I'm getting better at making it clear. I hope now you understand better my cynicism during the power crisis (and why I wanted to strangle lewislynn (of course, lewislynn deserves strangling on his own merits)). :-)
My first inkling of this camr from writing the two sections in Part II, Chapter 3, "More is Less" and "Less is More." You might end up wondering (as I do) if the seemingly deliberate accrual of fuels around Los Angeles is "The Squeeze" in action. I honestly believe that the monsters with whom we are dealing at a high level are that callous.
I guess I should have added that at the time the MTBE thing went down, the British Royal Family was the principle investor in ARCO (the ARCO Chemical Company that produced MTBE is now part of Lyondell).
I came across a what might work out to be a little gem this morning (WARNING: the next link is a long pdf document. A shorter excerpt is here. I tested the short one, the longer is beyong my bandwidth): A top ARCO executive admitted under oath, “The EPA did not initiate reformulated gasoline....” He clarified that “the oil industry... brought this [MTBE] forward as an alternative to what the EPA had initially proposed,” (which was ethanol being pushed forward by ADM (corporate welfare has become a feeding frenzy)).
Apparently the oil companies knew of the threat from leaking tanks as early as 1981, from a spill in Rockaway, NJ. A Shell hydrogeologist testified in the South Lake Tahoe case that he first dealt with an MTBE spill in 1980 in Rockaway, N.J., where seven MTBE plumes were leaking from underground storage tanks. [Excerpt] [Full document].
I've got more on this if anybody wants it.
My husband worked for ARCO for 25 years, and I have to tell you that the employees hated MTBE. They knew the dangers, but were told that it was government mandated.