The Army Is Going To War With Climate Change – Going Electric
In a shocker of a strategy release, Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth laid out her plans for America's oldest military branch. We are now at war with climate change.
Whether you believe in climate change or not, the military is addressing their historical pollution problem with a very clear and lofty goal... The biggest headline getting the attention is to convert all non-tactical military vehicles to a 100% all-electric fleet and do so in a relatively short amount of time.
The move to electric vehicles has already started, but the goal is to convert all light-duty non-tactical vehicles to all-electric by 2027... and to finish the conversion of ALL non-tactical vehicles to all-electric by 2035. This might be THE game-changer for electric vehicle technology.
We've talked about EV (electric vehicle) technology in the past. It seems the overwhelming majority opinion is "I don't see a personal advantage to my life and/or lifestyle, so we shouldn't be wasting time developing it...rabble, rabble, rabble..." It's an understandable reaction that concretes another human truth.
People hate change, and it's not just big change people resist, it's even the piddliest and smallest little petty changes we naturally detest because it can affect our daily lives.
Example: When Daylight Savings starts, LaffTV doesn't skew the programming to be offset... they just let the log of television shows run as normal... This means I have to sit through the ghastly 80s classic Night Court before I can get to my regular Grace Under Fire to play in the background while I dress for work in the mornings. I hate the fact they don't also move the playlist by the same hour we adjust our lives.
It's petty, irrational, and purely human.
This is exactly how almost everyone I know reacts when words like "Tesla" or "Cybertruck" are mentioned. And it always ends up the same, a bunch of dudes all complaining about "green energy" and "false renewables" and how it's all some sort of socialist or communist ploy to ruin America.
I admit, when there's a lull in the party, I intentionally bring this up. It's good for a laugh.
The Army's goal to convert to an electric fleet of vehicles seems so lofty since the technology wasn't instantly perfected. People tend to forget it took forty years to develop a car that did 40 MPH, an additional forty years to make them reliable and efficient, and another forty-ish years to balance power and efficiency to make a modern pickup truck get over twenty miles per gallon.
The combustion engine is only a reliable and comfortable technology because we've never known anything else. You have to remember that there was a time when nobody thought steam would replace horses and carriages. Electric vehicle technology is still young even though we don't consider electricity a young thing.
The biggest limiting factor of EV's is the current state of batteries. The most common battery technology we use today is actually older than the combustion engine. Of course, we've hopped into and temporarily settled on lithium-ion as the solution, but chemists all around the world are trying to make a new battery that will change the world... and make them a gigantic pile of Wall Street money, but we like to think it's mostly the changing the world aspect...
If you look at the progress so far, EV's tend to improve their efficient and effective range leaps and bounds year over year. Some of the first could offer you thirty to forty miles around town before needing a full charge. Now you can travel up to 600 miles on a single charge, and "fill up" an additional 450-ish mile range in fifteen or twenty minutes at any supercharger station along your way.
Fight it if you must, but there will be an EV to fit even your needs and lifestyle one day soon.
On top of the goal to field a fleet of EV's in America's Army, there is another even bigger goal. All military installations are to run on 100% carbon-pollution-free electricity by 2030. Additionally, the Army plans to build microgrids on each installation by 2035, and actually generate their own carbon-pollution-free power by 2040.
The US Army has a goal to become net-zero carbon neutral from top to bottom... which sounds really, really expensive.
On the plus side, as millions of light-duty vehicles start hitting the auction sites, it just might bring the current ridiculously inflated car market back under control.
You can read the TL:DR outline here... and the full detailed outline here if you're so curious.