John McCain, Barack Obama 10/16/2008 Alfred E Smith 63rd Annual Dinner Roast clown themselves and each other. Why can't we be friends?

Geothermal Energy in the Military

In the middle of the Mojave Desert, a nondescript two-story building behind a gated fence houses an unlikely group of geologists. Their lineage is strong: several generations of prospectors have been drawn to dig in this dry corner. Within 100 kilometers of the geologists' base near China Lake, Calif., 19th-century gold diggers stumbled on riches, and later oilmen got lucky in the same inhospitable soil. Now these earth-minded fellows have grand ambitions of their own. Their aim is to turn the U.S. Department of Defense into one of the world's largest users of geothermal energy.

Their vision isn't all a pipe dream. The rising cost of fuel has the Pentagon pressuring the four branches of the armed services to cut their energy bills wherever they can. It's easy to see why—every US $10 increase in the price of a barrel of oil costs the Air Force, for example, an extra $600 million. The Army, Navy, and Marines, too, are tearing through their budgets. In response, energy managers at bases across the country are reevaluating how they light, insulate, heat, and cool their buildings. The most ambitious of these managers have begun aggressively adopting renewable-energy technologies. Together they have emerged as a distributed network of clean-energy advocates. The irony, of course, is that these military men and women should form such a group at the heart of one of the most energy-intensive operations on the planet. Read more: