The Promise of Hydrogen: An Alternative Fuel at the Intersection of Climate Policy and Lethality
Walker Mills and Erik Limpaecher | 12.27.21
On the campaign trail, President Joe Biden made climate policy a key part of his agenda. Within a week of taking office he began to follow through on his pledge to prioritize climate action, signing an executive order on “Tackling Climate Change at Home and Abroad” that placed the climate threat on par with the threat of a rising China. Climate was also a key focus of the administration’s “Interim National Security Strategic Guidance” and in September the Department of Defense released its own “Climate Adaptation Plan.” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has also affirmed the Pentagon sees climate change as a key “national security issue.” The link between national security and climate change is increasingly undeniable and it may manifest itself in everything from increased human migration to widespread food insecurity. It is, in the words of one researcher, “not the wolf at the door, threatening to blow the house down,” but rather “thousands of termites . . . whose collective impact is potentially just as catastrophic.” The unique threat of climate change has perhaps best been described, by the United Nations, as a “threat multiplier.”
As the world’s single largest institutional user of petroleum the Department of Defense can both further the president’s climate agenda and increase lethality by replacing petroleum-based fuels with hydrogen. Brown University researchers have calculated that the military produced nearly sixty million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions in 2017—more than the entire nations of Sweden or Denmark. Some have argued that the military will have to make sacrifices for the climate change agenda; we don’t believe this. New technologies are making it possible to shift the military away from a near-total dependence on petroleum-based fuels toward greener alternatives without sacrificing lethality. Existing and growing hydrogen production capacity by our allies means that a switch to hydrogen could dramatically change how the military does operational energy. Hydrogen can be generated and used at the tactical edge of the battlefield, whereas petroleum fuels have to be extracted, refined, stored, and transported long distances.
https://mwi.usma.edu/the-promise-of-hydrogen-an-alternative-fuel-at-the-intersection-of-climate-policy-and-lethality/
