EDITORIAL: Obama the biofool

Leftists see the military more as a playground for kooky ideas than as the primary responsibility of the federal government. Consider the scheme President Obama announced Tuesday that will have the armed forces devote a great deal of time, money and energy to switch to so-called advanced biofuels. Underneath the trendy “green” label, however, is a classic example of pork-barrel politics. Under the White House plan, the Departments of Agriculture, Energy and the Navy will divert $510 million in taxpayer funds to develop less efficient sources of power to meet the Navy’s transportation needs. This represents a small down payment, as Navy Secretary Ray Mabus committed to converting half of the Navy’s petroleum use to biofuel by the year 2020. That’s an expensive proposition. The combined services last year used 130 million barrels of petroleum, worth about $13.4 billion, according to Defense Logistics Agency figures. Military experiments with various plant, animal-fat and algae-based fuels represented a fraction of even the daily need of the world’s single largest consumer of oil. So the plan is to subsidize these pie-in-the-sky boondoggles. “Current processes for producing advanced drop-in biofuels are expensive,” an administration memorandum explained. “Therefore, it is necessary that the federal government cooperates with industry to create a strong demand signal and to make targeted investments to achieve the necessary production capacity required.” In other words, nobody in their right mind would select this stuff as a fuel. Despite being $14.6 trillion in debt, the Obama administration plans to blow millions investing in something the private sector says is a fool’s bet...more