Friday, February 06, 2009

FuturePork

An MIT report concluded "the U.S. government begin thinking about such a portfolio of demonstration projects and not be singularly focused on any one project such as FutureGen." And the Washington Post editorial board also concluded the technology was "prohibitively expensive."

So in effect the inclusion of $2 billion for a near zero emissions powerplant amounts to a staggering earmark — one that's nine times the cost of the bridge to nowhere. It's also substantially larger than Congress' previous earmark record of $1.5 billion for the DC metro system last year.

After FutureGen was abandoned, disgraced Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich paid Cassidy and Associates, a major Washington, D.C. lobbying firm, $468,000 in public funds to lobby to restart the project. The Illinois delegation in Congress has also been pushing hard for the FutureGen earmark