Baby vs Bathwater: When does budget prudence tip over into energy Shortsightism?
By Digest associate editor Joelle Brink
A Washington Beltway newspaper summed it up this way: “Navy 2, Congress 0.” But in what’s fast shaping up as the election year Navy-Congress “playoff game”, the real story is about national security as renewable energy security, and about the drop-in renewable biofuels right now powering a US naval strike group of ships, jet aircraft and land vehicles designed for fossil fuels in the US Navy’s Pacific war games. The Navy doesn’t go to war, or even a war simulation, with unproven technology. That sends a message loud and clear to those who hope the Age of Biofuels has not yet arrived.
If you’re a fossil energy company that is not Shell or BP and forgot to diversify into biofuels, you’ve got to be thinking “there goes my entire market”, maybe not today but certainly somewhere in the near future unless the bioenergy take-over is stopped. So you pick up the phone, call your congressional representatives and instruct them to kill bioenergy funding or at least hold it up, maybe not in those exact terms but making sure they get the message.
Heather Zichal, the White House deputy assistant for energy and climate change, calls that “shortsightism,” and says Congress “needs to get beyond the myopia that is stunting investment in and handcuffing Defense Department use of biofuels. The Defense Department isn’t making these investments in renewable energy and renewable fuels because it sounds good,” she says. “They’re doing it because it makes sense from an operational and national security perspective.
Unfortunately, that hasn’t stopped some in Congress from putting forward short-sighted legislation that would undermine military’s ability to invest in alternative fuels.” Noting that a $1 dollar rise in gas prices would cost the Defense Department $30 million, she emphasized that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta himself has championed biofuels as an important part of the department’s energy mix. But, she said, “some folks, especially here in Washington, are resistant to change even when it is so clearly needed.”
More on the battle over budgets.
In addition to the White House, a coalition of six influential biofuel industry trade organizations and the Biotechnology Industry Organization have lined up behind the Defense Department’s biofuel mission.
Brent Erickson, executive vice-president of BIO and head of its industrial biotechnology section, issued a statement supporting Navy’s demonstration of advanced biofuels during Rim of the Pacific international naval maneuvers. Calling oil refinery industry’s criticisms of the demonstration meritless, he cited the dangers of depending on foreign oil as well as its associated costs. He said that BIO supports U.S. Navy’s “strategically important” decision to support “viable, cost-competitive alternatives to foreign oil.”
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