The ARI, Adam Eichelberger

Few topics have been as hotly debated as clean energy, climate change, and how both of those issues impact consumers and the average citizen’s household. We go back and forth on issues like the banning of gas stoves or whether blanketing the desert in solar panels is truly a good idea. Less often, at least outside of the realms of policy wonks, do we ever talk about energy as a national security issue.

Over the years, the Joint Chiefs have issued warnings on the issue, yet we still collectively seem to view clean energy as a “civilian” issue or a purely “domestic policy” issue. If we ever consider it in the context of foreign policy, we usually think of it around conflicts in the Middle East or with other oil rich nations.

It is time that the United States, especially the more traditionally conservative midwestern states, like mine, that are so wonderfully poised to lead the charge on clean energy, wake up to the reality that energy needs—especially clean energy needs and climate policies—are national security issues. (Id.) The Department of Defense, especially the United States Navy, already spends billions to mitigate the ongoing damage caused by climate change.(Id. and DOD’s Climate Change Plan.) These are not some hypothetical future damage they are seeking to mitigate (though there is that too), but real, current harms being caused by things like once-in-a-century storms battering our ports every year now, or more violent storms and tornados causing damage to DoD infrastructure, Army motor pools, and other installations across the Midwest.

As a national security law attorney, a former Army program manager who worked on soldier power systems, and a conservative, I believe the time has long since passed to debate whether the problems of climate change are real and something we should take action on. Instead, we now need to focus on what are the right actions to take. At the personal level, so-called “dirty” fuel sources create health hazards in our warfighters that not only deteriorate their quality of life over time, but affect their capabilities in the immediate field of battle. (The modern soldier now has such power needs at the individual warfighter level, that he carries an estimated twenty (20) pounds of batteries for a simple three-day mission.) At the macro level, countries are being destabilized, right now, over mass migrations caused by climate change. Ports experience rapid degradation and armies experience real, tangible losses of capability that weaken our and our allies’ readiness to respond to threats like Hamas, Iran, Russia, and China. Most important, by ceding the conversation about clean energy and pretending that it is not a national security issue—by not engaging in the public discourse of how to respond to emergent energy needs and climate risks—we allow an existential threat to creep ever closer.

Most climate activists point to global warming itself as the existential threat. It is not. However, it creates conditions that make nuclear war, a real existential threat, far more likely. That is a key national security concern that should get every American to sit up and take notice. That alone is a reason why we should be engaging in conversations that are not denial of the problem, but tackling how should we handle this problem? How do we maximize liberty and national security, hand-in-hand, with liberty being the necessity for which we create security to protect, and, ultimately, measure what risks we allow in order to preserve liberty for the future. Conversations like Senator Todd Young of Indiana engaged in back in 2018.

Together, the ingenuity of Americans can raise our security through smart clean energy policies. We can end frivolous government actions that simply cause controversy and focus on what we think American’s should not be doing, as if our citizens were some toddler with a hand caught in the cookie jar.

We can build a better future by focusing on what innovations, what new sources of energy, and what new technologies will solve our energy needs and our climate needs. I know we can do this because I was part of the Program Management Office who reduced the weight in batteries our soldiers needed to carry by almost a third, while also increasing the amount of actual usable energy they could carry for a seventy-two (72) hour operation back in the mid 2010s.

We can conserve and expand our current liberties and abundance, increase our national security, and build a tomorrow where we are actively reducing the existential risks of war over climate change that face our children.