Obama's Imaginary Solutions To Real Problems

Algae, you say? I wonder whatever happened to this?

Fast forward a couple of years, citizen, and forget that inconvenient idea. The New Five Year Plan revolves around powering our cars with pond scum.

To give you an idea how impractical this is at its current stage, let's look at a couple of numbers. In 2010, the U.S. produced about 138 billion gallons of gasoline. At $3.00/gallon, that's a market worth north of $400 billion annually.

Obama's magical solution? Spending $0.085 billion on researching algal fuels now with a proposed increase to this research of $0.014 billion.

He says algal fuels can replace "up to" 17% of a $400 billion revenue stream yet proposes to invest $0.099 billion to achieve this? We either need to be investing several orders of magnitude more in this miracle technology or zero. Given the Federal government's track record as a venture capitalist and our current financial situation, I'll go with zero.

This is more laughable than a call to inflate your tires, which at least has the advantage of being something you can do immediately and for free (or thereabouts).

We may bitch about our choices to replace this clown, but none of them, not even Luap Nor, are as unserious about the problems we face and the solutions to them as Obama is.

posted by Andy at 04:50 PM

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