As the Department of Defense (DoD) faces drastic budget cuts, the last thing the military needs is to be forced by President Obama to spend billions of taxpayer dollars on an expensive green energy agenda.
This week President Obama’s green regime at the Pentagon will be in the spotlight as the U.S. Navy’s “Great Green Fleet” – a strike group that the Obama administration hopes to run completely on alternative fuels by 2016 – sets sail as part of training exercises in the Pacific. One would think the fleet would take to the seas with a great deal of fanfare, but the Navy has kept it quiet and it’s not difficult to figure out why. President Obama clearly doesn’t want the American people to know how much his plan to green the military will cost. As Wired magazine uncovered, a recent DoD report revealed that their biofuels program will amount to an extra $1.8 billion a year in fuel costs for the Navy alone.
This ludicrous pricetag is not surprising: through Congressional oversight efforts, we found that in 2009, the Navy paid an outrageous $424 per gallon for 20,000 gallons of renewable diesel, and in December 2011, the Navy purchased 450,000 gallons of biofuel for $12 million, equaling about $27 a gallon. The Navy is not the only service being subject to this great greening agenda: last month, the Air Force bought 11,000 gallons of alcohol-to-jet fuel at $59 a gallon, twice as much per gallon as what the Navy was forced to spend. And all of this is being done by the Obama administration while the president guts our military.
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