Embrace the (Energy) Suck

Note: Marketplace podcasts are meant to be heard, with emphasis, tone and audio elements a transcript can’t capture. Transcripts are generated using a combination of automated software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting it.

Phil Lancaster: All right, welcome to the Bulldogs.

Kai Ryssdal: We’re in the ready room of the 525th Fighter Squadron at Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska. The ready room is kind of like homeroom for air crews. Comfortable chairs and tables, plaques on the walls and mementos all over the place, huge windows looking out to the flight line and the runways. They do mission briefings here, weather updates, and sort of hang out too.

Phil Lancaster: You go straight ahead towards the piano.

Kai Ryssdal: Straight ahead toward the piano.

Kind of the same, except a lot nicer, as when I was flying back in the mid and late 1980s off the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt.

Oh, you freaking Air Force guys have everything. Man, Jesus. Sorry, I was, I was Navy.

We were spending months at sea, training flights, keeping an eye on the Soviets.

Ready seven on the Theodore Roosevelt was, was our ready room, and it had some of this stuff. And then it had, you know, rows and rows of chairs, and we’d sit there for, you know, pre flights and movie nights and what have you.

We would drink really bad coffee and play lots of games to kill time, cards and acey-deucey mostly. Here though?

Popcorn machine, shut up.

There are snacks.

There he is. There’s the dog.

And, a bulldog.

Phil Lancaster: Hi, there’s Argos.

Kai Ryssdal: His name is Argos. He is the mascot of the 525th. They fly F-22 raptor fighters, which is what I’m actually here to see.

Oh yeah, looks like a squadron.

Orange foam earplugs in place. Into the hangars we go with Colonel Phil Lancaster. He’s the deputy commander of the 11th Air Force.

Phil Lancaster: So because it’s the Bulldogs, these are the kennels.

Kai Ryssdal: That’s pretty good.

Phil Lancaster: So we’re going to kennel three. And then you can see the base on the north side.

Kai Ryssdal: More important, the star of the show, a flying machine that costs hundreds of millions of dollars.

Phil Lancaster: Have you been up to a raptor before?

Kai Ryssdal: Not this close.

Phil Lancaster: All right.

Kai Ryssdal: Not this close. I left the service when we were still flying Tomcats and you know, original Hornets, EF Hornets. Tell me what we’re looking at.

Phil Lancaster: Yep. So this is the F-22. We have about 150 combat coated ones. You have 50 of those up here in Alaska, and this is your frontline air superiority fighter for America.

Kai Ryssdal: These jets are sleek and slate gray, patrolling the skies up here, defending the northern border. And they use a lot of gas doing it.

You never really forget that smell, that JP5. What do these guys do? JP8, what do they do?

Phil Lancaster: It is JP8, yep. And you know, I didn’t know I smelled like JP8 until my spouse one day said, your uniforms smell like jet fuel all the time.

Kai Ryssdal: Lancaster says raptors burn around 6,000 pounds of fuel an hour when they’re cruising. That translates into about 900 gallons an hour, 15 gallons every single minute, almost seven times that when they’re fighting.

Phil Lancaster: That’s not very good gas mileage. Well that’d be like asking, you know, let’s take a NASCAR car and drive it for the family vacation. That’s not what these these planes are meant to do.

Kai Ryssdal: This season, we’re looking at how the institution that shaped me, the American military, is going to shape our climate future. The conversation about climate change and national security comes broadly in two parts, what climate change means for the American military and national security. That’s the obvious one, but also what the Pentagon itself means for climate change. According to a study from Brown University back in 2019, the Department of Defense is the biggest institutional source of greenhouse gasses in the world. It puts out more carbon than some countries do. That becomes more relevant when I tell you that the Biden administration has made it an explicit goal to completely decarbonize the federal government by 2050. That obviously includes the Department of Defense. And it becomes more challenging when I tell you that the US military uses 73 million barrels of fuel every single year. Most of it goes to airplanes, and standing in front of this admittedly cool looking, but extremely gas guzzling machine, decarbonizing by 2050 feels like a very lofty goal.

—

We’re out there burning 6,000 pounds of JP8 an hour. Is that compatible with getting a net zero by 2050?

Phil Lancaster: You know, here’s the cool thing about the military and DOD. If, if they direct something, we’ll meet it. So compatibility aside, you know, we need to be talking about it, and we are. And if the directive comes down, I guarantee we’ll meet it. So standing by.

Kai Ryssdal: What we’ve been telling you about so far is the DOD reacting to climate change, figuring out how to adapt as permafrost thaws or infrastructure deteriorates, that radar we were at up in Point Barrow, right? But there is another way to think about it. The Pentagon is an enormous beast with resources, $850 billion a year, give or take. So really, the question is, how are they going to leverage all the money and all the power the Department of Defense has to actually get ahead of and maybe solve some of our biggest climate problems. I’m Kai Ryssdal, and this is How We Survive, episode three, Embrace the Energy Suck. That phrase, Embrace the Suck, is military slang. You heard it last episode up in Alaska.

Caitlin Esch: You look like you’ve been out in the cold for a while. What was your first impression of the cold?

Jack Foster: Just kind of to embrace the suck.

Caitlin Esch: Did you say embrace the suck?

Jack Foster: I did. Yeah, that’s, that’s probably the, you know, the Army has many mottos, but that’s the true, unofficial motto of the army.

Kai Ryssdal: It means when things have gone wrong and you’re down in the mud. You’re tired, you’re struggling. Maybe you can’t change the situation. You have to just in your mind, embrace it, lean in, tough it out and try to move forward, embrace the suck and get to the other side. The situation we’re in with climate change is bad. There’s really no turning back the clock. And in the face of that, the Pentagon has in some ways embraced the suck. They’ve set a lot of really aggressive goals, goals that imagine a more climate friendly and more resilient force. There is the big one to decarbonize by 2050 but each branch, Army, Navy, all of them also have their own custom climate action plans with goals they’ve committed to over the next 10 or 20 years. They’re talking about electrifying whole fleets of vehicles, making tens of thousands of buildings more efficient, and exploring hydrogen and nuclear power too. The DOD has been investing in climate adaptation and mitigation for years. So today, an episode about the possibilities. What’s actually going on on the ground?

Mick Wasco: How’s it going? You guys are more than welcome to be in your car. You’re just gonna follow me on the base.

Kai Ryssdal: Marine Corps Air Station Miramar is about 15 miles north of downtown San Diego, and we’re headed into a glass box of an office with a big frosted logo that reads Marine Corps Energy.

So this is, this is your kingdom in here, right?

Mick Wasco: This was the last part of the Navy. This was, like the last Navy facility.

Kai Ryssdal: This used to be a Naval Air Station.

Mick Wasco: Naval Air Station.

Kai Ryssdal: You might have heard of Miramar. That’s where Top Gun used to be. Yes, that Top Gun, from the movie. There are still fighters there, Marine Corps jets now, but also something completely different.

Mick Wasco: This floor was a machine shop, and so I kept the floor open so you could see all the scars and the stains, and then put all the new stuff inside next to the old. The juxtaposition, if you will, of the energy evolution.

Kai Ryssdal: We’ve come to see Miramar’s microgrid. Microgrids are mentioned a lot in the Pentagon’s climate plans as a way to make the DOD more energy resilient. In fact, the Army has promised to put a microgrid on every single one of its bases by 2035. Because after planes, bases themselves are the other big energy suck for the military.

—

Tell us who you are and what you do around here.

Mick Wasco: Mick Wasco, currently I am working at Marine Corps installations command as energy operations. So I was just recently promoted to help the rest of the Marine Corps do these types of projects.

Kai Ryssdal: Congratulations on the promotion. So now you’re in charge of this all over the Marine Corps.

Mick Wasco: In charge, I would, I would, wouldn’t say on the nose.

Kai Ryssdal: He’s being humble right there, because he’s got a passion for this stuff. Mick’s been working on this particular microgrid for more than a decade.

So, layman’s terms, how does this thing work?

Mick Wasco: A microgrid is defined as a electrical definable boundary that can be both disconnected from the utility and also connected to the utility.

Kai Ryssdal: A microgrid is basically a self-sufficient energy system. The key thing is that it can be totally disconnected from a utility, if needed, be completely off the grid. They call that islanding the base. Imagine a tropical storm hitting the city and taking down power lines, or an earthquake maybe. Point is, the city’s power’s out, and a microgrid is what you want to have, because it’s a system that generates and distributes energy that will keep your base, which is basically a small town going.

—

So we have sort of a chart of the schematic of how the micro grid basically works, right? We got a map of the base and then a org chart, right?

Mick Wasco: Yes, organization electrically, if you will.

Kai Ryssdal: I will, yes.

Mick unrolls a giant map that takes up most of a conference room table.

Grab me one of those soda cans, one of those ice teas.

We hold the corners down with cans of Arizona Iced Tea.

So what makes the Miramar microgrid special?

Mick Wasco: So the special thing about MCS Miramar is in our Marine Corps boundary, land boundary here contains the city of San Diego landfill.

Kai Ryssdal: Miramar’s micro grid stands out because it’s got access to a whole range of energy sources. The landfill on base is actually able to capture methane from the trash here and turn it into electricity for the base to use. A smaller percentage of energy comes from solar panels, and it can also pull, if needed, from a power plant on base that runs on natural gas and diesel.

—

Important point here, the microgrid, a microgrid is not necessarily all green.

Mick Wasco: Not necessarily. The technology and the cost is not really feasible at this point in time for us to meet our mission with 100% grain power.

Kai Ryssdal: But renewable resources do make this microgrid more powerful.

Mick Wasco: To give you perspective, with incorporation of the landfill and our solar, our microgrid system can operate the entire flight line for up to 21 days with just the diesel that we have on station. And so that ability to run so long on so little fuel is due to our ability to leverage the renewable resources.

Kai Ryssdal: That’s three weeks this base could keep doing its job at full capacity with all its jets in case of a crisis. More than a couple of people told us that this is the DOD’s most complicated and advanced version of a microgrid. They’ve been working on it for 14 years. They are still not done. Mick and his team are trying to make it more renewable. They’re adding lithium battery storage to help get there. The challenge is that there is no off the shelf microgrid yet. Something you can just buy and plug in. They’re custom made, and they need highly skilled and in very short supply engineers to maintain and operate.

—

So Marine Corps leads the way. We all know that. The catch is the Pentagon’s a big place. The DOD is a big place, and there’s a goal and an ambition, I’m sure, to have this kind of resiliency everywhere. Let me ask the expert, is that realistic, Mick?

Mick Wasco: I think that the goal for energy resilience needs to be there. I think that the feasibility is that in being a person who’s done one of these projects, they are much harder than we might assume, but that doesn’t mean we can’t get after it.

Kai Ryssdal: Is it a resource thing? The Pentagon has $860 billion a year to throw around. You need more of that?

Mick Wasco: It’s definitely a resource thing. And so I think the balance to the leaders above me is, is all the competing priorities and energy resilience at its installations is just one of all the alligators at the boat, you know.

Kai Ryssdal: So far, the Marine Corps has six microgrids across its 24 bases. This is energy resilience, right? Being able to keep the lights on even during a crisis to get the mission done. That’s a buzzword you’ll hear from the Pentagon way more often than the words climate change, by the way. But resilience and climate change are related, because while for now, the Miramar microgrid has been kind of break glass in case of emergency, it’s not going to stay that way for long. This is the guy who gets to decide whether or not to break the glass.

—

All right, first thing you have to do, sir, is tell us who you are and what you do around here.

Marty Bedell: Colonel Marty Bedell, I am the Marine Corps Air Station Miramar commanding officer.

Kai Ryssdal: You’re a Harrier pilot.

Marty Bedell: I am a Harrier pilot. I spent about 10 years in Yuma, Arizona, so I’m really, really happy to be in San Diego.

Kai Ryssdal: Nothing wrong with Arizona, of course. Colonel Bedell spends a whole lot of time thinking about Miramar’s role in a crisis — its troops and its planes.

Marty Bedell: It’s actually much more helpful to think about this air station as a power projection platform. And there are lots of scenarios, be it cyber attack or earthquake, I could imagine, where we would need to be prepared to respond if called upon.

Kai Ryssdal: Self-sufficiency, basically, that’s what you got to have.

Marty Bedell: That’s exactly right.

Kai Ryssdal: How many people live in this little town?

Marty Bedell: We have about 12,000 marines and sailors. We’ve got 548 homes. We’ve got 4,000 barracks rooms. So we have a lot of people, military and civilian, who live and work here.

Kai Ryssdal: Like Mick said, this micro grid could support this little town for 21 days all on its own. Back in the summer of 2023 San Diego had brutal heat waves, and the city asked Miramar if they could help out.

Marty Bedell: We did relieve the grid of our burden at their request.

Kai Ryssdal: Right, and that’s only going to start happening more.

Marty Bedell: Absolutely correct. We are absolutely aware here in Southern California of climate considerations. We just had our first hurricane in a very long time, which is not normal. We have fire danger, which is something that is ever present in Southern California. All of these climate events that are increasing in frequency are things that impact everyone, including our military installations.

Kai Ryssdal: So I have to tell you, sir, we’ve been talking to a lot of people, a handful of them at your grade level, and when I say how big a challenge is climate change for you, most of them say, our mission is to get bombs on target on time, basically. You’re the first one who’s actually said climate change is a huge challenge for us.

Marty Bedell: It is both true that our job is to get bombs on target on time, and it is short sighted to not connect barriers to being able to do that with our ability to support forces when they are forward.

Kai Ryssdal: Is climate change affecting the Marine Corps’ ability to provide for the common defense?

Marty Bedell: I believe that it is, and I think that this, the small impacts are collectively felt.

Kai Ryssdal: One of the lessons from that trip to Miramar, is how much the small stuff can matter. An hour-long power outage because of a heat wave might not seem like much, but it could put maintenance on a plane behind, which then throws off a deployment schedule, which then affects the ability to get forces where they need to go. And in the end, like Colonel Bedell said, we’re all going to feel it. So every little bit counts, every bit of innovation and every possibility. Even something really small.

—

A little splash. Nice. What’d you do in New York, Kai? Well, I had vodka to paper cups in Brooklyn at 10:40 in the morning.

Stafford Sheehan: In a jet fuel refinery.

Kai Ryssdal: So let me back up.

All right. So here we are in a, I think we’re in Bushwick, Brooklyn, totally industrial. The place is in a Quonset hut. It says Air Company on the front. It’s literally corrugated steel Quonset hut, sort of World War II-ish looking. So let’s see what we got.

—

Inside is a startup called Air Company. It’s one big room. It’s clean and bright, lots of equipment and testing gear. There’s that low hum that you sometimes get in high tech industrial spaces. There’s a dozen, maybe 15, people. We went to visit, yes, for the national security story, but also, in part, because of the vodka.

Stafford Sheehan: This is our, the label for our vodka. It says New York City on the top, Air Vodka, and then on the bottom, distilled from captured carbon and water.

Kai Ryssdal: Carbon dioxide, technically. I’m a bourbon guy myself, but I had to try this.

Cheers.

Stafford Sheehan: Cheers.

Kai Ryssdal: For those who are having. I mean, look, I’m no vodka connoisseur, but that’s vodka. It’s pretty good, right?

Stafford Sheehan: Yeah. I mean, it’s ethanol and water and all vodkas are kind of neutrally flavored, but —

Kai Ryssdal: It’s, it’s very hipster, right? I mean, come on. It kind of is.

Stafford Sheehan: It is. It’s very hipster. I mean, you’re in the middle of a bespoke jet fuel distillery in the middle of Bushwick. I don’t think it gets more hipster than this.

Kai Ryssdal: Stafford Sheehan is the co-founder and chief technology officer of Air Company. He’s in jeans and a black T shirt with the company logo. Their tagline is turning CO2 into an endless resource.

Stafford Sheehan: We take carbon dioxide, and we capture that from a variety of different sources, then transform it into the products that we need.

Kai Ryssdal: They’ve invented a way to turn carbon dioxide into ethyl alcohol. And in 2017 they started turning that ethyl alcohol into this vodka. Also a perfume with, I’m told, notes of tobacco leaf and orange.

Stafford Sheehan: Think about what kind of liquids are most valuable. When you go to duty free at the airport, you see those little perfume bottles, and they’re like $200 for 50 milliliters of liquid. So we started with things like that, where we could get $200 for 50 milliliters of liquid.

Kai Ryssdal: So it’s a business model decision.

Stafford Sheehan: It is. That’s exactly what it is. It’s a business model.

Kai Ryssdal: Making small amounts of expensive liquids was how Air Company scaled until they could do what they really wanted to do.

Stafford Sheehan: We do make these consumer goods, but our principal target and our principal product at Air Company is jet fuel.

Kai Ryssdal: Sustainable aviation fuel, to be precise, SAF. Now SAF itself is not new. Commercial airlines are counting on it to help meet their climate goals. And under the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration has put almost $250 million into incentivizing SAF production. What makes air company unique is that its SAF is made out of CO2 which, as you know, the planet already has way too much of.

Stafford Sheehan: We started working with the Department of Defense several years ago, but our major breakthrough, I would say, with that group and the customers within the Department of Defense came in 2022 when we responded to an open solicitation from the defense innovation unit. The goal of the Defense Innovation Unit is to take dual use technologies, or technologies that can be used both for military and for civilian purposes and introduce them to the Department of Defense.

Kai Ryssdal: The DIU, the Defense Innovation Unit, started in 2015. It’s kind of a Silicon Valley accelerator for commercial technology the DOD is interested in, and energy is one of their priorities. Since 2016 the DIU has awarded more than $200 million to more than 50 energy related projects, like Air Company’s SAF.

—

The competitive award was how much?

Stafford Sheehan: So the ceiling on the contract is $65 million.

Kai Ryssdal: That’s nice, right?

Stafford Sheehan: And it’s, it’s nice, and that’s the magnitude of a lot of awards the DIU gives out. And you need it realistically. The technology development like this is expensive.

Kai Ryssdal: As you try to do these technologies and as we try to take care of climate change, how critical is it that the government be invested spiritually but also financially?

Stafford Sheehan: We’re not going to be able to solve these problems without the government, in one way or another, coming in and saying, the way that we’re doing things now is not the right way of doing it, and it’s hard to compete in a market where your competitors is getting all these government subsidies, right? We need at least a level playing field.

Kai Ryssdal: It’s really hard to compete with fossil fuels if you’re trying to make sustainable jet fuel. There is a huge SAF plant in California that I’ve been to that uses melted beef tallow, but it only produced 8 million gallons in 2023, almost literally a drop in the bucket of the hundreds of millions of gallons that are going to be needed. SAF meets less than 1% of global jet fuel demand because it is just so hard to scale. And remember, the American military uses 73 million barrels of fuel a year, all by itself, and this pilot plant produces about 30 gallons of SAF a day.

—

30 gallons ain’t going to do it. We need 300 million and more, right? Does this get us there?

Stafford Sheehan: This does, actually.

Kai Ryssdal: They’ve got two ways to scale, Staff Sheehan says. First a much bigger refinery making millions of gallons a year. So each gallon will cost way less to make. He says they’ll have their first commercially viable plant in the next three years. Second, they’re making their system small enough to put on a truck or into a cargo plane and deploy to war zones or contested parts of the world.

—

This is a beast. It’s a cage kind of thing, like —

Nick Steinke: It’s basically the size of a shipping container.

Kai Ryssdal: Nick Steinke was one of the first employees hired at Air Company. He’s senior engineering manager now, and he’s showing me the actual setup of the SAF refinery, all the tubes and all the equipment designed to fit on the back of a semi.

Nick Steinke: Think about places on remote islands in the Pacific, areas in Alaska where the only way you get fuel there is flying it in a plane, which kind of doesn’t logically make sense, because you’re using fuel to deliver fuel. They like this idea.

Kai Ryssdal: So just to be clear, the idea would be to take something like this, or maybe a little bigger, or maybe two of them side by side, whatever, and plop it in Kwajalein or Barrow, or wherever they need fuel, right? Where they don’t have their own grid and don’t have their own pipelines, and create it that way.

Nick Steinke: Yeah, exactly. If there’s a source of water, if there’s a source of electricity, and we can get CO2 from somewhere, we can make fuel on site.

Kai Ryssdal: Which would be a game changer. In the mid 2000s in Iraq and Afghanistan, access to fuel was a logistics and a security nightmare. It cost an estimated $400 a gallon to get fuel where it needed to be, and fuel convoys then became easy targets for roadside bombs. Hundreds of soldiers were killed protecting those trucks. So while this SAF is more climate friendly, it could also make the military less vulnerable. Talking to Nick and Staff Sheehan and lots of others who are working in labs and R&D doing things like making jet fuel literally out of thin air, you see so much optimism about what might be possible. Part of that’s just entrepreneurs and how they’re wired. Part of it, not to be crass, is the Department of Defense putting its climate change money where its mouth is, like the $65 million that Air Company is looking at, and part of it is taking Pentagon leadership at their word.

Kathleen Hicks: We make significant investments to advance ourselves, specifically around the climate crisis, and we’ll keep doing that.

Kai Ryssdal: Coming up after the break, Deputy Secretary of Defense, Kathleen Hicks.

Kai Ryssdal: So first of all, coming to the Pentagon by Metro, it’s a totally new deal. There’s a whole brand new visitor center. It’s not the way it was when I was here. The security requirements seem to be much higher, which makes sense out of September 11th.

—

After I spent four years flying in the Navy, I spent my last couple of years on active duty at the Pentagon.

It’ll be the first time I’ve been in the building for 30 years, and it’ll be interesting to see what’s changed and what hasn’t.

As we get in line to get our visitors passes, I start to see the changes — the new visitors area, the brand new food court with a Starbucks. Looks totally like a fancy college dining hall. But then we get to the part that feels real familiar — the endless and depressing windowless hallways and cubicles. To be honest, if you didn’t know where you were, you could be in any random office building. But finally, we get to a conference room with a view. This part of the Pentagon, the E-ring, with the windows that have actual views, is for the higher ups.

Voice 1: Ma’am, you’re gonna be sitting here. Yeah, we gave you the option for a mic stand instead of holding it.

Kai Ryssdal: You and Janet Yellen.

Kathleen Hicks: Janet Yellen also likes a mic stand? I didn’t know I had a preference. I feel very privileged to use the Janet Yellen.

Kai Ryssdal: We get settled.

Tell me who you are and what you do.

Kathleen Hicks: Kathleen Hicks, I’m the Deputy Secretary of Defense.

Kai Ryssdal: And fresh on my mind is the investment I saw at Air Company, the investments the DOD is making in new technology that’s greener and more resilient.

How much do you depend on the private sector to help you finish your national security mission as the climate changes?

Kathleen Hicks: Very dependent on the private sector. We’re often a fast follower in many areas. You can think about vehicles, for instance. The entire commercial vehicle industry is shifting quickly. That means that maintenance and repair is shifting quickly, for instance, to hybrid or battery. If we don’t follow that, we will have challenges sustaining our force over the long term. So those are that’s actually probably the best example of where we need to adjust. New battery technology, we’re in the United States very dependent on battery sources that have Chinese components for the Defense Department. That’s a significant national security concern. So where our industry is investing in finding new domestic or allied or partner sourced capability for a battery, that’s very much to our benefit.

Kai Ryssdal: I wanted to talk to Secretary Hicks because bigger picture, her portfolio includes the Defense Department’s goals around climate like the decarbonization of the entire military. We should say the DODs total emissions have been coming down steadily for the past decade or so, but it is still a huge number. Hicks pointed out in a speech a couple of years ago that the Department of Defense is responsible for 75% of the entire federal government’s carbon emissions.

—

Our position in the global security infrastructure, right, internationally and also just domestically, the way we do it depends on the DOD making I’m sure it’s dozens and dozens and dozens of flights a day of C17s to the other side of the planet, which burns, I don’t know how many tens of thousands of pounds of JP8, right? Is is our current national security infrastructure compatible with fighting climate change?

Kathleen Hicks: Well, we’re adapting. I think we are world class right now, and what we see is the increasing threats and challenges caused by severe weather or changing sea levels, all of which is exacerbated in terms of the frequency of challenges and the scale of challenges by climate change, and so we’re getting in front of that, and I do think we’re doing that. We have ambitious goals, and so the challenge to us is making sure we stay on top of those goals and make sure we make the adaptation as quickly as possible.

Kai Ryssdal: We’ve been doing a lot of reporting at the operational level, at Jay Baer and at the radar installation up in Utqiagvik and the Coast Guard at Kodiak Island, which was spectacular, by the way, super impressive, those folks. The vibe up there, when you say, Listen, what are you thinking about climate change? Their response is, I’m paraphrasing, I have a mission to do, and I can’t think about that stuff. What do you say to that?

Kathleen Hicks: Yeah, I think it’s, it’s part and parcel of our mission. And I do think there’s, you know, it’s inevitable that with the politicization around the terminology of climate change, that our apolitical military, that we protect so carefully to ensure that they can be focused on mission, I think that has created some challenges. There’s no doubt about that. We’re very focused in the Biden administration on making sure that we get after climate change. We’re very upfront about it. There’s no competition between that and being focused on what the warfighter needs. In fact, they’re not only aligned, but we’re advancing what the warfighter needs when we’re paying attention to how to make sure that she or he is able to be resilient in the face of the effects of climate change. So we know we have work to do inside our force, but I think the larger political climate has work to do to help us out.

Kai Ryssdal: Since you brought it up, I do have to talk about the political climate. This is an election year as you know, it’s a toss up as to what’s going to happen in November. But if there’s a change in administrations, the federal government’s attitude towards climate change is going to change. What do you make of that and all the sorry, and all the work that you and the national security establishment has been doing for many, many years, including in the first Trump administration.

Kathleen Hicks: Look, I have to believe that any administration that will come in wants to advance what’s good for the warfighter. In our last budget, we requested about $5 billion. We got $4.5 billion. Someone might say, Well, you didn’t get $500 million. And I say, well, we got $4.5 billion. That tells you something about the degree of bipartisan support behind the scenes. So we’ll keep working at that. We’ll keep making our case. We’ll keep showing how it advances warfighter effects, and I think we’ll keep making progress.

Kai Ryssdal: $5 billion ain’t nothing, but in an 860-ish billion-dollar budget, it’s not a whole lot.

Kathleen Hicks: It’s a lot. We make significant investments to advance ourselves, specifically around the climate crisis, and we’ll keep doing that. There are lots of other investments probably not counted in that, but I think we do a healthy, healthy investment.

Kai Ryssdal: Is it possible that what needs to happen is that the Pentagon, the Department of Defense, the military establishment, needs to get smaller if we’re going to meet our climate goals?

Kathleen Hicks: I don’t think there’s a direct connection between the size of the military and climate. I think the better way to think about it is the innovations. Technology has really opened up a number of ways in which we can be much more effective as a military, and it turns out, we’re a more sustainable military. So I would think about it that way.

Kai Ryssdal: Let’s be honest here, the American military establishment is not going to get any smaller, whether that’s because of legitimate global security challenges that only the United States is capable of handling, or because of domestic politics. Remember, there are military retirees, defense contractors or bases themselves in every single congressional district. So the gains in the Pentagon mitigating or reducing its carbon footprint are going to come at the margins through those small steps that we’ve been talking about in this episode. But if the size of the military is not going to change, if we keep all of the nearly 800 bases that the Pentagon has around the world, what’s that going to mean for the bases that are literally going to be washed away?

Voice 2: Oh, my God, get out of here!

Kai Ryssdal: A wave, an army base, and a really big radar dish in the middle of the Pacific Ocean coming up next time.

I’m Kai Ryssdal. Sophia Paliza-Carre produced this episode. The How We Survive team includes Hayley Hershman and Katie Reuther. Caitlin Esch is the Supervising Senior Producer. Nancy Farghalli is our editor. Sound design and original scoring by Chris Julin. Mixing by Brian Allison. Our field engineer in San Diego was Jay Siebold. And in New York and Washington D.C. our engineer was Gary O’Keefe. Bridget Bodnar is the Director of Podcasts. Francesca Levy is the Executive Director of Digital. Neal Scarbrough is the Vice President and General Manager of Marketplace. Our theme music is by Wonderly.