US Military Exits Climate Change After a Decade of Waste

By Steve Goreham

Originally published in MasterResource.

The United States military has pursued an increasing number of programs to try to fight climate change for more than a decade. The air force, army, and navy each developed programs to use alternative energy and to reduce hydrocarbon-based fuels, with aggressive carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions reduction plans. But under the Trump Administration, climate change mitigation will no longer be an objective of the US military.

Earlier this month, the new Department of Defense (DoD) Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote “The Dept of Defense does not do climate change crap. We do training and warfighting.” The DoD is now cutting Pentagon programs that involve climate change. So begins a new age of realistic military policy and an end to more than 15 years of wasteful climate change spending.

Under President Joe Biden, the US government adopted a goal of net-zero emissions for both the US economy and the federal government by 2050. At the direction of the administration, all branches of the US military developed plans to try to get to Net Zero, the elimination of all hydrocarbon-based energy.

The US military is the largest institutional user of petroleum-derived fuel in the world. It is estimated that the DoD uses 4.6 billion gallons of fuel each year. According to the DoD, military emissions in FY 2021 were Air Force (56%), Navy (31%), Army (9%), and Marine Corps (5%). Aircraft accounted for 76% of emissions and ships emitted most of the remainder at 17%.

The navy began climate change programs more than a decade ago during the administration of President Barack Obama. In 2011, US Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus stated, “By no later than 2020, at least half of the energy that the navy uses, both afloat and ashore, will come from non-fossil fuel sources.” The Great Green Fleet initiative was a key part of this effort.

The Great Green Fleet program attempted to use a drop-in blend of biofuels to replace diesel fuel in ships. In 2016, the navy deployed a carrier task force using a fuel mixture of 90% diesel and 10% biofuels. But the biofuel portion cost about $14 per gallon, seven times as much as the diesel portion. The navy also proposed to install hybrid electric-drive engines in 34 “green destroyers” to allow them to run on either fuel or electricity generated from fuel.

But the Great Green Fleet was a dismal failure. Biofuels were high cost and not available around the world, requiring the use of traditional diesel fuel in overseas ports. The hybrid electric-drive destroyers could not keep up with nuclear-powered carriers when using electric engines.

By the end of 2017, the navy had spent $57 billion on green fuel programs. The electric-drive destroyer program was cancelled in 2018. By 2022, except for nuclear-powered ships, more than 99 percent of the US Navy’s fuel still came from petroleum.

But the Biden Administration urged the navy to double down on climate change objectives. The navy issued its Climate Action 2030 plan in May of 2022, pursing a “department-wide pathway to net-zero by 2050.” The written plan lauds recent climate change “achievements,” including the “Mekong Delta Climate Research Collaboration” with the government of Vietnam, the “California Organic Recycling and Composting” project, and a partnership with the armed forces of Ghana to “combat vector-borne diseases that are exacerbated by climate change.” It’s not clear that these programs improve navy military readiness in any way.

Since aircraft emit the most CO2, the US Air Force has focused on reducing aircraft emissions. But aircraft emissions are very difficult to eliminate. An aircraft on a long mission produces as much CO2 as the weight of the plane. Fuel engines deliver a 20-to-one energy advantage compared to batteries and electric engines, making electric aircraft impractical.

Air force climate plans count on Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF). SAF is made from biomass or waste, with claims of lower CO2 emissions. SAF would have the same specifications as current aviation fuel, allowing it to be “dropped-in” to existing aircraft operations. Military SAF would be similar to planned commercial aviation SAF.

But SAF is expensive, not available in large quantities, and may not even reduce CO2 emissions. Jet fuel emits 3.16 tons of CO2 for each metric ton of burned fuel. When you burn SAF, 3.16 metric tons of CO2 are also exhausted for each ton of SAF burned. Both jet fuel and SAF are produced in refineries. So how can SAF reduce emissions? In any case, the use of SAF provides no military value, so Secretary Hegseth will likely shut down all SAF programs.

The “Army Climate Strategy” plan of February 2022 called for the near-term use of microgrids and renewable electricity at military bases. It called for a 100% transition of the “non-tactical vehicle fleet” to electric vehicles (EVs) by FY 2027. Spending would amount to about $2 billion per year from 2023 to 2027.

The plan also proposed to begin a transition of light, medium, and even heavy battlefield tactical vehicles to electric drive by 2027, and the development of “battlefield chargers” for these vehicles. Charging electric tanks on the battlefield is another example of “climate change crap” with no military value. 

Department of Defense climate plans call for adaptation measures, such as building sea walls, erecting flood barriers, hardening military installations, and constructing backup power systems. These adaptation measures are sensible policies to build resilience to weather events. But here is no evidence that climate change can be “mitigated” enough to be measurable. Switching all US military vehicles to EVs will have no measurable effect on storms or sea-level rise.

Earlier this month, the US Coast Guard Academy announced that it was removing “climate change” from its academic curriculum. The Coast Guard is part of the Department of Homeland Security in peacetime, the only branch of the military that is not part of the DoD.

Military climate policies under the Biden Administration, even if fully implemented, would not have had a measurable effect on global temperatures. But they would continue to waste hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money. Secretary Hegseth will put these funds to better use to strengthen the US military.

Steve Goreham is a speaker on energy, the environment, and public policy and author of the bestselling book Green Breakdown: The Coming Renewable Energy Failure.