cut down enough yourself each week, just with a machete, and make your alcohol with an olDavid Blume: fashioned Amish sorghum press, because that's what they make blackstrap molasses from is sorghum. And that would be an easy way for people who have a tiny amount of acreage to make all the fuel they need. Now in the workshop that we teach, and we're doing two of them in Wisconsin ...

JEFF RENSE: Excuse me, I've got a question. Pardon me, hold onto your workshop thing there. I've got an acre of sorghum.

DAVID BLUME: Yeah.

JEFF RENSE: I go out -- is sorghum a year-round crop? Is it a spring crop? A summer crop?

DAVID BLUME: Plant it in the spring, and it's a huge grass, like sugarcane. You can cut it, depending on how far north you are, you can cut it from one to three times, getting a cane to process one, two, or three times a year. The farther south you are, the more often you can cut it. And it's chock full of sugar, just like sugarcane. And there's other crops, too, of course. But you know, there's so much waste raw material around that you could use. Bakeries throw away tens of tons a day of waste dough that hits the ground when they're, you know, working. They throw that all away, and it goes on and on. But just the waste in America alone would really take care of a lot of us who are the first ones in. But then we have to start growing crops, and there are many good crops to do it with.

JEFF RENSE: Alright, very good. Go back to the workshop.

DAVID BLUME: Well, the workshop is basically half production and half use. So we talk about all the different things you can use, how to build your own distillery, how to get into the business of making alcohol for a local station. And the material in this workshop and in the book is now being adopted at colleges around the country. So we have Richland Community College, and this course that we're going to be teaching in Madison is being sponsored by the Madison Area Technical College, and it has college credit. We're also teaching one way up north, closer to Minneapolis in Osseo, Wisconsin, just over the line, and that's because we've had so much interest from that part of the country is why we're doing the next ones there. But we do have ones scheduled, that will be all confirmed in the next week or two, everywhere from New York to LA and back again. So the idea with these workshops is to get people together to learn how to do it. Some of them who come are people who want to make alcohol. Some are mechanics who want to convert cars. We have kits, of course, that -- we didn't get too much of a chance to talk about -- that we can almost duplicate what GM and the other companies do with flex fuel, that you can slap onto our car --

JEFF RENSE: Who? What was that name you said?

DAVID BLUME: GM? You know, that old company that was around for awhile?

JEFF RENSE: Yes ...

DAVID BLUME: You know, GM missed a big opportunity. We wrote -- what we should have done when we lent that money to GM is mandated that they made all cars flex fuel coming out of that factory. And then they would have had a competitive advantage. Because right now today, alcohol at the pump in Chicago is a dollar cheaper than gasoline -- at the pump, right now today. We just got a call from our buddy Miles, and he just told us --

JEFF RENSE: Okay, here's another question: If 98% alcohol becomes popular, what's to keep the corporate parasites from making the prices as high as they want?

DAVID BLUME: Well, there's two things: One, we've got to try to prevent that. For instance, oil companies are trying to buy up alcohol companies right now. Obama and his administration haven't done a thing to try to stop that.

JEFF RENSE: That's right. Nor are they going to.

DAVID BLUME: But smaller plants, ones that you or I could operate -- in fact, we ought to get a workshop going in Oregon. We'll talk to you about that. But anyway, you could make alcohol in a small plant. Let's say you make a million gallons a year. This can be done in a reasonably small barn. I mean, we're not talking about a big plant here to make a million gallons. That would supply a thousand people with fuel, or more. You could sell it at a cardlock station at one of the dying strip malls in your area, and there's no one between you and the customer. Make it, sell directly to the customers -- there's no one to stop you from doing that. It's completely legal. So, what we advocate is not these big giant alcohol plants which are having financial problems and are easily crashed when you manipulate the price of corn. We're talking about plants that can contract with a local farmer to grow beets or sorghum or used waste potatoes, or -- in Oregon there's all kinds of waste, depending on where you are -- there are so many crops grown in Oregon. In other words, you can't stop all these little people from making moonshine. No one has ever stopped moonshining with any kind of laws. And this is legal. The permit's free. You can make pretty much as much alcohol as you need to cover you and your neighbors. And if you want to make a business out of it, the permits are cheap. So, we think that it's the American entrepreneur that's going to get us out of this trap. Because if we're not buying oil, we're not sending our money overseas. If we're not poisoning ourselves with toxic gasoline, then that saves all of us money. We're all paying for the health costs. If we're out there doing this, we actually get tax credit for it. And the first good thing the Obama administration has done is increased the tax credit for setting up a station to 50% tax credit, for setting up an alcohol station.

JEFF RENSE: Really? Huh...

DAVID BLUME: So, and in Oregon, where you are, there's a 50-cent-a-gallon tax credit when you buy alcohol. So if you're making it for a buck, you get 50 cents tax credit from the federal government for making it, okay, if you're using a free or waste material, AND the buyer gets 50 cents by the state of Oregon, we're down to, well, free!

JEFF RENSE: Pretty amazing.

DAVID BLUME: Or pretty darned cheap.

JEFF RENSE: Yeah, it is.

DAVID BLUME: And in Oregon you can actually borrow $100,000 to build your alcohol plant from the state at a reasonable interest rate. So there are a lot of things in Oregon that we'd like to see --

JEFF RENSE: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa -- you can do what?

DAVID BLUME: The renewable energy, uh ...

JEFF RENSE: You can borrow $100,000 from the state of Oregon?

DAVID BLUME: Yeah, and you can build a plant that would make --

JEFF RENSE: To open your own cardlock alcohol gas station?

DAVID BLUME: Absolutely. And, well -- it's a little tricky in Oregon, because you're supposed to have an attendant there. You're a unique state where people have to actually put gas in the car.

JEFF RENSE: You're not allowed to pump your own gas.

DAVID BLUME: But, $100,000 would allow you to build yourself your own alcohol plant that might put out a hundred to two hundred thousand gallons a year.

JEFF RENSE: They do have cardlock stations all over the place, by the way. They're private enterprises.

DAVID BLUME: Yeah. We cover all that in the book, and on our website at AlcoholCanBeaGas.com, and we have free information you can call for at 888-737-6228.

JEFF RENSE: 888-737-6228. David, thank you. Always fascinating. You're going to see your dream blossom here fairly soon, I think.

DAVID BLUME: It's already happening.

JEFF RENSE: Good. Alright, keep in touch, my friend.

DAVID BLUME: Thanks, Jeff.

JEFF RENSE: Take care. David Blume. His website is AlcoholCanBeaGas.com. And yes you, if you've got just a little bit of land, can grow your own fuel. One acre -- a year's worth of alcohol, right there. And David will explain to you in his book how to convert your car. I think he's making conversion kits now. Very simple to do. So, there are all kinds of potentials here that we've got to get out and get after. We'll be back, in just a few ...