Ethanol or Petroleum
Food Chain Radio Show #1256
Michael Olson, Author & Urban Farming Agriculturalist
Henry Ford’s Ethanol V. John D. Rockefeller’s Petroleum
Guest: David Blume, Author Alcohol Can Be A Gas
Things seem to go along as they go along until a conflict arises that forces a change.
Consider the way our young nation went from growing energy on its farms to mining it from the earth.
To understand how this happened we need only look to the early years of the 1900s and the conflict between two of America’s great industrialists: Henry Ford, who founded the Ford Moter Company, and John D. Rockefeller, who founded the Standard Oil Company.
Henry Ford was famous for mass-producing cars, trucks and tractors that everyday people could afford. He designed them to run on the alcohol produced at farm distilleries and on the gasoline derived from oil. In doing so, Henry Ford put rural America on wheels.
John D. Rockefeller was famous for turning petroleum into gasoline and then selling that gasoline through a network of gas stations. In doing so, he put city people on wheels. Two great industrialists, two ways of fueling America. One had to win out, and did. How that happened leads us to ask:
Leave a comment below: Do you think Prohibition turned us from plants to petroleum?
