Military is customer-of-last-resort for green scam

Forget Solyndra. Congress ought to be investigating the green scam Obama is perpetrating on the U.S. military.

A front-page, column A story in this morning’s Washington Post entitled “Building a green military machine: Pentagon concludes that alternative fuels are a matter of security” (written by green propagandist Juliet Eilperin) inadvertently exposes the nonsense, if not corruption, of the Obama push to green the military.

Starting her story with an anecdote about the Blue Angels flying a Labor Day Air Expo with biofuels, Eilperin quotes Navy Secretary Ray Mabus as saying,

The main reason we’re moving toward alternative fuels in the Navy and the Marine Corps is to make us better war fighters.

But how substituing a 50-50 mix of biofuel/conventional fuel for 100% conventional fuel makes a jet or its pilot fly or fight better is a mystery.

Eilperin goes on to report,

But the Navy secretary said he is more focused on the fact that a Marine is either wounded or killed for every 50 convoys of fuel brought into Afghanistan than on cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

“That’s just too high a price to pay,” Mabus said…

But as biofuel is less efficient than conventional fuel, it actually takes a greater volume of biofuel to do the same work as conventional fuel — that means more not fewer convoys and casualties. Eilperin, of course, omitted this fact from her report.

Eilperin did include, however, an ironic quote from one Bob Barnes, a retired Army one-star general who is now a policy adviser to the scandal-plagued Nature Conservancy:

One thing the Department of Defense is really good at is risk management and long-term strategic planning.

If so, it couldn’t be proved by Mabus’ biofuel rationale (or for that matter, by the badly wasted lives and training of the 22 Navy Seals sent on a needless mission in a slow-moving chopper to kill a few easily-replaced Taliban fighters).

Eilperin reports,

Mabus has outlined a series of ambitious goals for the Navy and Marine Corps, including ensuring that 50 percent of the services’ energy supply comes from alternative energy such as biofuels and solar power by 2020; cutting fossil fuel use by its non-combat vehicles in half by 2015; and reducing fuel consumption on ships 15 percent by 2020.

In the private sector, alternative energy survives only through mandates. The military-equivalent, of course, are orders from the top — and the military’s often-questionable procurement process.

As Eilperin reports,

The Defense Department has pledged to obtain 25 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2025.

In doing so, it has provided a new target of opportunity for environmentalists and green businesses now that climate legislation has failed and renewable-energy subsidies have come under fire, most recently with the collapse of solar-panel manufacturer Solyndra.

As the Department of Defense spends $15 billion annually on fuel and electricity, the military is ripe for a multi-billion dollar fraud.

Eilperin reports,

Nicole Lederer, co-founder of Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2), said her group’s members have found new opportunities through defense contracts now that Congress has balked at setting national limits on greenhouse gases that would have boosted demand for low-carbon energy.

“We have turned our attention to every other possible avenue for progress,” said Lederer, whose organization partners with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group. “When one door closed, a big window opened with the Department of Defense.”

So the military will be the dumping ground for green junk that no one else wants or can afford.

Isn’t military life already dangerous enough without being made more so by incompetent and corrupt leadership?