Just as our military is preparing for the automatic cuts triggered by the super committee failure, Mona Charen reveals that the U. S. Navy is now paying $15 a gallon for green fuel. The Navy has allotted $12 million for a biofuel/gasoline demonstration project.
This is a case of green ideology run wild. This is the mentality that gave us the Chevy Volt, the electric car that nobody wants because it has a tendency to burst into flames. But potentially crippling the Navy with an unsupportable fuel bill is far more serious than trying to foist the Chevy Volt on an unwilling public.
Charen quotes the astonishing rationale given for this expense:
"We are doing this for one simple reason," explained Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, "It makes us better war fighters. Our use of fossil fuels is a very real threat to our national security and to the U.S. Navy's ability to protect America and project power overseas."
Well, let’s hope this expensive fuel is more effective than the solar panels from Solyndra. Speaking of Solyndra, which cost the taxpayers more than a half billion dollars and whose investors had ties to the Obama administration, T. J. Glauthier, a "strategic advisor" to Solazyme, one of the companies that sells this expensive fuel, reportedly worked on the Obama transition team.
The irony, as Charen notes, is that the United States doesn’t have to do this:
The United States is an energy colossus. Just this week, the state of North Dakota announced that it had produced 488,068 barrels of oil per day in October, up 100,000 barrels from June of this year. State officials predict that by 2013 to 2014, North Dakota will be producing 900,000 barrels a day, putting it ahead of California and Alaska and behind only Texas (at 1.2 million barrels per day) in domestic oil production.
Though the Obama administration regards our energy wealth as a threat to the planet, the untapped resources could be a pillar of American economic resurgence. The Institute for Energy Research predicts that by tapping shale and other sources, the U.S. should be the world's top oil and gas producer by 2020, outpacing Russia and Saudi Arabia. The development of domestic oil and gas would boost the economy, providing jobs that cannot be outsourced, as well as genuinely promoting our national security by ensuring a supply of energy that cannot be manipulated by hostile governments.
The Obama administration has done everything possible to prevent the U.S. from developing its own energy, from a ban on offshore drilling to blocking uranium mining (necessary for nuclear energy).
That same administration has just delayed the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have brought oil from a friendly nation and created jobs in the process. Republicans are trying to tie the payroll tax extension to ending the Keystone delay.
You’d almost think the administration prefers to pay $15 for a gallon of biofuel.