From Friday Free for All, Smoothfur asks:
Does anybody out there have any memory of the reason given for the establishment of the DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY during the Carter Administration? Anybody? Anything? No? Didn't think so. Bottom line . . we've spent several hundred billion dollars in support of an agency the reason for which not one person who reads this can remember.
Ready? It was very simple, and at the time e v e r y o n e thought it very appropriate.
The Department of Energy (located very inappropriately at 1000 Independence Ave ) was instituted 8-04-1977
TO LESSEN OUR DEPENDENCE ON FOREIGN OIL. HEY, PRETTY EFFICIENT, HUH?
AND NOW IT'S 2008, 31 YEARS LATER, AND THE BUDGET FOR THIS NECESSARY DEPARTMENT IS AT $24.2 BILLION A YEAR, THEY HAVE 16,000 FEDERAL EMPLOYEES, AND APPROXIMATELY 100,000 CONTRACT EMPLOYEES. This is your government at work.
Saturday, October 25, 2008
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4 comments:
Well Smoothfur, if that is indeed their stated mission, they've failed horribly. If however, the Department of Energy were somehow reformed into a giant venture capital firm, helping to mature technologies in order that they might indeed help lessen our dependence on foreign oil, I say, let her rip!
A thoughtful albeit politically biased answer from an avowed Liberal Democrat.
"Ah yes. And if we had actually done what Carter proposed we would be in a much better place than we are now. He was totally correct. Unfortunately he was a Democrat/Liberal/Enemy and was stopped in his tracks and replaced by Republicans who had absolutely no intention of moving away from our dependence on oil for obvious reasons. The speed limit was raised and serious attempts to curb our dependence on oil ceased. The only Democratic president since Carter, Bill Clinton, never had enough power to buck the oil establishment.
As for the DoE, most of the budget is spent on nuclear energy, weapons, safety, etc. The DoE was created from several nuclear bureaus and offices. It was not established to lessen our dependence on foreign oil. It was established to clear up the control of nuclear energy.
Carter did push for energy independence, but those ideas were stripped from the DoE mission by subsequent presidents."
http://www.energy.gov/about/timeline1971-1980.htm
http://www.cdi.org/pdfs/DOE2009BudgetRequest.pdf
Well, not all agencies can be as effective as, say, the Departmunt of Edjukashun.
Um... no... Subsequent liberal administrations caved to environmental special interest groups and killed the nuclear power industry in the US. We walked away from it, as opposed to France, who pushed forward and patented ways to recycle nuclear waste, etc. So now much of the world is way ahead of us with nuclear power.
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