While giving a speech on Earth Day from Seward Park in Seattle, Washington, President Joe Biden claimed that the United States military would be climate-friendly at some unspecified point in the future. He provided no time frame, nor any specific details other than that his administration was spending billions of dollars to make this conversion. Ultimately, like many of Biden’s promises, it will probably never happen — and definitely not in the immediate future. Yet, in saying it, Biden showed he prioritizes politics over national security.
“We’re going to start the process for every vehicle in the United States military, every vehicle is going to be climate-friendly,” Biden said during his speech. “Every vehicle. I mean it. We’re spending billions of dollars to do it.”
People want the military to be able to defend the country from its enemies. They want the military to have the most advanced technology to help win battles with the fewest number of casualties possible. Whether this is achieved using fossil fuels or not should be irrelevant. Moreover, this should be the goal of every politician.
Biden stated that this climate-friendly transition would apply to “every vehicle in the United States military.” However, he does not expand on which vehicles these are. Technically, a vehicle is anything that transports people from one place to another. This could be on air, land, or sea. For the sake of this article, I am going to assume that Biden meant vehicles that operate on land.
However, it is important to clarify, because, according to reports, the U.S. military is allegedly the largest consumer of energy in the country, the world’s largest “institutional user of petroleum,” and the world’s largest “institutional producer of greenhouse gases.” Yet, as the graph from a 2019 report below illustrates, most energy used by “vehicles” is jet fuel. Currently, there is no reliable, widespread alternative fuel source for military jets, and it certainly won’t come from wind turbines or solar panels.
Furthermore, as the graph shows, gasoline consumption represents a minor part of the military’s energy consumption. Spending billions of dollars to switch to “climate-friendly” fuel sources seems to be a waste of time. It threatens the reliability of military vehicles, given the well-documented challenges renewable energy sources present. Biden’s words are little more than senseless pandering to climate alarmists with no viable plan to make it a reality.
Prioritizing politics over efficiency is a dangerous game for Biden to play with the military. Our country’s enemies don’t care about carbon emissions. Unless new energy sources as reliable as fossil fuels are discovered in the future, transitioning the military to climate-friendliness is pointless and threatening to national security.
