We’ve translated President Obama’s “all of the above” energy policy before. Basically, it’s to rid the US of energy from fossil fuels. Now, no translation is needed.
Dan Arvizu, director of Colorado’s own National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), a taxpayer-funded arm of the Department of Energy, says “fossil fuels should be phased out by 2040 to blunt man-made climate change” reports the Denver Post.
Arvizu refers to natural gas as simply “a nice bridge technology, but not the answer we are looking for in terms of a transition and transformation,” away from fossil fuels and toward alternatives such as wind, solar, and biofuels, of which NREL is a champion.
NREL has seen its budget and influence grow under the Obama administration. We reported in September of last year that NREL’s budget exploded 63.4 percent from 2007 to 2010. While taxpayers suffered the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, NREL received nearly $300 million in “stimulus” funds to create 219 jobs. To put that in perspective, Colorado’s oil and gas industry “directly employs over 40,000 people and supports over 107,000 jobs in the state and provides $6.5 billion in total labor income and $31 billion in economic output annually,” according to the Colorado Oil and Gas Association (COGA).
Even if COGA is off by a factor of half, the oil and gas industry is economically more beneficial to Colorado than NREL, which claims substantial increases in economic benefit but still doesn’t equal the percentage increase in its taxpayer-funded budget according to an NREL press release.
NREL’s economic impact grew 41 percent from FY 2009’s $588.3 million, and 12 percent from FY 2010’s $742 million, as construction continued on energy-efficient research and office buildings that will house employees leading the nation to a clean energy future.
So taxpayer-funded NREL wants to get rid of privately-funded fossil fuel industry. We now know what President Obama’s “all of the above” energy policy looks like and doesn’t really include all sources of energy.
