“The Navy has always led the nation in transforming the way we use energy"

Ray Mabus, former Mississippi governor and current Secretary of the Navy, on biofuel purchases by the Navy:

“The Navy has always led the nation in transforming the way we use energy. This is not work we can afford to put off to another day.”

Back during the Wright Brothers patent wars, the Navy backed Glenn Curtiss against the Wright Brothers. It was the Wright Brothers who developed novel thinking about screws (propellors). Of the USS Arizona, from wikipedia: Four coal-fired American dreadnoughts were eventually sent across the Atlantic in December 1917 as Battleship Division Nine, but Arizona was not among them, as it was easier to obtain coal than oil in the United Kingdom.

Elsewhere in the article by Hembree Brandon :

Critics’ caviling aside, all progress comes with cost. Computers once were room-size and cost millions; now they’re WalMart loss-leaders. Cell phones started out brick size and cost a fortune; now they’re the most ubiquitous devices on the planet.

IPBiz notes that some things do scale. Some things do not. About 100 years ago, Thomas Edison was going to solve the battery problem for electric cars.