How America Actually Wins

The National Security Case for the Next Generation of Energy

Looks like someone high up read last week’s post about Russia-Ukraine! Because the US thankfully reversed course on the critical negotiating error of unilaterally giving up leverage like aid and intel sharing when dealing Russian realpolitik.

Another thing I talked about, however, that has not been addressed, is how Europe made this conflict possible by buying what it thought was “cheap” natural gas from Russia for years. Gas that seemed cheap because the sticker price didn’t include other external costs, like the fact that the money was going to fuel Russia’s war machine which Europe is now having to spend a lot of money counteracting. In the long run, that “cheap” natural gas is going to cost significantly more than if they had invested in that money in the next generation of energy.

America has been making the same mistake for decades, thinking that fossil fuels are cheap because we only look at the sticker price. It’s time all of us doubled down on making the case that decarbonization and the transition to the next generation of energy is the critical ingredient of future American security and strength.

I first made the case for that in the American Prospect, this is how it’s done.

I spent a decent chunk of 2009 rolling down the roads of western Iraq, working with Iraqi police, and trying not to get blown up. A few years ago, on my birthday, I tried to reflect back on the birthday I spent there near the end of that deployment. How different it was. But, looking back, I couldn’t even tell you where I went that day. Fallujah? Ramadi? Habbaniyah? It’s hard to tell. It’s been more than a decade since most of us were there and, while some things are still quite sharp, the day-to-day stuff is getting fuzzy.

I did remember a running joke that would come up now and again, though, because it was exactly the type of thing that would come up on a birthday in Iraq. Occasionally, when the opportunity seemed right, someone would wonder aloud, “Why are we here again?” And the answer, delivered dryly, was always some refrain of: “Oh, yeah. Oil.”

It’s not like we were being clever. Everyone knew it. The old CENTCOM commander, John Abizaid, had said it quite clearly in 2007: “Of course it’s about oil; we can’t really deny that.” Alan Greenspan had agreed, and Chuck Hagel directly confirmed it: “People say we’re not fighting for oil. Of course we are.”

It’s the reason we’ve cared about the Middle East for decades. It’s almost certainly the reason I spent parts of 2012, 2013, and 2014 in Afghanistan, too. Al-Qaeda would have likely never existed were it not for the U.S. obsession with oil, considering that the chief popular complaints that al-Qaeda exploited centered around our actions in the Middle East. Without al-Qaeda, we would have cared about Afghanistan and the Taliban about the same amount we care about Eritrea and its repressive king. Which, of course, is not at all.

Without an oil addiction, the U.S. military could avoid a number of costly and resource-intensive still-ongoing operations in the area, such as working the Fifth Fleet overtime to keep the Strait of Hormuz open. In 2019, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo affirmed that the U.S. would keep the straits open at any cost militarily, and that policy has never wavered, regardless of the President. Which is an incredible amount of dedication for an expensive policy that, ironically, helps our adversary, China, more than us. Seventy-six percent of the oil flowing through those straits in 2018 went to Asia, not America. And China received more than double the amount that came here.

As my generation enters middle age and we look back at the several decades of conflict we endured because of oil, and the effort we continue to put toward it, it’s obvious that it has never been worth the cost. The time. The lives. The dollars. The price tag on U.S. actions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Syria in the 21st century totals more than $14 trillion.

Not to mention the intangible cost of allying with countries like Saudi Arabia, incubator of 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers. The country that funded and exported Wahhabi extremism and anti-American sentiment for decades. The fourth-most repressive country in the world that murders journalists, commits war crimes, and shares none of our values. A country that has profited off of us so enormously that they are attempting to build a $9 trillion hundred mile long skyscraper, taller than the empire state building, across their desert and, true to form, using slave labor and killing anyone who stands in their way.

Taking it back to oil: The cost of rapidly decarbonizing the US power grid is estimated at about $4.5 trillion, plus some amount for accelerating the transition to electric vehicles. That’s a THIRD of what we spent in Iraq and Afghanistan. And a much better investment than what we get for the money we spend helping secure China’s oil supply chain and continuing to screw around in the middle east.

For our national security, we must adopt an industrial policy to rapidly and fully decarbonize our energy and transportation sectors. We need to ditch all fossil fuels, not just oil, the same way we ditched whale oil for petroleum in the late 1800s.

There are people working hard to hide the fact, but our government knows it to be true.

The Pentagon has periodically issued reports on it for years. The Bush administration had one in 2003, the Obama administration in 2014 and 2015, and, yes, even the Trump administration in 2019.

Throughout the years, the story hasn’t changed. Climate change–induced severe weather has caused billions of dollars of damage to defense infrastructure and threatens to damage the majority of Defense Department installations, costing taxpayers billions over the long haul. Sea-level rise is undermining our naval bases. Climate change taxes the military by increasing refugee flows and other events that require humanitarian relief missions. It fuels conflicts over basic resources such as food and water that create instability and lead to military intervention.

An increase in temperature directly correlates with an increase in violence.

A recent study of conflict in Africa found that a 1 percent increase in temperature leads to a 4.5 percent increase in civil war in the same year and a 0.9 percent increase in the following year. By the year 2030, based on averaged data from 18 climate models, this would lead to a 54 percent increase in armed conflict on the continent over the next decade.

As defense budgets continue to rise, avoiding and preventing conflict is one of the best cost-saving measures available to U.S. policymakers and illustrates one of the key external benefits of decarbonization and slowing global warming. We can’t go back and get the $14 trillion we spent over the last 20 years in the Middle East, but we can prevent the need (or desire) to spend the next $14 trillion by both making the region and its natural resources irrelevant and slowing global warming and the attendant increase of global violence.

This is a critical component to transitioning from the so-called war on terror and its regional power struggles to a focus on near-peer competitors like China and Russia and retaining the position of the West, and democratic values, in the international order.

As I’ve mentioned before, Russia’s economy is largely based around oil and gas. The war in Ukraine wouldn’t even be happening if there was no market for Russia’s oil and gas.

Instead of abandoning NATO, we should be using the leverage we have to bake decarbonization tech funding into our national-security agreements with Europe. Continue to provide our nuclear umbrella, that we already pay for, but give them a cheaper alternative to building their own by having them invest in NextGen energy development that they then buy from us, instead of Russian gas. The alternative is that Europe re-militarizes, more countries have nuclear weapons, and Europe ditches Russian gas and turns to China for the next generation of energy because we never built it out.

Terrible.

Especially considering that the technology we develop and know-how we build in the decarbonization process will be a boon to U.S. business as we export our knowledge, technology, and products overseas.

Crushing Russia and China and exporting U.S. tech and products at the same time? That’s decarbonization.

Decarbonizing isn’t even complicated. We have many of the tools to start doing it right now: the technology, the manpower, and the financial structure. The only thing missing is leadership with the courage to enact an industrial policy around decarbonization and the creativity to make it happen.

It could be funded by re-prioritizing the $650 billion in fossil fuel subsidies the U.S. hands out each year. It could be funded by eliminating tax cuts. It could even be funded without spending a dime by transitioning the Federal Reserve from quantitative tightening back to quantitative easing— but instead of focusing on juicing the stock market and buying fossil fuel junk bonds, it could fund decarbonization. The federal government could back decarbonization-related loans, like federally backed mortgages, that the Federal Reserve would then purchase. Or we could create a special purpose vehicle with the Departments of Defense and Treasury for the purchase of green assets. It wouldn’t even increase the Fed’s $7 trillion balance sheet if done the right way.

There is precedent for this.

After World War II, the Department of Defense shaped industrial policy and the direction our country was headed. The department could lead with its budget in that regard. Other national security–based tools, like the Defense Production Act, which has numerous authorities and even energy-related sections, including an exhortation to maximize renewable energy, could also be leveraged.

The technical details can be accomplished in any number of ways. It just needs to get done. Building renewables here is like creating our own reservoirs of oil out of thin air.

In the end, this type of leadership shouldn’t even be that risky.

I think leaders would find that if you offer the American people two worlds: one with more conflict, higher future defense spending, and a reliance on China; or one with more security, less military action, cleaner rivers and skies, and more economic opportunity, they would overwhelmingly pick the second.

Lucas

The views expressed in this Substack are those of the individual only and not those of the Department of Defense. Use of military rank, job titles, and photographs in uniform do not imply endorsement by the Department of the Navy or the Department of Defense.