Obama’s Wish List for Energy

[wtmusic]

"The Energy Department’s budget request for the fiscal year that begins on Oct. 1 sounds a familiar theme. 'The United States is competing in a global race for the clean energy jobs of the future,' a cover letter from the federal energy secretary, Steven Chu, says.

'Do we want the clean energy technologies of tomorrow to be invented in America by American innovators, made by American workers and sold around the world?' he writes. 'Or do we want to concede those jobs to our competitors?'

Yet the $27.2 billion budget request itself is mostly about nuclear energy. It calls for $7.6 billion for a 'safe, secure' stockpile of weapons, $2.5 billion for nonproliferation efforts and $5.7 billion for the continuing struggle to clean up the environmental effects of weapons manufacturing dating back to the Manhattan Project and the cold war."

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/14/obamas-wish-list-for-energy/

[think]

1. Most of this shit should be in the fracking military budget. What a fracking joke /nt

[wtmusic]

2. Agree. nt

[think]

3. Frustrating isn't it? Lying through reclassification is now the US Govt norm /nt

[wtmusic]

5. Like the current attempt to fund oil drilling in the House transportation bill

"Drilling" is to "Transportation" what "Citizens United" is to "Fraud".

[think]

7. Was not aware of this. TY. Oil drilling is now transportation.

What an Orwellian world we live in...

[PamW]

4. It used to be...

Most of this shit should be in the fracking military budget.
=================================

It used to be...up until 1947. In 1947, the USA made a decision that nuclear weapons and the knowledge and facilities needed to design, build, and maintain them; was going to be under civilian control.

So in 1947, the Congress passed the Atomic Energy Act of 1947, and amended it in 1954 by passing the Atomic Energy Act of 1954.

Those Acts created the AEC; which owned the nuclear weapons design / production complex as well as nuclear power research and nuclear power regulation. In 1974, Congress decided to split the regulatory function away and created the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA) to supplant the AEC. In 1978, Congress created the Dept. of Energy by folding ERDA, and several other energy agencies into a new Cabinet Department.

So the responsibility for maintenance of nuclear weapons remains in civillian hands in the DOE, and is NOT part of the Pentagon budget, so it is not managed by the military.

In 1992, President George H.W. Bush began a nuclear testing moratorium ( the last US nuclear test was in Sept 23, 1992 ). In July 1993, President Clinton decided that the Bush moratorium would be extended indefinitely. However, those nuclear tests were used to check both the reliability and safety of nuclear weapons. The USA had to have a program to ensure reliability and safety. The USA couldn't ignore the reliability and safety of nuclear weapons any more than an airline could stop doing regular maintenance on its airliners and just "hope" that they would function properly.

So President Clinton instituted a program called "Science-based Stockpile Stewardship" in which laboratory-scale experiments, and massive computer simulations supplanted nuclear testing. President Clinton was told, and acknowledged that Stockpile Stewardship would be much more expensive than doing nuclear testing, but made the decision it was worth it to stop testing. ( Image safety tests for cars. The cheapest thing is to put instumented dummies in a car and actually crash it into a wall. That's analogous to nuclear testing. However, imagine if the car companies couldn't crash test cars and had to buy big supercomputers and do lots of laboratory tests on steel to determine all the mechanical properties of steel to input into the simulations...)

As a condition to the Senate's ratification of the latest arms control agreements with Russia ( the Kyl Amendment ), the price for further reductions in the US stockpile was increase assurance of the remainder of the stockpile; and hence an increase in spending for nuclear weapons. It's a condition on the Senate's ratification. If President Obama doesn't increase the nuclear weapons budget as he agreed, the Kyl Amendment revokes the Senate's ratification of our latest arms reductions treaty with Russia.

You have your choice; spend more on nuclear weapons, or lose the latest arms reduction treaty.

PamW

[think]

6. Extortion isn't a choice and lying through false classification is still lying

I realize you are just explaining the situation. Thank you for doing so. Still my response is aimed at a situation that is in need of being addressed beyond the limited choices given.

[happyslug]

8. No closing of the Washington and Lincoln Memorials?

Or, that was the old ploy of the Park Service, whenever Congress wanted the Park Service to cut back. i.e. Congress would cut the budget of the Park Service and tell the Park Service to cut its less important parks, which the Park Service did by first defining the least important park as being in DC. We have to remember before Disney World opened up in the early 1970s, DC was the #1 tourist destination on the nation. By closing down the DC Memorials, tourist would find them close and then go to their Congressman and complain. Congress would then allocate more money for the Park Service.

Now, the Park Service was the most overt practitioner of this art (and congress "solved" the practice of the Park Service, but making a separate line for the Washington and Lincoln Memorials, thus the Park Service can no longer close them down when Congress cut the Park Service's Budget) the other branches of Government were worse. In the 1980s for example The Air Force, when told to cut expenses would say it would ground all of the A-10 attack planes, knowing the Army would fight to get them back for the Army was more dependent in the A-10 then the Air Force was. Another example was the Army was told to close down bases, would put up Azores base for the first base to Close, the Air Force which did the Security around the base would agree, both knowing the Navy, which flies the planes out of the Azores would fight to keep open the port (run by the Army) and the Security for the base (run by the Air Force). The Navy and Marines are not above such fight, in the 1990s the Marines ask to be assigned new missions so it could expand, and justified the growth on the ground the Marines could do it for it was ship based, and all that was needed was to transfer Tanks from the Army to the Marines.

I fully believe such items are in the proposed budget, items that the various parts of the executive branch know Congress will add or expand on its own. Other parts are in the budget to give Congress something to cut, so Congress can show it has cut somethings.

Remember it is Congress that actually decides the budget, all the proposed budget is an offer by the President what he thinks the budget should be but it is nothing but the base Congress will use to set the actual budget. This is the start of the Fight not the end point.

[caraher]

9. Nothing new here

Historically DOE has always been mainly about the weapons labs and research on things other than energy. This isn't some kind of bait-and-switch; it's quite the opposite. Under Chu and Obama, basic and applied energy research are growing (though not rapidly enough). For some perspective, check out what happened to DOE energy research following the Carter years (according to an APS study):



You can see DOE budget data directly from their site There's a link to an Excel spreadsheet of historical budgets.



Looking at outlays, you can see stimulus spike in spending on energy projects followed by a contraction thanks to the idiocy of the ginned-up deficit "crisis." But even so, the projected outlays for energy are healthier than the pre-Obama values.