Redirecting Energy Transition Minerals from the Pentagon Fleet to the Public Good

by Lorah Steichen, Mekedas Belayneh, Matthew Haugen, Patrick Bigger and Lucy Block

Read Brief

The Pentagon is the world’s largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels, but it is also the US federal government’s leader in electrifying some of its transportation—especially non-tactical vehicles (NTVs) like sedans, pickup trucks, and buses. The Pentagon NTV fleet comprises more than 176,000 vehicles and more than 70 percent of all government-owned electric vehicles. While the energy transition requires a full switch from fossil fuels to zero-carbon transportation, there are also social and environmental costs associated with this switch, particularly in the volume of minerals required for electric transportation.

In order to minimize harms created by mining and refining of energy transition minerals (ETMs) like lithium and cobalt, demand for ETMs should be moderated by prioritizing the social utility of their deployment. Instead of mining minerals to power the Pentagon’s sprawling material footprint, ETMs should be deployed in ways that materially benefit peoples’ lives while reducing demand for new mining.

In this brief we show that electrifying the entire military NTV fleet would require more than 75,000 tons of ETMs. The same volume of materials needed to electrify Pentagon NTVs scattered across the globe at more than 750 overseas military bases and thousands more domestically could electrify the entire US Postal Service fleet, the entire National Parks Service fleet, and provide battery backup for electricity to more than 7,600 federal buildings.

It is imperative to ‘electrify everything’ using renewable energy to stave off the worst impacts of climate change, but radically reducing Pentagon demand for ETMs by cutting its bloated budget and required resources would reduce demand for ETMs while redirecting capacity to the decarbonization of more socially useful government services.