Opinion: Scuttling fossil fuels could harm national security

David Gattie , an associate professor of engineering at the University of Georgia, is no climate denier. He wants that understood upfront. He believes renewable energy is important.

That said, however, he believes the United States couldn’t pick a worse time to force a rapid transition away from fossil fuels on the economy. More importantly, he thinks it could be disastrous for national security.

He points to executive order 14008 , in which President Joe Biden stated, “It is the policy of my administration that climate considerations shall be an essential element of United States foreign policy and national security,” and he wonders who, if anyone, is thinking things through.

For now, at least, he believes fossil fuels are important for national security, and renewables can help diversify the nation’s energy assets, not replace them.

Gattie was a principal speaker and presenter at the One Utah Summit a few weeks ago at the Little America Grand in Salt Lake City. He caught my attention because his message was so unusual for a modern-day academic, and because it made good sense.

I caught up with him by phone a few days later. Gattie is an amiable fellow with a good sense of humor. Those are important traits if you’re in liberal-dominated academia and you’re presenting research that shows the nation needs to hang on to fossil fuel technology a while longer. Gattie jokes that he no longer has a key to the faculty lounge. And yet, he sees nothing funny about the world’s situation right now.

“It’s the worst of times to be doing this,” he told me. Russia is becoming expansionist. China has its eyes on Taiwan. Both nations are fueling their militaries with oil and gas, and their electrical grids with coal.

Meanwhile, according to the International Energy Agency , China holds about 60% of the world’s capacity for things such as batteries, as well as 60% of the world’s rare earth elements . Those elements are essential for many high-tech devices upon which the U.S. economy relies.

China refines about 90% of the planet’s rare earth elements and 60-70% of its lithium and cobalt. In other words, we are becoming more reliant on supply chains that run right through a nation that is becoming our chief international competitor.

Gattie calls the administration’s goal to make the nation a zero-carbon economy the greatest economic transformation since the industrial revolution. The problem is, no one knows how we could mobilize such an economy for a widespread military response the way the U.S. mobilized industry after Pearl Harbor. Also, virtually no one is examining this move objectively.

It is, he said, as if we have “cut off a couple of legs (from the economy) and expect it to walk. I’m saying it’s not worth the risk.”

In an op-ed he wrote for The Hill , Gattie referred to what he calls the military-industrial-academic complex, adding the nation’s universities to the well-known connection President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about after World War II.

At today’s universities, he said, grant funding is vital to career success, and much of that comes from the federal government.

“With the federal government backing the mandated solution of decarbonization, there is little incentive for tenured or tenure-seeking professors to challenge this ‘settled’ industrial policy, and hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars incentivizing acceptance and promotion of it,” he wrote.

The result is more of an echo chamber than a critical review of policies.

All of this must be music to the ears of Utah lawmakers who, earlier this year, worked to preserve a coal-fired plant near Delta. They are also likely to agree with his solution, which is to move the discussion out of Washington and into the states; especially energy-rich states such as Utah.

“I am convinced that our response to this needs to be at state levels,” Gattie told me. “We need a coalition of like-minded states that recognize what is going on and that can actually develop a strategy moving forward.”

That strategy needs to ensure that changes to our energy portfolio make the United States a stronger industrialized economy.

“States, I’m convinced, are where the work is going to have to be done,” he said. “They need to be the loudest voices in the country.”

Gattie may not succeed in getting the attention he needs in order to change the nation’s foreign policy focus, at least not with the current administration in power. But he is at least asking questions that demand intelligent answers from those in power.