As the price of gasoline consumes the disposable income of the middle class and drains the
pockets of the poor, the debate over biofuels heats up once again. I say once again because biofuels
are not new and in fact the first internal combustion engines were developed to run on biofuels.
Let’s look at the historical development of ethanol as a fuel put out by the Energy Information
Administration of the United State’s Department of Energy:

1826 – Samuel Morey developed an engine that ran on ethanol and turpentine.

1860 – German engine inventor Nicholas Otto used ethanol as the fuel in one of his engines. Otto
is best known for his development of a modern internal combustion engine (the Otto Cycle) in 1876.

1862 – The Union Congress put a $2 per gallon excise tax on ethanol to help pay for the Civil
War. Prior to the Civil War, ethanol was a major illuminating oil in the United States. After the
tax was imposed, ethanol cost too much to be used this way.

1896 – Henry Ford built his first automobile, the quadricycle, to run on pure ethanol.

1906 – Over 50 years after imposing the tax on ethanol, Congress removed it, making ethanol an
alternative to gasoline as a motor fuel.

1908 – Henry Ford produced the Model T. As a flexible fuel vehicle, it could run on ethanol,
gasoline, or a combination of the two.

1917 – 1918 – The need for fuel during World War I drove up ethanol demand to 50-60 million
gallons per year.

1920’s – Gasoline became the motor fuel of choice. Standard Oil began adding ethanol to gasoline
to increase octane and reduce engine knocking.

Why did gasoline become the "motor fuel of choice"? Ford’s Model T was able to be
driven on ethanol, and Henry Ford touted it as the "fuel of the future." He envisioned
that every farm would be a filling station for his cars. Not only was Henry Ford an advocate of
ethanol but also peanut oil and soybean oil to be used as fuel for his diesel engines.

Standard Oil was started and owned by John D. Rockefeller who was a ruthless pursuer of profits
and generally recognized as the prototypical "robber baron". It just so happens that he
got involved with the "Temperance Movement" and with his financial support steered it and
the country to establish "Prohibition" in 1919. With Prohibition as the excuse, law
enforcement officers went around the country and destroyed the farm based ethanol plants which
ushered in the era of the dominance of John D. Rockefeller’s gasoline. Now America has involved
herself in wars around the globe to secure petroleum for her addiction to gasoline and diesel fuel.

The revolutionary engine that Rudolph Diesel unveiled to the world in Paris in 1900 wasn’t
powered by diesel fuel. Diesel’s diesel ran on peanut oil. To Diesel, his invention was more than a
mere machine. It was an engine of social change.

"The diesel engine can be fed with vegetable oils," Diesel explained in 1912, "and
would help considerably in the development of agriculture of the countries which use it."
Rudolph Diesel died a year later after making this statement.

George Washington Carver first tested soybeans, among other plants, to find uses for them and
diminish the dependence on cotton as the single commodity of the Southern economy. He invented
soybean based varnishes, paints, inks, mayonnaise, salad dressings, linoleum, plastic and even fuel.
He and Henry Ford partnered up and used soybeans to make plastic window handles, gas pedals and even
dent proof trunk covers for many of the Fords built in the 1930’s and 40’s. The original diesel
engine, invented by Rudolph Diesel, actually ran off of peanut oil based on Carver’s research.

Now if we couple this information on how the farmers could have benefited if cars were run off of
ethanol from corn and diesel fuel from soybeans and peanuts with the fact that in the South black
farmers owned almost 16 million acres of land in 1910, now we can really imagine what the economic
condition of the South and black people in general could have been without John D. Rockefeller and
the Dupont family which made their fortunes developing chemicals from petroleum. More recently
imagine what America could have been like if President Jimmy Carter was successful in the late 1970s
in his attempt to reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil by utilizing the already existing
technologies on renewable energy. Thirty years later faced with global warming and global warring,
the oil companies are still paying scientists to argue against the effects of automobile emissions
on climate change. The oil companies are also pulling at the heart strings and stomachs of the
consumers by arguing that using feed crops for fuel will starve the poor and increase the price of
meat.

The Honorable Elijah Muhammad has taught us that both soybeans and peanuts are not fit for human
consumption, so diversion of these crops to fuel would increase the world’s health. Most of
America’s farm land is not used to grow fruits, vegetables and grains for human consumption, but
is used to produce feed for cattle, hogs and chickens. Cattle and hogs are particularly very
inefficient converters of the sun’s energy into food. It takes ten times more acres of land to
grow feed to produce a pound of meat from animals than it takes to grow a pound of food fed directly
to humans. The stomachs of cows are designed to eat grass, not corn grain, requiring grain fed cows
to be given sodium bicarbonate to stop their stomachs from bloating. And since modern science is
finally bearing witness to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad’s teachings that meat is not good for us,
using land to produce fuel could help us be healthier by breaking us away from so much meat.

There are other sources of energy that could be used other than our decreasing supply of fossil
fuels such as wind, solar, tidal and hydrogen. The electric car is not a new idea. In fact GM
developed an electric car to be sold in California, but discontinued its production and crushed the
cars after it was able to lobby the California senate to repeal its stringent auto emissions
requirements. Check out the movie, "Who Killed the Electric Car".

However, the history of America and the West has demonstrated that the politically connected and
the wealthy determine what technologies are used. People are not suffering, poor and hungry due to a
lack of the earth’s resources or the dearth of human ingenuity. People are suffering because of
the devious minds and ruthless behavior of those who continue to enslave humanity by controlling
resources. When the majority of people lived on small farms and the technologies of ethanol and
peanut oil as fuel were invented, the people could have been both free and wealthy. However, only a
few people had the resources to find, pump and process fossil fuels and this was the course that the
world was taken on. Now the people locked up in the cities have got to make a decision on their
future. Take on the "bloodsuckers" or continue to be bled to death.