l****z
发帖数: 29846 | 1 The Obama Navy Illustrates Why America Is Sinking: PC Navy Buying Biofuel At
$16 A Gallon
In Obama’s God damn America we do truly breathtakingly stupid things and
then keep doing them until we collapse. And then of course we can also add
a healthy mixture of Obama’s crony capitalist fascism:
Navy buys biofuel for $16 a gallon
posted at 7:00 pm on December 11, 2011 by J.E. Dyer
This is going to help the Defense Department weather looming budget cuts
, for sure. Teaming up with the Department of Agriculture (which has a
cheery Rotary Club ring to it), the Navy has purchased 450,000 gallons of
biofuel for about $16 a gallon, or about 4 times the price of its standard
marine fuel, JP-5, which has been going for under $4 a gallon.
You won’t be surprised to learn that a member of Obama’s presidential
transition team, T. J. Glauthier, is a “strategic advisor” at Solazyme,
the California company that is selling a portion of the biofuel to the Navy.
Glauthier worked – shock, shock – on the energy-sector portion of the
2009 stimulus bill.
The Navy sale isn’t Solazyme’s first trip to the public trough, of
course. The company got a $21.8 million grant from the 2009 stimulus package.
Solazyme’s partner in the biofuel sale is Dynamic Fuels, a Louisiana
company owned jointly by Tyson Foods and Tulsa-based Syntroleum. Tyson and
Syntroleum are distinguished by having profitable lines of business that do
not rely on government grants to unprofitable “green” projects. This does
not make their biofuel product price-competitive with fossil fuels, however.
(They were induced to develop biofuel manufacturing processes by a
combination of subsidies and tax breaks.)
The Dynamic Fuels plant was opened for business in Geismar, LA in 2010,
becoming by far the largest biofuels plant in North America – and
reportedly, in combination with a plant in Finland, a producer of 94% of the
world’s biofuels. This is great boosterism stuff, but the biofuels
produced by Dynamic Fuels are still considerably more expensive than the
fossil-fuel alternative. Dynamic Fuels has begun supplying aviation biofuel
to KLM, the Dutch flag carrier, but of course, the use of more-expensive
biofuels by commercial carriers has to be subsidized by governments.
If governments stopped subsidizing biofuels, their artificial “
profitability” would disappear overnight. Price-wise, they can’t compete
with fossil fuels. The day may come when they can, but subsidizing them
while they don’t is not a method with any record of success for encouraging
price efficiency. What it does instead is create languishing public
dependencies and tremendous opportunities for cronyism, as demonstrated in
the Solyndra scandal.
As the Institute for Energy Research article (top link) indicates, the
US has enormous reserves of both conventional and unconventional oil and
natural gas resources. Opening them up for exploitation would, among other
things, ensure that the US armed forces could buy cheaper fuel – cheaper
than today’s prices – produced in the USA. At a time when federal debt is
spiraling and the Defense Department is facing budget cuts that are
guaranteed to gut the fighting forces and render them ineffective, it seems
to border on insane to eschew a ready, significantly cheaper alternative and
require the armed services to quadruple what they pay for fuel as a proof
of concept – apparently with the idea that the forces should buy more of
the 4-times-as-expensive fuel. This is, after all, our national security we
’re talking about.
While Obama is making the Navy shoot itself in both feet by buying fuel that
costs FOUR TIMES what they need to spend, he is simultaneously demanding
that the military’s budget be gutted by $600 billion – AFTER he already
gutted it $450 billion the year before.
And to “pay for” forcing the Navy to purchase fuel that costs four times
more than what they had been buying, Obama is going to lay off more than 3,
000 valuable mid-level sailors who make up the heart of our armed forces.
Hopefully all that biofuel is for ships with names like “The USS Dodo Bird.
” Because that’s the way we’re going under this president’s leadership.
Or maybe the “USS Teapot Dome” in honor of Obama’s in-your-face blatant
corruption. |
|
