Embrace the (Energy) Suck

How We Survive

Marketplace

Business, News

5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 25 September 2024

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Department of Defense is an enormous consumer of energy, using 73 million barrels of fuel annually. An F-22 Raptor, a fighter jet, burns 15 gallons of gas every minute when cruising. And more than a third of the DoD’s emissions come from powering its estimated 750 bases around the world.

On the flip side, the Pentagon has an enormous budget, about $850 billion a year. So how is it leveraging some of that money and power to work on some of our biggest climate problems?

In this episode, host Kai Ryssdal takes a look at some of the promising tech solutions that the military is investing in to make it more resilient and reduce emissions. We tour a warehouse in New York making sustainable aviation fuel, visit a microgrid at the original Top Gun school in California and swing by the E-ring, where the higher-ups in the Pentagon work.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	All right, welcome to the Bulldogs.
0:04.0	We're in the ready room of the 525th Fighter Squadron
0:08.0	at Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska.
0:12.0	The ready room's kind of like, homeroom. Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska.
0:12.7	The radio room's kind of like home room for air crews.
0:16.3	Comfortable chairs and tables, plaques on the walls and mementos all over the place.
0:20.9	Huge windows, looking out to the flight line and the runways. They do mission
0:24.8	briefings here. Weather updates and sort of hang out too. You go straight ahead
0:28.8	ahead toward the piano. Straight ahead toward the piano. Kind of the same except a lot nicer as when I was flying back in the mid and late 1980s off the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt.
0:40.0	Oh, you freaking Air Force guys have everything man Jesus sorry I was I was Navy
0:45.2	We were spending months at sea training flights keeping an eye on the Soviets
0:50.1	Ready 7 on the theater Rooseveltboat was our ready room.
0:53.0	And it had some of this stuff, and then it had, you know,
0:57.0	Rose and Rose of Chairs, and we'd sit there for, you know, pre-flights and movie nights and what have you.
1:01.0	We would drink really bad coffee and play lots of games to kill time,
1:05.6	cards and acy-ducy mostly. Here though, popcorn machines, shut up. There are snacks.
1:12.1	There he is, There's the dog.
1:14.0	And a bulldog.
1:15.0	All right, there's Argos.
1:17.0	His name is Argos.
1:18.0	He is the mascot of the 525th.
1:20.0	They fly F-22 raptor fighters, which is what I'm actually here to see.
	...

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