Green Fertilizer

Farmers will often plant a green crop such as alfalfa or timothy and then, after a month or so, plow it under in order to enrich the soil. It's called green fertilizer. Apparently our federal government has similar notions about their environmental, or "green," investments ... only the appropriate word is not fertilizer. It's the s-word. It is "green s-word" and the Department of Energy under the Obummer administration has produced tens of billions of dollars of such s-wordy investments ... no, wrong word ... these were basically give-aways ... otherwise known as crony capitalism. And now the shame of this evil largess is keeping the Department of Energy from releasing key documents to Congress investigators that chronicle these insider deals ... see: Daily Caller Article. Of course this withholding of key documents is illegal ... but when has this been a consideration of one of the most corrupt administration's since Richard M. Nixon.

I have commented on this cringe-worth crony capitalism before ... see: Crony Capitalism and Crony Capitalism Redux. Read 'em and weep.

Bile Green

The Obummer administration has just scored another big crony-capital debacle in its thoughtless pursuit of clean green energy ... see:  Breitbart Story. This time the will-o-the-wisp was biofuels and the cost to U.S. taxpayers looks like it will total something like $2.34 billion. The rat hole down which these funds were pored was Abengoa Bioenergy ... a Spanish firm ... showing that our government's poor financial judgement shows no national boundaries.

The project on which so much was squandered was cellulosic biofuels to be produced at the Hugoton, Kansas plant and six other U.S. locations. The Hugoton plant had a projected production capacity of 25 million barrels of ethanol. So far it has yet to sell its first barrel.

Of course this is not this Energy Department's first financial disaster. I have written in the past about a series of other bile green investments ... see: Frugal Green Energy. I choose not to add up the total taxpayer losses from the 13 failed green projects mentioned  ... for I am afraid my head would explode. However, my best guess is that it is north of $50 billion dollars.

Perhaps, if the Department of Energy could have found 97% of all climate scientists (the magic number) to agreed on these investments, it might have had a better batting average ... but I doubt it.