You want to piss off a Californian, bring up MTBE. It was shoved down our throats, and ended up poisoning groundwater and lakes. If a private company had done this, instead of the government, the CEO would be in jail.

Our local talk radio station made this a major cause a few years ago, saying this stuff was poisoning the environment, and they were called crackpots by the EPA. Supposedly it is being phased out, but I don't see a lot of action there.

One brand of gas, the "76" stations, advertise MTBE-free gas. I don't know how they manage that.

It has been proven that gasoline can be made clean enough without either MTBE OR ethanol. But nobody seems to be interested in that.

I'm of two minds on the exemption you link to. It wasn't the oil companies' idea to put this crap in the gas. They were made to do it. But on the other hand, they made a lot of extra money off the "enhanced" gas, and maybe they could have used ethanol instead. I could see them picking up at least some of the costs of cleanup, but it would be rotten to make them carry the whole load when it was mandated.