Pete Hegseth, who began calling himself Secretary of War, tells the Department of Defense: “doesn't engage in climate change bullshit” Just last week he said that the agency “won't distractclimate change or “woke moralism.”
But new report suggests that the Pentagon is seriously addressing this problem: as it stockpiles dozens of critical minerals, threatening energy transition by accumulating resources that could be used to decarbonize transport, energy production and other sectors.
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President Donald Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill allocated $7.5 billion to replenish the Pentagon's reserves. critical minerals like cobalt, lithiumand graphite which are stored in six warehouses across the country, and the effort is overseen by the Defense Logistics Agency. Such materials are used in everything from jet engines to weapons systems, and are often mined or processed in China or other countries. Materials in the warehouse are available only during a declared war or by order of the undersecretary of war, a Defense Logistics Agency spokesman said.
A report on the potential peaceful uses of these materials was published by the Transition Security Project, which analyzes the economic, climate and geopolitical threats posed by the US and UK militaries. Laura Steichen, the strategist who prepared the document, said America essentially faces a choice between missiles and buses. The Pentagon's planned stockpiles of cobalt and graphite (7,500 metric tons and 50,000 metric tons, respectively) could electrify 102,896 buses—dwarfing the roughly 6,000 currently operating in the United States. Or they could be used to produce 80.2 gigawatt-hours of batteries, more than double the country's current energy reserves.
The International Energy Agency also said such minerals could be used for peaceful purposes, such as building batteries, wind turbines and other technologies that underpin the transition to a green economy. But designating a mineral as “critical” allows the government to speed up the extraction and procurement of minerals for military purposes. “The term ‘critical minerals’ originated from military stockpiles—the criticality of a mineral is partly due to its national security significance,” Steichen said.
The last time the Pentagon stockpiled nonfuel materials was during the Cold War, when the government sought to build storage facilities for industrial raw materials (such as metals and agricultural materials) and limit dependence on other countries. By the late 1990s, the United States began to view other countries, especially the Caribbean, as generally reliable suppliers, and by 2003 the weapons stockpile had dropped to almost zero. During Joe Biden's presidency, there has been some movement towards a revival of these particular stocks. fight climate change. (That plan never came to fruition, according to a DLA spokesman.) This year, however, Trump introduced the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” highlighted $2 billion to expand reserves and $5.5 billion for supply chain infrastructure needed to secure these minerals.
Even some military and government experts agreed that the expansion of government stockpiles was a concern. A Department of Defense report from 2021, for example, said that if the supply chain rare earth elements — some of the critical mineral resources are disrupted, “the main damage will be suffered by the civilian economy.”
“The point here is to push back against some of the militant associations of essential minerals and the various assumptions that are based on that,” Steichen said. “What materials are actually needed for the energy transition versus another definition of criticality?”
The military is not required to report its greenhouse gas emissions, and the US military in particular is the largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases. greenhouse gases in the world and accounts for about 80 percent of total US government emissions. They are also generally not required to report the quantities of minerals they extract and use.
Julie Klinger, a geographer at the University of Wisconsin who studies mining and resource boundaries, says these things deserve closer attention. “Especially now as we enter a time where there is much more explicit taxpayer-funded support for critical mining and processing projects, the taxpayer really needs to have a little more information,” she said.
The Defense Logistics Agency made an unusual admission when it revealed exactly how much cobalt and graphite it was trying to purchase. Often, Steichen said, such information is not readily available to the public. Some numbers are known – for example, one F-35 military aircraft requires about 920 pounds rare earth minerals for their engines and weapon tracking systems. But despite the Pentagon's vast network of suppliers, it's unclear where all the minerals go.
“This creates an accountability gap and makes it difficult to clearly understand the use of military resources,” Steichen said. “We know that this is the amount they are seeking to accumulate, but we do not know the specific volume of this material going to various military sectors or various military contractors.”
The Pentagon has invested in mines that produce some of these minerals in places like Alaska, Idaho and Saudi Arabia. Right-wing think tanks such as Heritage Foundation and Rand have spent the last five years urging the government to stockpile these materials to reduce its dependence on adversaries like China, which currently dominates the world market for critical minerals.
Researchers like Klinger question the federal decision to prioritize military stockpiles—in part because most critical minerals, such as graphite, can potentially be recycled when used in batteries but are lost when they are turned into, say, bombs. According to Klinger, one of the reasons that demand for fossil fuels maintains is the fact that they are consumed in use. On the other hand, critical minerals such as lithium and cobalt can be recovered or recycled when used for civilian purposes.
“The only use for critical minerals that destroys them during use is to literally blow them up,” she said. “Will these critical minerals go into energy technologies that will then provide a range of societal benefits, or are they simply dug out of the ground in one place to be exploded somewhere else?”
