Nabil al-Jurani/AP Photo
An Iraqi worker at the Rumaila oil refinery, near the city of Basra, December 13, 2009
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. On my most recent 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 operations in the Middle East.
Without an oil addiction, the U.S. military could avoid a number of costly and resource-intensive 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. An incredible amount of dedication to 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 the U.S. 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 hard to believe that it was worth the cost, or will be going forward. 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.
Taking it back to oil: The cost of rapidly decarbonizing the power grid is estimated at about $4.5 trillion, plus some amount for accelerating the transition to electric vehicles. That’s a much better investment than what we got for the trillions we spent helping secure China’s oil supply chain, and certainly less than future potential oil conflict would cost, whether in Syria, Iraq, or even Iran.
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.
This is not coming from some coastal elitist, hippie, or any of the other fair or unfair stereotypes that surround advocates of renewable energy. I watch football on Sundays, I grew up in a regular neighborhood in a small conservative town in the great state of Missouri, and I joined the Marine Corps when George Bush said we were going to surge in Iraq.
I’ve worked against terrorists, helped counter the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and represented our country in arms control negotiations with Russia.
My life’s work is national security. And the case could not be clearer. Decarbonizing will make us safer, allow us to focus on adversaries like Russia and China, and save us money.
The threat posed by climate change is not a secret in the defense world. The Pentagon has periodically issued reports on it for years.
On January 27, the Biden administration acknowledged the threat climate change poses to national security and initiated a plan to tackle it. This should be a bipartisan issue. The threat posed by climate change is not a secret in the defense world. 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. Michèle Flournoy wrote about it last fall and suggested a litany of steps the Pentagon can take to reduce its carbon footprint. Sens. Jack Reed and Elizabeth Warren have focused on how climate change impacts defense supply chains.
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.
I’ve already mentioned the irony of our navy securing Chinese oil supply chains, but eliminating carbon-based energy dependencies is even more important in our competition with Russia, whose economy is largely based around oil and gas. Fully decarbonizing the U.S. energy and transportation sectors will depress prices of oil and gas, giving Russia a hard choice between continued militarization and its domestic economy.
U.S. decarbonization will also pressure European countries, which are reliant on Russia for natural gas and let that reliance constrain them politically, to likewise decarbonize. We could even bake decarbonization into our national-security agreements with Europe or into future arms control agreements. 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 exporting U.S. tech and products at the same time? That’s decarbonization.
The technology we develop and know-how we build in the decarbonization process will be a boon to U.S. business.
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 bipartisan 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 shifting the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing from juicing the stock market, including fossil fuel junk bonds, to funding decarbonization. The federal government could back decarbonization-related loans, like federally backed mortgages, that the Federal Reserve would then purchase. Or 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.
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 reservoir 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 an artificially juiced stock market; or one with more security, less military action, cleaner rivers and skies, and more economic opportunity, they would overwhelmingly pick the second. This Marine from Missouri sure would.
