The RFS: Reality 1, Rhetoric 0

Bob Greco
Posted June 28, 2013

There is a classic xkcd cartoon where a one of the characters says they can’t come to bed because “Someone is wrong on the internet.”  Though the options for who exactly that someone was are almost unlimited, statistically there is a good chance the character was referring to Bob Dinneen.  Witness this tweet:

This is an easy thing to check.  Are gasoline imports “nonexistent?”  No.

But, to be fair, they have fallen quite dramatically.  So has that fall been “because of ethanol?”  If supply has fallen, it is always good to check demand:

So taking chart one, a decline of about 200 million barrels a year in imports, then looking at chart two which shows a decline of 254 million barrels a year in retail sales, you can clearly see that it is declining gasoline use, not ethanol, in the U.S. that is responsible for a decline in imports. Now I can sleep soundly tonight.