I'm still trying to figure out why we have a DoE to begin with. Salazar is in charge of drilling for energy over at Interior, the EPA is in charge of the environmental impacts, Labor is in charge of conditions for those who are harvesting the energy, Transportation is in charge of how it gets from A to B, Commerce is in charge of regulating anything to do with the sale of it, Treasury is in charge of taxing it and collecting the revenue......what is it that the DoE does?
PrintSmith wrote: I'm still trying to figure out why we have a DoE to begin with. Salazar is in charge of drilling for energy over at Interior, the EPA is in charge of the environmental impacts, Labor is in charge of conditions for those who are harvesting the energy, Transportation is in charge of how it gets from A to B, Commerce is in charge of regulating anything to do with the sale of it, Treasury is in charge of taxing it and collecting the revenue......what is it that the DoE does?
Well... this I know from experience (I worked for the DOE for almost 15 years)... they are used to funnel black funds to military projects. Many of the projects at the highly secret Area 51 (Edwards Air Force Base, Groom Lake) was managed by the DOE. And all funding for those project were not public information, nor could that funding be traced to any appropriations.
The DOE also runs the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, which was originally the Solar Energy Research Institute (SERI) set up by Jimmy Carter. Where as the lab has made many advancement in renewable energy, in over 35 years they have not been able to create a self-sustainable alternative energy source. They employ over 1000 people and the support staff spends 6 months out of the year producing budgets and requests for funding for the next year. I've seen the labs contracts and the scoring system used by the DOE to measure progress and contractual obligations and it's a "glad handing" scoring systems that basically makes the lab look good no matter what.
The DOE is also involved with retrofitting federal building with "green" options (Federal Energy Management Project - FEMP) where every federal building and facility is mandated to save "x" amount of energy each year, on a sliding scale which attempts to measure out for 20 years the improvements that can be made and the possible savings. When the savings don't work out according to their rather dubious formulas and algorithms, they will change the formulas. Sort of like climate change modeling. Near impossible to predict reliably but that never stops the government from moving the target and claiming success.
Go to their website... there are tons of projects in which they spend the taxpayers money on. This is only the tip of the iceberg.
