Now the GOP is caught between a rock and a hard place

Grab the popcorn, kids, because the GOP, that party that professes to worship the military, has to decide whether its first loyalty is to the military or to the petroleum companies that are part-owners, along with Rupert Murdoch, or their party:

With insurgents increasingly attacking the American fuel supply convoys that lumber across the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan, the military is pushing aggressively to develop, test and deploy renewable energy to decrease its need to transport fossil fuels.

Last week, a Marine company from California arrived in the rugged outback of Helmand Province bearing novel equipment: portable solar panels that fold up into boxes; energy-conserving lights; solar tent shields that provide shade and electricity; solar chargers for computers and communications equipment.

The 150 Marines of Company I, Third Battalion, Fifth Marines, will be the first to take renewable technology into a battle zone, where the new equipment will replace diesel and kerosene-based fuels that would ordinarily generate power to run their encampment.

Even as Congress has struggled unsuccessfully to pass an energy bill and many states have put renewable energy on hold because of the recession, the military this year has pushed rapidly forward. After a decade of waging wars in remote corners of the globe where fuel is not readily available, senior commanders have come to see overdependence on fossil fuel as a big liability, and renewable technologies — which have become more reliable and less expensive over the past few years — as providing a potential answer. These new types of renewable energy now account for only a small percentage of the power used by the armed forces, but military leaders plan to rapidly expand their use over the next decade.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, the huge truck convoys that haul fuel to bases have been sitting ducks for enemy fighters — in the latest attack, oil tankers carrying fuel for NATO troops in Afghanistan were set on fire in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, early Monday. In Iraq and Afghanistan, one Army study found, for every 24 fuel convoys that set out, one soldier or civilian engaged in fuel transport was killed. In the past three months, six Marines have been wounded guarding fuel runs in Afghanistan.

“There are a lot of profound reasons for doing this, but for us at the core it’s practical,” said Ray Mabus, the Navy secretary and a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, who has said he wants 50 percent of the power for the Navy and Marines to come from renewable energy sources by 2020. That figure includes energy for bases as well as fuel for cars and ships.

“Fossil fuel is the No. 1 thing we import to Afghanistan,” Mr. Mabus said, “and guarding that fuel is keeping the troops from doing what they were sent there to do, to fight or engage local people.”

He and other experts also said that greater reliance on renewable energy improved national security, because fossil fuels often came from unstable regions and scarce supplies were a potential source of international conflict.

Gee, ya think? For nearly a decade since the 9/11 attacks, Republicans have been touting the greedy consumption of fossil fuels as some kind of national virtue. Solar is for hippies. Hybrid cars are for wusses. Renewable energy is bunk, drill baby drill — that’s what we hear from Republicans, even after the BP oil spill’s befouling of the Gulf of Mexico. The military is not calling for increased domestic drilling, it’s calling for renewable energy so that it doesn’t have to lose soldiers to IEDs while transporting gasoline and other petroleum-based fuels across dangerous areas. But military leaders also seem to recognize what Republicans refuse to — that oil meand dependence on an increasingly hostile part of the world, and that anyone who doesn’t advocate weaning ourselves off of oil is simply asking for more young American dead.

Somehow I don’t think we’re going to hear Republicans talking about changing the Constitution for Arnold Schwarzenegger again any time soon

Certainly not after his amazing speech today. Would that the Democrats had this kind of guts to tell it like it is.

The full speech isn’t available yet, but here’s a peek:

Thomas Friedman is starting to sound like one o’them lefty bloggers

And damn it, he owes us after spending the last decade extolling the virtues of outsourcing everyone else’s job while his own was safe and defending George W. Bush’s war.

But even so, we must give credit where it is due, and so kudos to Friedman (good Lord, did I just actually say that?) for pointing out that John McCain’s bellowing about how Congress needs to get back to work on an energy plan is just so much hot air:

John McCain recently tried to underscore his seriousness about pushing through a new energy policy, with a strong focus on more drilling for oil, by telling a motorcycle convention that Congress needed to come back from vacation immediately and do something about America’s energy crisis. “Tell them to come back and get to work!” McCain bellowed.

Sorry, but I can’t let that one go by. McCain knows why.

It was only five days earlier, on July 30, that the Senate was voting for the eighth time in the past year on a broad, vitally important bill — S. 3335 — that would have extended the investment tax credits for installing solar energy and the production tax credits for building wind turbines and other energy-efficiency systems.

Both the wind and solar industries depend on these credits — which expire in December — to scale their businesses and become competitive with coal, oil and natural gas. Unlike offshore drilling, these credits could have an immediate impact on America’s energy profile.

Senator McCain did not show up for the crucial vote on July 30, and the renewable energy bill was defeated for the eighth time. In fact, John McCain has a perfect record on this renewable energy legislation. He has missed all eight votes over the last year — which effectively counts as a no vote each time. Once, he was even in the Senate and wouldn’t leave his office to vote.

“McCain did not show up on any votes,” said Scott Sklar, president of The Stella Group, which tracks clean-technology legislation. Despite that, McCain’s campaign commercial running during the Olympics shows a bunch of spinning wind turbines — the very wind turbines that he would not cast a vote to subsidize, even though he supports big subsidies for nuclear power.

Barack Obama did not vote on July 30 either — which is equally inexcusable in my book — but he did vote on three previous occasions in favor of the solar and wind credits.

The fact that Congress has failed eight times to renew them is largely because of a hard core of Republican senators who either don’t want to give Democrats such a victory in an election year or simply don’t believe in renewable energy.

Last week the friend who is afraid to vote for Obama because of the e-mail smears forwarded me another gem from one of her wingnut friends. This one was about the states in the U.S. where there is oil and that we should tell the “dipsticks” in Washington to get drilling. What the e-mail didn’t say was that the oil leases in these states aren’t being used and that it has nothing to do with Congress; and it also didn’t say that at the same time as oil companies want to drill off the coast of the U.S., they are exporting an ever-higher percentage of the oil they do find. I don’t usually forward political material to her, because she has pretty much decided who she’s going to believe, but on this one I had to send it along. I can’t fight vestigial racism, particularly racism that is not acknowledged by those who still have it (much as they would like to believe they don’t), but I can fight complete and utter horsepuckey.

But they want to drill for sticky black stuff everywhere

You don’t even have to STUDY the environmental impact of offshore drilling, we already know the impact:

But for the Bush Administration, it’s “Full Speed Ahead!” on drilling, while they want a fucking environmental impact on….solar power.

Yes, folks, SOLAR:

Faced with a surge in the number of proposed solar power plants, the federal government has placed a moratorium on new solar projects on public land until it studies their environmental impact, which is expected to take about two years.

The Bureau of Land Management says an extensive environmental study is needed to determine how large solar plants might affect millions of acres it oversees in six Western states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah.

But the decision to freeze new solar proposals temporarily, reached late last month, has caused widespread concern in the alternative-energy industry, as fledgling solar companies must wait to see if they can realize their hopes of harnessing power from swaths of sun-baked public land, just as the demand for viable alternative energy is accelerating.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” said Holly Gordon, vice president for legislative and regulatory affairs for Ausra, a solar thermal energy company in Palo Alto, Calif. “The Bureau of Land Management land has some of the best solar resources in the world. This could completely stunt the growth of the industry.”

Much of the 119 million surface acres of federally administered land in the West is ideal for solar energy, particularly in Arizona, Nevada and Southern California, where sunlight drenches vast, flat desert tracts.

Galvanized by the national demand for clean energy development, solar companies have filed more than 130 proposals with the Bureau of Land Management since 2005. They center on the companies’ desires to lease public land to build solar plants and then sell the energy to utilities.

According to the bureau, the applications, which cover more than one million acres, are for projects that have the potential to power more than 20 million homes.

All involve two types of solar plants, concentrating and photovoltaic. Concentrating solar plants use mirrors to direct sunlight toward a synthetic fluid, which powers a steam turbine that produces electricity. Photovoltaic plants use solar panels to convert sunlight into electric energy.

Much progress has been made in the development of both types of solar technology in the last few years. Photovoltaic solar projects grew by 48 percent in 2007 compared with 2006. Eleven concentrating solar plants are operational in the United States, and 20 are in various stages of planning or permitting, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association.

The manager of the Bureau of Land Management’s environmental impact study, Linda Resseguie, said that many factors must be considered when deciding whether to allow solar projects on the scale being proposed, among them the impact of construction and transmission lines on native vegetation and wildlife. In California, for example, solar developers often hire environmental experts to assess the effects of construction on the desert tortoise and Mojave ground squirrel.

Since when do they give a flying fuck about native vegetation and wildlife? They want to drill in the Alaskan National Wildlife refuge, with idiotic wingnut Congresswomen claiming that the caribou will belly up to the nice warm pipes to have their Starbucks. You think I’m joking?

This Administration is going to do everything it can, via squeezing Americans at the gas pumps, to get its way on oil drilling, the better to enrich the Bush and Cheney families and their cronies and friends in the oil industry. Meanwhile, a young industry that promises a renewable source of fuel is subject to a freeze while the federal government drags its feet on environmental impact studies that it doesn’t find necessary while drilling for poison.

And with John McCain, we get even more of this insanity.

President Incendiary Trousers

George W. Bush, in his 2007 State of the Union Address:

Let us build on the work we have done and reduce gasoline usage in the United States by 20 percent in the next ten years — thereby cutting our total imports by the equivalent of three-quarters of all the oil we now import from the Middle East.

To reach this goal, we must increase the supply of alternative fuels, by setting a mandatory fuels standard to require 35 billion gallons of renewable and alternative fuels in 2017 — this is nearly five times the current target. At the same time, we need to reform and modernize fuel economy standards for cars the way we did for light trucks — and conserve up to eight and a half billion more gallons of gasoline by 2017.

George W. Bush, today:

Weeks after pledging major investments in renewable energy, President George W. Bush is calling for cuts at Colorado’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, drawing complaints Monday from two of the state’s Democratic lawmakers.

A centerpiece of Bush’s State of the Union speech this year was a 20 percent cut in gasoline use by 2017 made possible in part by increasing the use of renewable fuels.

Colorado’s Democratic lawmakers criticized Bush’s proposed budget, delivered to Congress on Monday, for increasing spending on fossil fuel and nuclear development while cutting the Energy Department’s renewable research lab by 3 percent.

Bush’s proposed budget would decrease funding for the Golden, Colo., lab to $181.5 million from $187.5 million, they said. The lab does the nation’s primary research on renewable energy and energy efficiency.

Why does anyone still believe anything this president says?