Military Leaders Want to Save Money and Lives with Clean Energy, While GOP Leaders Want to Stop Them
What’s abundantly clear is that the military’s commitment to clean energy innovation is motivated by a desire to save money and improve the DoD’s bottom line. Sherri Goodman, Executive Director of the Center for Naval Analyses Military Advisory Board, said:
“These programs, by and large, particularly the energy programs, are going to be saving the military departments money in a year of declining defense budgets, so it would be penny-wise and pound-foolish to cut too deeply.”
…
In the last year, the U.S. military has launched substantial and cost-effective initiatives to meet these energy challenges. And yet, despite strong objections from DoD, GOP House members recently voted to block funding for Section 526, which bans the federal procurement of alternative fuels with higher greenhouse gas emissions than conventional fossil fuels as part of extensive and bipartisan energy legislation that passed in 2007.
…
Conservatives opposing further investment in military development and deployment of clean and efficient energy technologies are, to borrow a phrase from Goodman, the definition of ‘penny-wise and pound-foolish.’Eager to score ideological victories by denouncing the reality of climate change and rejecting the existence of readily available climate solutions, Republicans aren’t grasping that cutting spending for an investment that would save energy and money over the long haul doesn’t equal ‘fiscal conservatism.’
