Even as Hillary Clinton’s email troubles get more and more attention, intriguing and disturbing news continues to emerge from the Clinton Family Foundation. In what looks like a pay-to-play scheme of epic proportions, officers of a “green fuel” company made massive donations to the foundation (and to Barack Obama), and later sold its gasoline alterative to the government – at $149 per gallon.

“The CEO and Board of Directors of Solazyme, a company the military paid $149 per gallon for ‘alternative’ fuel, have donated more than $300,000 to Democratic candidates and committees, according to a Washington Free Beacon analysis,” that newspaper reports. “Recipients of significant donations included the Obama Victory Fund and the Democratic National Committee. Additionally, Solazyme donated between $100,000 and $250,000 to the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation.”

Let’s talk about that fuel. It’s like ethanol, but made from algae, not corn.

“A Congressional Research Service (CRS) report found that the Department of Defense (DoD) paid Solazyme $149 per gallon for fuel made of algal oil, costing taxpayers a total of $223,500 in 2009,” the Free Beacon reports. “The group also received a $21 million stimulus grant from Department of Energy in 2009.”

The company’s own website declares, “Based in South San Francisco, Solazyme’s mission is to improve our lives and our planet by producing sustainable, high-performance oils and ingredients derived from microalgae.”

Why would the DoD – specifically the Navy – pay $149 per gallon for this stuff?

This is mostly about central planning – which history shows doesn’t work. The theory is that if the Navy creates a demand for biofuels, then the private sector will deliver them. Eventually, the thinking goes, prices will drop and biofuels will be competitive with petroleum.

But that’s not how it works in the real world.

Private sector suppliers like getting paid $149 per gallon for their product. As long as the government is happy to pay those prices (at our expense), the private sector has no motivation to develop viable technologies that would make biofuels more competitive.

And really, what technologies can be developed that will drop the price from $149 to about $2 – which is what the government can generally get petroleum fuels for?

Also, environmentalists should side with the doubters on this. Biofuels offer no ecological benefit, other than a warm, fuzzy feeling. Most biofuel production causes “high levels of greenhouse gas emissions,” according to RAND Corporation researcher James Bartis, who has studied the Navy’s efforts.

Finally, biofuels will never completely replace oil; that’s because at best, all of the processes taken together could produce less than a quarter of what the Navy needs on a daily basis.

Navy officials liken the current effort to the service’s switch from sails to steam in the 19th century. But that’s a flawed analogy.

Steam worked, and coal was plentiful. Steam offered a distinct advantage over sails, in reliability and maneuverability.

The Navy’s purchase of the fuels is, by any equation, a boondoggle.

Those donations to the Clinton Family Foundation and to Obama might help explain how it came about.