A nighttime view of the devastated barrier island towns of Bay Head and Mantoloking, N.J., whose lights normally glitter across the Barnegat Bay into Point Pleasant. With the exception of emergencey crews working in the distance (the crane in the bottom right corner sits at the site of the partially submerged Mantoloking Bridge) , that region as of this writing largely remains in darkness.
Project launched in wake of Hurricane Sandy
Less than a week after Hurricane Sandy plunged much of the mid-Atlantic region into darkness, the Obama administration unveiled a new initiative aimed at mitigating the impact of “unreliable grid power.”
Not across ravaged coastal New Jersey, New York and Connecticut, but in Pakistan’s Punjab province.
The direct beneficiary of the administration’s generosity is a publicly traded Pakistani cement and concrete producer, according to a planning document that U.S. Trade & Aid Monitor located via routine database research.
The Lahore-based Pioneer Cement Limited, or PCL, requested a grant from the U.S. Trade & Development Agency, or USTDA – an independent White House entity – to fund a feasibility study of its modernization plans.
USTDA agreed, thereby requiring U.S. taxpayers to foot the bill for eco-friendly industry representatives needing international flights and hotel accommodations. The agency is offering a $770,000 grant to make it happen, Solicitation Number 2012-31033A shows.
The completed study also may come with recommendations for further financial or technical assistance to PCL, which ultimately wants to build a biomass-fired power plant as well as a waste heat recovery unit “and energy efficiency upgrades to mitigate or reduce dependence on unreliable grid power,” the document says.
Biomass, “as a renewable energy source, is biological material from living, or recently living organisms,” as defined by the Surrey, England-based Biomass Energy Center. PCL, for instance, uses residues from agricultural waste such as rice husks and wheat straw.
USTDA acknowledges that the grant-recipient Pakistani company is thriving. Indeed, the targeted facility “is equipped with two cement production lines with a total production capacity of 6,200 tons” of clinker – the primary component of cement – per day.
The agency laments, however, that “PCL’s production costs are rising, particularly in terms of fuel and power. As a result, PCL is intent on maximizing production capacity utilization, maintaining quality, and reducing its cost of production.”
Implementation of the biomass-fired power plant will help PCL “to meet the cement plant’s internal demand, with any surplus energy being sold to the National Transmission & Despatch Company,” the solicitation says.
USTDA touts itself for helping “companies create U.S. jobs through the export of U.S. goods and services for priority development projects in emerging economies.”
The agency on its website claims that last year it “identified over $2.2 billion in U.S. exports that were directly attributable to USTDA-funded activities.”
But as the Monitor reported earlier this year, sometimes those companies include multi-billion-dollar corporations such as GE, which stands to gain from USTDA-financed energy projects in Kenya and Tanzania.
The agency often pays for feasibility studies and “definitional missions” as the first steps toward the modernization of other nations’ industries – including the oil industry in places such as Libya.
USTDA has since embarked upon a separate Libyan project.
Interestingly, on the 11th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks – the very day of the al Qaida-staged attacks resulting in the deaths the deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others – USTDA in a Special Notice recognized the “technical merit” of an unsolicited proposal to create Internet access points across Libya.
Benghazi and Tripoli were identified as two target cities to deploy the access points. No action – neither a contract award or project cancellation—has been announced in that particular matter.
Congress this week separately began hearings on the Benghazi attack.
This article originally was published via WND.com Nov. 14. Under agreement with the publisher, rights have reverted back to to the author, Steve Peacock.
Hurricane Sandy: Another Example of Why We Need to Invest More in America, Less Around the Globe (COMMENTARY)
I have an idea how we as a nation can better cope with the financial burden that nature has imposed upon us in this post-hurricane environment of devastation on the East Coast: Assess and then cancel various programs that U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the U.S. Trade & Development Agency currently are carrying out or are planning to implement across the globe.
For the sake of full disclosure, I say this not only as a concerned taxpayer who continues to advocate streamlining (not the elimination) of foreign aid, but as a human being who lives one mile from the beach on the battered New Jersey coast -- someone who is doing significantly better than many of his Shore neighbors, but who is temporarily displaced nonetheless.
Before I continue, also keep in mind that this is less political -- insofar as partisan politics -- than it appears. Yes, the Obama Administration currently is executing the following initiatives. But as I've said before, it's a power thing, not an Obama thing. Such endeavors took place under Clinton and Bush, and in various forms will continue under future presidents.
Here we go:
Cancel the planned development of Ph.D. and masters degree programs for which USAID intends to fund in a Ugandan university. Use that money in schools across New Jersey, New York, or Connecticut.
Cancel the nearly $1 billion in construction projects that USAID has planned for the Palestinians. Use it to rebuild homes, businesses, and infrastucture destroyed during the hurricane. OUR hurricane.
Those business start-up projects in The Philippines? Cancel them. Most of the businesses in my area are closed, hopefully just temporarily. many, presumbaly, will go under. Tell the Filipinos they have to wait.
The groundwater cleanup projects in for which USTDA paid the cost of U.S. industry reps to fly to China to boost that sector? Stop such subsidies, damnit. I'm guessing the groundwater between Seaside Heights and Point Pleasant (among other locations) could use some ameliorating.
The list is seemningly endless. There are bigger and even more controversial projects, I am sure, the billions is no so-called "drug war" contracts among one of the more insane categories.
Oh, okay, just one more example (out of many). I know it amounts to peanuts, but the $322,000 that Department of State just spent on a 10-animal dog kennel in Iraq could have been used to rebuild damaged animal -- and human -- shelters here on the East Coast instead. Just sayin.' -- Steve Peacock