President Joe Biden stops to talk to the media as he drives a Ford F-150 Lightning truck at Ford Dearborn Development Center, Tuesday, May 18, 2021, in Dearborn, Mich. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) AP
House must save military from Biden’s climate obsession
Washington Examiner July 14, 12:01 AM July 14, 12:02 AM Video Embed
President Joe Biden wanting to force civilians to buy electric cars by 2032 is terrible public policy. It will only make it harder for most people to own and operate an automobile. But at least it doesn’t put the nation in danger.
The same cannot be said of Biden’s push to make all military vehicles electric. Forcing the military to adopt electric vehicles will endanger the lives of service members, weaken our ability to defend ourselves from foreign attack, and make us more dependent on our top national security threat: China.
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It is a ludicrous idea.
On Earth Day 2022, a day not traditionally associated with grand national security pronouncements, Biden said, “We’re going to start the process for every vehicle in the United States military, every vehicle is going to be climate-friendly. Every vehicle. I mean it. We’re spending billions of dollars to do it.”
Considering that our commitment to Ukraine has brought the military dangerously close to running out of ammunition, perhaps Biden should concern himself with properly arming our fighting men and women with the existing tools they need to deter China from invading Taiwan instead of fretting over how much carbon our military vehicles are putting into the atmosphere.
More recently, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said the Biden administration had set a 2030 deadline to switch all non-tactical military vehicles to electric. While her pronouncement is at least less nuts than Biden’s — Granholm at least acknowledges that vehicles in a combat zone are not going to have the luxury of plugging into an electric grid to recharge themselves — her arbitrary deadline would still significantly degrade military readiness.
Biden’s most recent budget barely raised defense spending and after inflation and pay raises are factored in it was actually a cut. The military has the largest organizational fleet in the country, bigger even than the Post Office. Switching all these vehicles to electric, let alone building all the charging stations and electricity transmission infrastructure necessary to make the fleet operable, would cost hundreds of billions of dollars. We do not have the money to make the switch Biden wants, especially not when Biden is cutting defense spending overall. We should not waste the money in that way even if we did have the cash to spare.
Even worse, while the Biden administration continues to make it harder to develop domestic sources for rare earth minerals needed to build electric vehicle batteries, China is on track to control a third of the world’s lithium by 2025. Any commitment to convert military vehicles to electric, especially when we are constraining our ability to harvest rare earth minerals, would make us more dependent on China at the very moment when it is threatening the military invasion of Taiwan.
With Democrats in control of the Senate, it falls on the House to stop Biden’s prioritization of climate virtue signaling over national security. China has no intention of slowing its carbon emissions, especially not emissions from its growing army, navy, and air force. Any reduction in carbon emissions achieved by our switch to electric vehicles would have zero affect on global temperatures.
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Climates change, it’s what they do. To the extent change makes the world unstable, our military must be that much stronger and more flexible to meet the challenge. We should not limit our military’s effectiveness by forcing its abandonment of much-needed and versatile combustion engines.
The House is set to vote on the National Defense Authorization Act this week or next. It should make sure the document it produces protects the military’s ability to defend the nation from Biden’s climate obsession.
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