CLIMATEWIRE | The Protection Division has a brand new search-and-destroy mission. It’s on the hunt for climate-related applications and research.
Final week, the Pentagon introduced it had canceled a number of research associated to local weather — together with a number of that sought to find out whether or not a warmer planet might result in extra instability in Africa. As well as, the Protection Division has spent the previous couple of weeks combing outdoors contracts for the time period “local weather” with the intent to zero out all associated work, in keeping with two former Pentagon officers.
The purge is being pushed broadly by President Donald Trump, who beforehand has described local weather change as a hoax. However it has taken on further urgency beneath the management of Protection Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has lengthy rejected local weather science and has vowed to get rid of all of the Pentagon’s climate-related work.
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“The @DeptofDefense doesn’t do local weather change crap,” Hegseth wrote on X on Sunday. “We do coaching and warfighting.”
It’s unclear what number of local weather initiatives are in danger for cancellation and the way a lot cash their erasure would save.
The Pentagon mentioned canceling 91 research on local weather and different matters would save $30 million, however it didn’t disclose how a lot cash the Protection Division might save by eliminating different climate-related applications and research. Pentagon officers didn’t reply to questions from POLITICO’s E&E Information looking for solutions on these matters. As a substitute , they issued a press release that mentioned the Protection Division was working to “restore the warrior ethos and refocus our navy on its core mission of deterring, combating and profitable wars.”
“Local weather zealotry and different woke chimeras of the Left will not be a part of that core mission,” Pentagon spokesperson John Ullyot mentioned in a press release.
However protection consultants warn the push to cancel these applications might backfire on the Pentagon. Learning and getting ready for world warming isn’t a liberal luxurious, they are saying — it’s important to raised perceive how local weather change might affect each world politics and battlefield circumstances.
It is about “missions and never emissions,” mentioned John Conger, who served as principal deputy undersecretary of Protection within the Obama administration.
For example, he pointed to the danger that rising sea ranges and extra excessive storms pose to the constellation of U.S. navy installations worldwide.
“Local weather impacts the navy mission, it impacts your capability to do your job,” mentioned Conger, who’s a senior adviser to the Council on Strategic Dangers.
“Particularly with infrastructure, the place you need to have the ability to endure excessive climate or different climate results as a way to retain functionality,” he mentioned. “But additionally within the battlefield, you need to have the ability to cope with the ambient circumstances and the environmental circumstances as a way to conduct your warfighting mission.”
The Pentagon’s broad strategy to world warming was outlined in a local weather adaptation plan the company launched final yr. It discovered that local weather change was costing taxpayers billions of {dollars}, threatening provide chains and disrupting navy readiness. These impacts have affected coaching, infrastructure and the Protection Division’s “capability to execute its mission,” the report mentioned.
“To coach, combat, and win in an more and more advanced risk surroundings, we should contemplate the results of utmost climate and local weather change at each degree of the enterprise,” the report discovered.
For years, the navy’s technique has been to include clear power and alternate gasoline expertise into operations — largely for strategic causes, quite than reducing greenhouse emissions.
However Trump and Hegseth each have focused that work as wasteful and pointless. Particularly, the 2 males have taken intention at efforts to develop hybrid tanks; on the marketing campaign path, Trump falsely claimed their function was to appease environmental teams.
In actuality, hybrid tanks largely run on diesel and are designed to have elevated vary by being much less reliant on gasoline. In addition they present an operational benefit as a result of they’ll change to a hybrid battery to chop a warmth signature that might be extra simply detected on enemy radar.
The military is now growing a hybrid-electric tank, which is actually a modernization of the Bradley Preventing Automobile, although they don’t seem to be but deployed. The Protection Division has been exploring the event and deployment of extra hybrid tactical autos by 2035. A 2022 local weather technique plan additionally referred to as for the event of all-electric tactical autos that might be utilized by 2050.
That plan has now been deleted from the Protection Division’s web site.
There are “great operational and functionality benefits” to utilizing clear expertise within the navy, mentioned Richard Kidd, who served as deputy assistant secretary of protection for surroundings and power resilience within the Obama administration.
He mentioned clear power expertise is totally part of fashionable warfare as a result of at present’s battle areas require “electrical energy to cost drones, energy AI on the edge, assist directed power weapons and sure forms of hybrid-electric tactical autos.”
“If the administration throws out every little thing that has the phrase ‘local weather’ in it — the folks, the constructions and the contracts — it dangers undermining its personal objectives about power dominance, competitors with China, and accelerating the deployment of nuclear energy,” he mentioned.
That mentioned, there stays some lingering frustration with the Biden administration over its efforts to infuse local weather planning right into a broad swath of navy applications, together with some that by no means had been designed for emissions reducing.
The push might have unnecessarily put a goal on these applications, mentioned Bret Strogen, who served because the power and sustainability adviser for the assistant secretary of the Military within the first Trump administration.
“Local weather resilience, local weather adaptation, getting ready for floods, drought, that’s — that’s an space that DOD and everybody else wants to concentrate to,” he mentioned. “Local weather mitigation and decreasing emissions just isn’t the DOD’s function.”
One protection skilled warned the hassle to get rid of local weather applications and research might create a future blind spot for the Pentagon.
It might depart the navy unprepared for the function of local weather change as a risk multiplier, the place extra excessive storms, warmth circumstances and regional conflicts might hamper and hurt U.S. troops and their warfighting talents, mentioned Sherri Goodman, deputy undersecretary of Protection for environmental safety within the Clinton administration.
She mentioned U.S. allies — and rivals — will likely be absolutely using that scientific intelligence.
“If we put our heads within the sand, that is a present to China,” mentioned Goodman, creator of “Risk Multiplier: Local weather, Navy Management, and the Battle for World Safety.”
“They’re conscious of the local weather dangers they’re confronted with in their very own nation and all over the world,” she added. “And they’re simply seeking to fill the ability vacuum that we’re creating.”
Reprinted from E&E Information with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2025. E&E Information offers important information for power and surroundings professionals.
