Here’s A Hint So Your Company Can Get Climate Federal Funding: Call It “Defense Tech”

janeiro 4, 2025

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An interesting twist of logic is taking place at the highest levels of global governments. You’d think that the need to address the climate issues would stand alone, right? After all, the effects of a warming planet are destroying ecosystems, threatening critical infrastructure, intensifying weather, and creating conditions incompatible with human life. The climate crisis, which is arguably the single greatest threat to the livelihoods, security, and well-being of people worldwide, seems doomed for isolated straight line federal funding funding. Lately, though, initiatives to grow investments in climate change R&D look a lot different — they’ve been wrapped in language around innovative government security systems and solutions. A semantic turn-of-phrase for the same climate purposes as the last four years is now referred to as “defense tech.”

Defense tech? Yup. The climate crisis is being framed as a destabilizing force that is a significant risk to national and global security. Governments are redirecting funds to defense tech as a means to mitigate climate-related policy issues.

We might not have paid much notice, but in 2021 the White House issued an executive order on tackling the climate crisis at home and abroad, making climate change considerations a central part of the US national security and foreign policy. Yet the Biden-Harris administration also enacted the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), and the CHIPS and Science Act — all of which explicitly promoted clean energy innovations.

Clean energy companies have been doing a whole lotta hand-wringing lately, though, as once-and-future President Donald J. Trump’s positioning on climate action has been quite clear. Rethinking climate action as defense tech stands in direct contrast to promises that twice Trump to office — a return to a ~~Gilded~~ Golden Age means rejecting transportation electrification, the Paris agreement, solar and wind energy, and other climate action advancements, right? The Trumpsters (“drill, baby, drill“) have consistently signaled the demise of climate tech.

But all is not lost in clean energy funding. Many experts have offered a counternarrative: clean energy funding will continue under a Trump administration — just don’t use the word “climate” in funding applications.

Why is Rebranding Clean Tech as Defense Tech Gaining Popularity?

Rebranding helps companies overcome a brand crisis and assess if their brand promise has been compromised, leading to a negative reputation. A successful rebranding campaign helps to distance brands from negative associations and allows them to communicate their new and improved values to consumers. This way, companies can regain market trust and rebuild a strong brand presence with a new identity.

Motivating people to act on climate change requires messaging tailored to the audience in question — at this moment in time in the US, that means conservative politicians whose campaigns are primarily funded by the fossil fuels industry. Lots of clean technologies have defense applications that can make them useful — in any presidential administration. Fossil fuels supply over 80% of the world’s energy. It seems that world politicians are simply conceding to short term returns with the rationale of protecting energy security.

Moreover, scientists frequently speak of terms of “negatives” like emissions, which sound bad but actually refer to positive acts like reducing carbon dioxide from the air. The idea rings true for Aaron Guo, co-founder of BladeX Technologies, a composite manufacturing company that has developed a new method of economically producing complex, high-performance composite parts. The startup is devoted to manufacturing lightweight composite materials, and its website touts using them for electric motors — but also artillery shells and drones. The company has shifted to defense funding as a way to attack the markets they need to maintain a competitive edge.

Clean energy companies that are hungry for federal funding must emphasize the importance of their role and audience when communicating their climate messages. By making climate change feel urgent, tangible, and appropriate for defense tech, climate innovators are designing alternate pathways for continued climate action.

What is Defense Tech? How does Climate Action Funding Fit In?

As Bloomberg reported recently, even before the November US presidential election, clean energy startups were already considering rebranding as defense tech. Some of the most influential companies, research facilities, and government agencies identified the need to address climate change — but they realized they needed to draw upon their prescribed missions and current political contexts to make it happen.

The climate crisis has changed the complexity of focus areas like the geostrategic environment in which defense organizations operate, says Edwin Oshiba, acting assistant secretary of the US Air Force for Energy, Installations, and Environment.

“We have to understand sort of the impact that those kinds of events have on our ability to get our mission done, whether it’s here in the continental United States, whether it’s how we project power overseas, how it impacts our ability to operate in a distributed environment.”

The US Department of Defense (DOD) also acknowledges that the climate crisis “fundamentally alters the conditions that shape military operations at home and around the world,” reshaping national strategic interests and requiring new understandings around adaptation to ways that extreme weather and climate change affect security readiness and capabilities. Pacifists cringe when climate funding is part of a DOD paradigm of defense tech oriented as an “opportunity for well-prepared forces to secure a competitive advantage” in addition to deterring aggression and protect national interests.

MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory has established a major initiative to help address climate change, with a focus on solving some of the most crucial and challenging technical problems consistent with its mission. Across these efforts, they have brought together multidisciplinary expertise in areas such as systems analysis, sensing, artificial intelligence, data analytics, and decision support to help us contribute to the global response to this threat. Their Technology Office has established a portfolio for climate change R&D. A framework to link ideas across a solution spectrum to prioritize efforts in grounded in six steps to address climate change:

mitigating anthropogenic drivers;
observing the climate;
modeling the climate;
predicting impacts;
adapting; and,
remediating.

Their projects include a climate resilience early warning network, a low-cost methane sensing network, advanced sensing for hydrological meteorology, a compact optical salinity sensor, artificial intelligence-based drought prediction, green instrumentation and experimentation, atmospheric aerosol characterization, an intelligent tornado prediction engine, and an Arctic climate change prediction network — among others.

Final Thoughts about Defense Tech

Of course, there are ideological concerns about clean energy R&D with applications to killing the Other, the enemy.

It must be said that there is a long-standing debate on how security and clean energy development are at times in conflict, and such arguments are not often made explicit in the debate on securitization of climate change.

There is criticism of the military being brought in as an objective, higher authoritative voice operating above the level of politics while pointing to security threats is inherently political.
It’s also disconcerting and contradictory that defense forces are not obligated by international climate agreements to report or reduce their carbon emissions.
There should be more attention to the military’s resource-use and carbon footprint.
Security forces should take natural resource scarcity aggravated by climate change into account in their on-the-ground risk assessment.
They should enter into dialogue with military actors that seek to misuse climate change for unjustified military intervention or are otherwise engaged in unsustainable businesses.