Viewpoint: The Pentagon’s green makeover
By Jeremy Williams
President Jimmy Carter famously put solar panels on the White House, only for Ronald Reagan to take them off again in a deliberate rejection of clean energy. Obama put them back, and now under President Biden, a host of other US federal buildings are getting a green refurb.
Among them is the Pentagon, the beating heart of America’s military-industrial complex iconic headquarters of the Department of Defense. It was completed in 1943 in response to the Second World War, with a remarkable 16 month build-time for such an enormous building. And it is enormous: five floors above ground and two below, its five concentric rings of buildings adding up to over 17 miles of corridor. The site includes a metro station, a chapel, a gym and a shopping mall, and it hosted a staff of 33,000 people when it opened. There are fewer now, more like 26,000, but it was still the largest office in the world until it was eclipsed last year by this diamond trading centre in India.
The new plans for the building include solar PV and solar thermal panels on the roof. The solar thermal will work in tandem with a heat recovery and heat pump system, and together this will meet 95% of the building’s demand for heat and hot water. That replaces the oil and gas systems currently in use, reducing carbon emissions significantly. The Pentagon will also save over a million dollars a year in energy costs.
Similar plans are underway across federal government buildings, as part of the Biden Administration’s efforts to lead from the front on sustainability. The Department of Transport is finally getting double glazing, using glass with solar photovoltaic film. The Mauna Loa Observatory, which has its own place in the story of climate change, is getting solar and batteries that will make it a zero carbon facility. American facilities and military bases around the world will also be upgraded, part of a plan to reduce the government’s own emissions by 65% by 2030 and a net zero target of 2045.
Before we applaud the idea of the Pentagon going green, it’s worth remembering that the US military is the single biggest user of fossil fuels in history. Its emissions are equivalent to the 140 lowest emitting countries all put together. It’s a phenomenal polluter, and those emissions lie outside of international carbon targets because the powers that be decided to exclude the military. But that makes it all the more important that it gets its own house in order, from the headquarters all the way down.
As we’ve seen with the solar panels on the White House, there is symbolic value to governments investing in this way. It shows that they mean what they say, and that they are not demanding anything they wouldn’t do themselves. They can demonstrate value for money, and also improve conditions for government workers. I look forward to something similar across the UK, eventually.
First published in The Earthbound Report.