Navy Secretary John Phelan said he’s rescinding a Navy plan focused on combating climate change established by the Biden administration.
“Today, I’m focusing on warfighters first and I’m rescinding the Biden administration’s climate action program,” he said in a video posted to X on Tuesday. “Our focus needs to be on lethality and our warfighters.” [emphasis, links added]
That plan was spearheaded by Meredith Berger, formerly the senior Navy civilian overseeing energy, installations, and environment, during the Biden administration in 2022.
“2030 is the marker that we laid down initially because the scientific community and others have said that this is the decade of decisive action, and so we’re taking that very seriously,” she told reporters at the time.
Defense Department officials had specifically expressed concern that the Marine Corps’s famous East Coast training grounds, Parris Island in South Carolina, could be largely underwater by 2099.
Today I am rescinding the Biden Administration’s Navy Climate Action 2030 program.
We need to focus on having a lethal and ready naval force, unimpeded by ideologically motivated regulations.
Our goal is Peace through Strength. pic.twitter.com/FwoRzm5Le0
— Secretary of the Navy John C. Phelan (@SECNAV) April 22, 2025
[…snip…]
It’s not the first time a Republican administration has canned a Pentagon effort surrounding climate change.
Ray Mabus, who served as SECNAV during the Obama administration, put forward an effort he dubbed the “Great Green Fleet,” which mostly focused on warships relying on alternative sources of energy.
But Republican skepticism quickly trashed the project when President Donald Trump took the White House in 2017.
When asked about the possibility of a successive administration discarding the climate plan, Berger told Breaking Defense at the time, “We’re driving towards success and making sure that we are the best warfighters, and so I hope that that is not a polarizing objective, as I think everybody wants to see mission success.”
Top photo by William Rudolph on Unsplash
Read full post at Breaking Defense
So weird that we have our defense departments focusing on preparing to defend our country instead of on social and environmental issues.
The only way to have a “Green Fleet” is to make only nuclear powered ships. Can’t ever get rid of jet fuel since there can be no jets running on batteries so that part can’t change. But right now the only nuclear power ships are our submarine fleet and our carriers. When I went into the Navy we did have destroyers and cruisers that were nuclear powered–I first qualified as a student on the reactor D1G which was originally used in the USS Bainbridge back in 1974/75. But all those surface ships have been decommissioned and no surface ships except the carriers are nuclear powered. Don’t know why the Navy chose not to replace them as they were decommissioned or to even add to the fleet of nuclear powered surface ships.
We dont need to have the Navy running on Giant Kites or Solar Panels we need Fossil Fuels not Cheap substitutes and WE NEED REALITY