Experts Only Episode #113 with Joe Bryan, Chief Sustainability Officer & Senior Advisor to the Secretary, United States Department of Defense

Host Jon Powers welcomes Joe Bryan, Chief Sustainability Officer & First Senior Advisor to the Secretary, United States Department of Defense.

Joe is an expert in creating change and doing interesting, innovating things both internally and externally, and he brings out the Department as a leader in both the markets and internationally.

This conversation brings our host back to his days of working at the Pentagon with Joe. He was excited to dive back in and see the work Joe is doing to bring change on the issues they care about.

Welcome to the show, Joe!

Transcript

Jon Powers:

Welcome back to Experts Only. I’m your host, Jon Powers. I’m the co-founder of CleanCapital and serve as President Obama’s Chief Sustainability Officer. On this podcast, we explore solutions to climate change by talking to industry leaders about the intersection of energy, innovation, and finance. You can get more episodes at cleancapital.com.

Welcome back to Experts Only. I’m your host, Jon Powers. Today we dive into the amazing things that are happening at the Department of Defense and have a conversation with Joe Bryan, who’s the Chief Sustainability Officer and is the first Senior Advisor of the Secretary of Defense on Climate. Joe has got an amazing track record of creating change and doing really interesting, innovative things and I think he brings that to the Department. We’re talking a lot about the work being done there, both in the building, but externally too, allowing DOD to be a leader, both in the markets as well as internationally. I hope you enjoy the conversation. This takes me back to the time that I was at the Pentagon actually with Joe. I’m excited to dive back in and excited to see the work that he’s doing, bringing change on issues that we care about. So I hope you enjoy the show.

Joe, thanks for joining me at Experts Only.

Joe Bryan:

Hey, thanks Jon. Appreciate the opportunity to join you.

Jon Powers:

Yeah. I’ve got to say, this is the first time I’ve done an interview into the Pentagon, so I’m super excited to see the background.

Joe Bryan:

Well, I think this is our first podcast actually. I’m looking at the team here, but I think this is the first time I’ve done an actual podcast.

Jon Powers:

No, that’s amazing. I love it. Well, welcome to Experts Only. I really appreciate the work you’re doing for the Pentagon, but obviously I’ve always appreciated your friendship. And I think for folks that aren’t aware, I want to get into how monumental it is that you’re the first Senior Advisor on Climate to the Secretary of Defense.

But before getting into that, I just want to fall back. You grew up in Cleveland, you went to D.C., you’ve worked with some really extraordinary leaders in your time in the Hill and beyond. So first of all, what got you interested on the policy front? How did you end up going to D.C.? I didn’t even know you were in South Africa at one point. What was it about policy that got you excited and knowing that’s the sort of space you wanted to play in?

Joe Bryan:

Yeah, well, thanks. Before we get into that, Jon, I think it’s pretty important. We’ve known each other for a little while, we have some similar backgrounds, both from the North Coast of the United States, the best of course.

Jon Powers:

Right. The coast of Lake Erie.

Joe Bryan:

You’re from Buffalo and me from the better city, the senior city of Cleveland. And you went to John Carroll in Cleveland, right?

Jon Powers:

I did, yeah.

Joe Bryan:

And we put our crack research team on your John Carroll career… John Carroll, if you go on their website on the Wikipedia page, they have prominent alumni, Jon. And who I see on there, I see Tim Russert, Don Shula, Josh McDaniels for those football fans out there, Eric Carmen of Raspberries fame, and Jon Powers.

Jon Powers:

I’m on there?

Joe Bryan:

You’re on as the prominent alumni. So I went to Fordham, another Jesuit school. We have Vince Lombardi and Denzel Washington, but I didn’t make the Mount Rushmore of Fordham, but you’ve managed to do that. So at some point, Jon, we’re all going to have to understand how one achieves Wikipedia stardom so that we can… That’s something we all…

Jon Powers:

It’s the podcast, Joe. Start a podcast, then they can get you up there.

Joe Bryan:

Start a podcast, right. Well, it’s an interesting question. How did I get into this space? Like we said, I grew up in Cleveland, moved to New York to go to college. I went actually to play football was my primary…

Jon Powers:

Oh, did you?

Joe Bryan:

Yeah, I wasn’t a good player, but I was present most of the time.

Jon Powers:

Listen, a decent player in Ohio is great everywhere else.

Joe Bryan:

Well, I mean, I may be an exception to that rule, Jon. So you can look at the tape.

Jon Powers:

That’s why I played Rugby, Joe.

Joe Bryan:

So let me see, after college, and this is actually how I not only got into policy, but got into climate and energy, mostly energy at the time. I took a job in the mountains of Western Maryland and I lived in a tent for a year.

Jon Powers:

Oh my gosh.

Joe Bryan:

And the job was dealing with kids who had an alternative… It was an alternative to incarceration for juvenile offenders. And so the kids could either go to jail or they could come and live in the tent with us. And if you’ve ever been in the mountains of Maryland in the winter, and this was before temperatures started to change too much, this is going back to the early nineties, and it was quite cold. And I remember thinking, we had to build fires to keep ourselves warm in the morning and I’d have to go around and light all the fires in the kids’ tents.

And I just remember thinking to myself, there’s got to be a better way. We got a couple days off and there was not much to do in Cumberland, Maryland in 1992. And so I would spend my time at the library reading about solar energy and electric vehicles. And I decided at that time that that struck me as really interesting. And this was very early on, obviously, in the development of all those technologies. So I decided that’s what I was going to do and I went to graduate school at the University of Delaware. I wasn’t a technical person, I’m not an engineer or a scientist, not smart enough to pass any of those classes. So I took public policy degrees and I got a public policy class and got a Master’s in energy policy from the University of Delaware, which was a fabulous experience and a great school. And then that kind of kicked off my career. I then moved to New York and worked a lot on renewable energy stuff, early days, on things like net metering policy, which…

Jon Powers:

You were at NRDC, right, after that?

Joe Bryan:

I was at NRDC after that in New York, and at the time we were in the middle of a lot of utility restructuring and introduction of competition into the utility space. So we worked a lot on that. And my particular interest in that was on how do we bring more renewable energy onto the grid? And what are the tools we have in policy to make renewables competitive and to grow those markets? And so I got very interested in that. And we had some success in New York and in the Northeast on some policies, which I think were helpful in moving the market a bit at the time. Then went, as you mentioned, I left there and went to South Africa for a couple years and then came back to D.C. And didn’t come to D.C. until I was probably 30, 31 years old. And then I had an opportunity obviously to work with the folks that you mentioned.

Jon Powers:

Yeah, I’m going to keep South Africa for a whole nother podcast. I’m fascinated by the work you were doing over there. But before getting deeper into the career stuff, you ended up working for John Lewis on Capitol Hill, who, and folks who don’t know, you should definitely look John Lewis up. He’s a luminary in American politics and just had been a phenomenal human being and leader. What was that experience like, just being in the room with him?

Joe Bryan:

So I had the opportunity to get that job when I first came back from South Africa. And just to be around him and the history that he’s lived was just something that you don’t get a chance to do. There’s not many living human beings who have contributed so much to equality in our country, or in the world, as Mr. Lewis did. And when I say contribute, I don’t mean contribute. He was arrested 40 times, he was beaten. We can all see the video in which he literally stood up in the face of some really serious challenges, and the bravery and courage… And he was a kid at the time. He was in his early twenties. So it was amazing.

Jon Powers:

I can name them probably on one hand the times I’ve sat in D.C. in awe of someone speaking, and I’ve seen Lewis speak a few times and every time you just sort of have to absorb the monumental person you’re in the room with, and appreciate all the stuff they’ve done. And he was one of the person that didn’t carry himself with zero ego, at least from what I ever saw. And it was just always wonderful to see the compassionate empathy and sort of leadership he showed.

Joe Bryan:

Yeah, the private John Lewis was just the same as the public John Lewis, and anyone who’s listening, Walking With the Wind is a great book and it’s a great story of his life and how one person who can stand up in the face of a lot of overwhelming resistance can really make change at a scale that we’re all benefiting from today. So it was just an amazing experience, and great colleagues and, you know.

Jon Powers:

That’s awesome. So I’m going to lead you forward, I mean other experiences in the Hill and the Senate side as well, which are awesome. When I first really got to know you was when you came into the Pentagon for the first time on the Navy side. And one of the things I really loved about the way you worked within the building was both respect for the process and the ability to disrupt the process. And for folks that don’t know the Pentagon, there was a lot of process, and you can either get lost in the minutiae of the process, which is, look, you’re obviously driving a major organization, the largest energy consumer, but also at the time we first started working there, there was fighting two active wars. There’s a lot of challenges in talking about climate, electric vehicles, renewable energy in the face of those challenges.

And you did a great job of driving it. But then also, I remember specifically on electric vehicles, instead of following the traditional path of, we can get it done if we follow this minutiae, you were able to disrupt that and get some of the traditional bureaucratic players, like GSA and others, to move hypervigilantly because they were afraid of the fact that you were not going to be married to the process. So I think that’s hugely important for me to think about now your role at the Pentagon, where you come in from that experience, you know the building, you know how to operate with and without the process, but now you’re at the highest level. So how has it…

PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:11:04]

Jon Powers:

About the process, but now you’re at the highest level. So how’s it been now stepping into literally the apex of the Pentagon and finding ways to drive a conversation around an issue like climate, which in many cases may not be the folks in the building’s natural thing to discuss. How has that experience been?

Joe Bryan:

Yeah, so coming into the Pentagon this time, Jon, really different than the last time and for a couple of reasons. One, I think I was just a lot smarter about how this place operates. It is, as you mentioned, it’s the biggest bureaucracy in the world. It’s a massive corporation with lots of different business units that operate within it. And so understanding that kind of whole kaleidoscope of things that are going on around you can be either empowering or distracting and you have to figure out how to manage through that process. So coming back it was a lot easier for me to understand what to do and you know as importantly, what not to do and understand the bureaucracy. Super, super important. So where I came in this time, and it’s unique, this administration’s take a really different approach to this issue of climate and energy.

And what the administration did, what the president did is he put a number of senior folks in agencies at the highest level to help build the groundwork for the kinds of things that he wanted to accomplish on climate energy. And Secretary Austin, Deputy Secretary Hicks, my bosses kind of put me in their front office. And what that means for folks who are not familiar with the Department of Defense is I exist not within the bureaucracy but within the Secretary’s office. And so I like to say sometimes that not a lot of people work for me, but everybody works for my boss. And when you remove this position and some of these functions from the bureaucracy, you can operate more strategically and set priorities for the department and allow the bureaucracy to actually do its job. So it’s not my job to manage everything, the deployment of electric vehicles on a particular installation or the development of a renewable energy power purchase agreement.

My job is to help the organization set priorities for what we want to achieve over a period of time, and then work with the components and the individual business units, the military services within the department to execute on those. And once we have unity of understanding of where we’re going, it makes it easier for the bureaucracy, I think, to get on board and to do what they do well. So the structure of this is different, very, very different than the first time I was in here. And I think it creates new opportunities for us. But it’s also, as you say, it’s operating at a different level.

Jon Powers:

So flashing back to the role we had before, right now it’s not a decade, but it’s not far from a decade later.

Joe Bryan:

Yeah. Gosh.

Jon Powers:

Is that right? Is that crazy?

Joe Bryan:

Nine years? Yeah, that’s nine years. Wow.

Jon Powers:

If you think about the foundation of work that was laid then of really raising this issue, being able to take this issue beyond the civilian side into the military side. And I think what is interesting about the military side having also been in uniform at one point, is you have a generation of sailors, soldiers, Marines, airmen who have lived and breathed national security and energy security and began to understand climate. So you have a cultural shift there. Here you are a decade later. How do you now communicate or do you see a better understanding within the bureaucracy of just the issue of climate and national security where it’s no longer like, “Hey, this is an issue, we should learn about it,” and it’s like, “We recognize this is a threat, we need to do something about it,” like how has that transition been for you coming back in the building?

Joe Bryan:

There’s two things I think. One is look, it’s really difficult to ignore what’s happening around us, right?

Jon Powers:

Right.

Joe Bryan:

There’s a quote that I sometimes… I’ll probably butcher it here, but there’s a woman who was a climate scientist was talking about climate change, obviously. And she says, “To understand climate change, you don’t need to be a climate scientist, you don’t need to be a meteorologist, you just need to be somebody who looks out their window.” And I think we are… I hesitate to say we’re benefiting from that by educating people, but you look around you and there’s a lot of things happening and I think it’s increasingly hard to deny that things are happening in the environment around us. So that’s one aspect of things that are different now than they were maybe nine years ago, or at least more obvious now than they were nine years ago. The other thing that we’ve done quite well, and I think we work really hard at it, is to communicate what we’re doing with respect to climate is aligned with what the Department of Defense needs to do for its primary mission. And so the company…

Jon Powers:

Can you add some color to that for folks that don’t understand that?

Joe Bryan:

Yeah. So obviously the Department of Defense’s mission is to be prepared to fight and win the wars and to protect the homeland and to intervene if we have to in conflict that happens. And that’s the primary mission of the Department of Defense. The primary mission of Department of Defense is not to lead the world on mitigating climate change.

Jon Powers:

Right.

Joe Bryan:

That’s not our mission. But what we do with respect to climate can actually help us be better at our jobs. And let me give you a couple examples. What we know is that climate change is increasingly causing extreme weather that impacts our installations, that impacts our training, that impacts our budget. We’ve had billions and billions of dollars that we’ve had to spend to rebuild places like Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida, Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. We have wildfires that impact our bases on the West Coast. We have dry conditions which make it difficult to do live fire training for example. When a hurricane comes in, we have to send our ships to sea.

So there are a lot of impacts to the mission from climate. And if you look at a military installation, they all rely on the commercial electric grid for power for the most part. And what do you do to improve the resilience of a military installation to events which might affect the commercial electric grid like a hurricane or a cyber attack, or even a kinetic attack on the grid, but what you do is you get as efficient as you possibly can to reduce demand on the grid in the first place. And then it’s helpful to bring energy storage and distributed generation solar inside the fence line to support critical missions, so if you do lose the commercial grid, then you can continue to operate things that you can’t lose in the event of a contingency.

So in that case, you don’t even have to agree that we’re doing this for climate reason, you do it for mission reasons and there happens to be a climate benefit. And so we can elevate those kind of efforts. Now in the operational forces, the same is true. What we know is that our logistics requirement, and Jon you can speak to this better than I, our logistics requirements for fuel are massive. They cost us treasure, they cost us lives to have to deliver fuel over long distances in contested space. We’ve faced that in the past in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we’ll face it potentially in the future as we think about the Pacific and what’s the best way to mitigate the risk of logistics, contested logistics? That’s to not require logistics in the first place.

So improve the efficiency of your platforms, deploy technologies that minimize the amount of fuel that you have to deliver. And so if we’ve worked very hard to align what we’re doing with respect to climates and we’re investing significant money in the hybridization of our tactical vehicles so that we don’t need as much fuel forward and that we leverage other combat benefits that electrification can bring like silent watch, being quiet on the battlefield, not putting out a heat signature, being able to go really fast. Those things have combat benefit to them and they’re also happen to be associated with a technology that’s better for the climate. So what we’ve tried very hard to do, and I think we’re doing reasonably well, is to communicate within the department how that perceived tension between what’s good for the climate and what’s good for the mission, to communicate that’s just a mistaken way to think about it.

Jon Powers:

Yeah, no, absolutely. So I think about what… the department as a whole, and for folks that are not familiar, obviously the military is one of the largest energy consumer in the world, and you’ve got spaces at home, you’ve got Ford operations. In many cases, the work, the stuff that’s happening at the Ford operating level is unique enough that it’s hard to really take best practices from other industries and bring that over. And there’s some hybrid vehicles, things that you can learn from technology-wise, but it’s very few people are figuring out how to really try to blow up an enemy that’s 50 miles away. They’re trying to figure out how to deliver packages your house in a more efficient fashion.

Joe Bryan:

Well, let me tell you that Jon right there as you just nailed it, delivering package in a more efficient fashion. The FedEx and the UPSs of the world, want cargo aircraft that are efficient because fuel costs are a significant part of their bottom line.

Jon Powers:

Huge.

Joe Bryan:

For us, we want airframes that can go long distances and deliver fuel, not packages, maybe packages, but fuel and cargo at range. So we both have a common interest actually in things like… we’re looking at a lot of things like blended wing body, a whole new kind of airframe that could transform the market for air travel and for commerce.

Jon Powers:

That is the question I wanted to ask you, which is like, okay, so for listeners that are working at some really interesting things in the private sector, whether it be, I think about the firm Guidehouse, which does… as you know I’ve worked with them a lot in the past and they do a lot of stuff around greenhouse gas accounting for a lot of really amazing corporations or someone in Silicon Valley-

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Jon Powers:

… or a lot of really amazing corporations, or someone in Silicon Valley who’s creating the newest technology to help bring efficiency to the airline industry or to building efficiency and building management. When they look at the defense department, how would you coach them to bring those experiences into defense market? Because DoD is … when you and I worked in there together, it was really the sole leader in a lot of this stuff. Now it is a really important consumer of energy and other climate technologies and et cetera as part of a much larger market, which I think is great, but it means there’s some really great off-the-shelf technologies that might fit into the rubrics of what you’re trying to solve. How would you advise firms that are innovative to think about how to bring those ideas into the department to help you and your mission?

Joe Bryan:

Yeah, that’s a good question. It’s frequently … I mean, I know in past lives we’ve talked a lot about that, about how to bring technology to the Department of Defense.

Jon Powers:

Or ideas, not just technology.

Joe Bryan:

Yeah.

Jon Powers:

Whether it be contracting, EV, infrastructure stuff, there’s a lot of unique … we were talking earlier about contracting of power. For a long time DoD was the biggest contractor of power. Now Google has their own sophisticated shop doing it, others doing it. And there’s so much that can be shared and help accelerate the mission that you’re on. And how can we help, I guess, maybe bring those players together.

Joe Bryan:

Yeah. So I’ll talk about a couple challenges, but then talk a little bit about what we’re doing.

Jon Powers:

Yeah.

Joe Bryan:

One challenge is that the department generally doesn’t buy widgets. We don’t buy individual goods. We don’t generally buy batteries or we don’t buy solar panels. What we tend to buy, and even when you think about our combat platforms, we buy the platform. We don’t buy all the components that go into the platform.

Jon Powers:

Right.

Joe Bryan:

So if you’re an individual company trying to sell into the department, you’re a widget, sometimes that can be tough when we look for integrated solutions to our problems. So even on an installation, if we’re trying to improve the efficiency of an installation, frequently, as you know, we’ll do energy service performance contracting, and we’ll use ESCOs and our utility partners to bring us integrated solutions to solve some of those problems, which could mean some efficiency, it could mean some supply side solutions like batteries and renewables.

Jon Powers:

Right.

Joe Bryan:

But those come together frequently as a package. And we have some great examples of where we’ve been able to execute on big kind of contracts at our installations that both improve our energy performance, but also offer us something in terms of resilience of our mission, so places like Paris Island or Miramar. And there’s a whole set of other examples we could go into about –

Jon Powers:

Joe, that’s really helpful because it helps folks understand you don’t have to go sell to the Pentagon.

Joe Bryan:

That’s right.

Jon Powers:

There’s an ecosystem around it of folks that are looking for innovative technologies that they can then wrap into a package and bring it in.

Joe Bryan:

That’s right.

Jon Powers:

And I think that’s really helpful, because often, having been on the other side … when I was working at Bloom in Silicon Valley, it’s always like, “We have to go meet with the secretary,” or whatever. And I’m like, “Well that’s really not who need to be talking to. You need to be talking to the ecosystem of folks around it and understanding that.”

Joe Bryan:

That’s right. And we have a lot of industry partners who are integrators.

Jon Powers:

Right.

Joe Bryan:

That’s what they do for a living. And operationally, one thing I’ll mention to you that I think is important, two-thirds of the department’s energy use and two-thirds of our associated greenhouse gas emissions are in our operations. So about a third in our installations, but two-thirds of it is in our ships, our airplanes, our tactical vehicles. That’s what are the big fuel users. And actually, two-thirds of that two-thirds is airplanes. So one of the things we need –

Jon Powers:

Two-thirds of the two-thirds are … so basically airplanes are the largest energy consumers and emitters basically, in many cases.

Joe Bryan:

That’s right. That’s right. They burn the most fuel.

Jon Powers:

Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Bryan:

So one of the things that we’ve done is the deputy, Deputy Secretary Hicks, put out a requirement last year that directed the department to pursue energy demand reduction in all their new platform acquisitions or in major upgrades to existing platforms. So basically what she was saying is, “Hey, when we buy something new or when we overhaul something that’s old, we need to make energy demand reduction efficiency a priority attribute of that system,” so that we can mitigate those logistics risks that we just talked about, but that also has a knock on benefit of being good for the climate. So she put that direction out. It’s making its way through the system and will end up ultimately in requirements that the individual and military services and the program offices who buy things for the department … because we don’t buy things out of my office.

Jon Powers:

Yeah. Right, right, right.

Joe Bryan:

buy things. The military services, the Army, Navy, Air Force, they buy things. And what they buy, they should have a requirement that, “Hey, that thing that we’re buying, that should be efficient.” Now that’s a demand signal that should come from us. And what I would say to the broader community though is there’s also –

Jon Powers:

Can I pause you for one second, Joe, and just translate that for folks. So what that means, and I think that’s a super important example, is that if now the folks that are on the front line are purchasing, that is a key metric that they’re measuring one system off another on. And what that does is then push the contractors, whether it be the folks developing planes or tanks or whatever to want to add that metric in and focus on that as a priority. And if it’s not a priority, they don’t think about it because they need to hit the rest of the scorecard. You guys have added that to the scorecard. That is wildly important because it is transformational in how not just you guys are thinking, but the ecosystem is thinking about energy demand. That’s exciting.

Joe Bryan:

Yeah, and that’s a great way to talk about it, in terms of the scorecard. And what I would say though is you asked how should people talk to the department. There’s a lot of folks out there and we have all of our traditional contractors. We have all of our defense industrial base, which are super important partners for the Department of Defense, but there’s also a lot of people doing cool and interesting stuff that we don’t get a chance to see. So the program offices, the folks in the services who are buying those things and who are being measured by those scorecards that you just mentioned, you can have a conversation with them about, “Hey, we have this thing that we think could improve the thing that you’re trying to buy, that could improve that airplane. Whether it’s a slight change to the aerodynamics of an existing system or whether it’s a way to think through how you design something new, we have an idea for that.”

There should be … one, there’s a demand signal that our program officers, the folks who buy things, should be sending to the market, but there also should be an open door to companies out there who are doing interesting things and who are innovating on energy and climate related technologies that they should come and talk to us, because it’s really hard for folks to … you’re head down here a lot of times in the Pentagon and in the program offices, so getting a chance to look up and see what’s out there happens less frequently than it probably should.

Jon Powers:

Yeah, so I’m going to transition now a little bit to the leadership that you and the department have been showing, not just domestically, but internationally. And I understand you actually went to COP in Egypt. And folks that don’t know COP, it’s basically the big climate negotiations you often hear about. The Paris negotiations was technically a COP. They happen on a regular thing. The most recent was in Egypt, it was called COP-27, but you led a defense department delegation there, right? And maybe was that the first time DoD’s been at the table of that?

Joe Bryan:

Yeah, it was actually the first time the department has sent an official delegation to a COP.

Jon Powers:

That’s amazing.

Joe Bryan:

And this was COP-27. So there have been a lot of them.

Jon Powers:

Yeah, exactly. So what was that experience like and what was the reception of the other partners, the other allies, in that some … I remember the British were doing some interesting stuff on this and others, but it seemed like really going back to the concept of leading by example, the Pentagon’s been doing it. How are the partners receiving that? And have you seen any sort of ripple effects from those conversations you had then?

Joe Bryan:

So first of all, I think it’s important that we went in the first place, and it reflects this administration’s sort of whole government approach to this issue.

Jon Powers:

Yeah.

Joe Bryan:

This is not something that you can confine to the Department of Energy or the EPA. This is something that … climate and energy transition are things that affect the entirety of the United States government, and in fact, the entirety of the US economy. And I know you’re deeply engaged in some of those discussions. COP was pretty amazing actually. So it is a massive, massive event, and I was a little unsure of what to expect when we went, but it was actually a fabulous experience. I think people … we had an opportunity to meet with a number of partners and allies when we were there, and there’s a lot of curiosity. They were asking, “So why is the US Department of Defense here?”

And we talked a lot about what you and I just talked about, and that is that we see climate is impacting the mission across the board, our readiness, our ability to do our job. And we see this energy transition that we’re in the middle of as providing an opportunity for us to do that job better. And really intrigued partners there, folks asking us first, “Why is the US Department of Defense there?” And then the second question they asked was, “Why isn’t our department a defense there?”

Jon Powers:

Right. Right.

Joe Bryan:

So I think it gave rise to a lot of really good discussion. The other thing that we were talking about just before we got in the conversation with you here was that if you go and talk to countries, we can talk to traditional allies and partners like those in Europe and some of the big countries and we all think through this in ways that are kind of relevant to how we’re positioned in the world, but if you go to places like the Pacific and talk to island nations and you talk national security with them, their primary national security issue is the existence of their country –

Jon Powers:

Right.

Joe Bryan:

– in the face of overwhelming challenges associated with climate change. So the perspective you get from meeting with those folks is that, “Hey, we would love to have a conversation with you, the United States, and we’d love to have a conversation with you, the Department of Defense. Our overriding interest here is making sure we exist in the future.” So it’s important for us to hear that and it’s important for us to integrate that into our approach to allies and partners around the world, but particularly in places like the Pacific and Central America and South America, where we’re –

PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [00:33:04]

Joe Bryan:

… in places like the Pacific and Central America and South America where countries are facing some pretty dire conditions.

Jon Powers:

Yeah, I was on the ground in Guam in November meeting with the governor. We owned the largest solar array in Guam and the work that, because of our defense presence there, that first DOD’s doing in general there on energy efficiency and upgrades is so critical for their infrastructure, not just for in existence, but also a lot of those islands, they basically are energized by shipping in fuel. So as the war with Russia, the Ukraine and Russian War kicked off and prices took off, their electricity bill skyrocketed, which they all are wrestling with what to deal with.

So I do want to step out of Pentagon for a second and talk big picture here at the end and talk about, as you mentioned a few times, and I love the term of the Biden all-of-government approach on climate.

So this role in particular is the first time ever there’s been a special advisor on climate at the Secretary of Defense, but that’s also in the Treasury Department and the Transportation Department and classic departments like EPA and DOE you’ve been working on this for a long time, but now you have at the highest level leadership attention, not just occasionally in a meeting every quarter to talk about this, but you have a Chief Sustainability Officer now at the Pentagon, which is you, and versions of that across the agencies that are daily focused on top-down leadership on this.

How has that changed the bureaucracies approach to this? And do you see that all-of-government initiative as … What does that look like for the rest of the administration here?

Joe Bryan:

Yeah. Well, first of all, there’s just a lot of leadership out of the White House. Jon, out of your old office, for example, at CEQ, Andrew Mayock over there, we have a lot of the client policy office in the White House. What’s clear and consistent is that climate matters across this administration. The climate and energy transition matter for the US economy and for US national security.

We play a particularly interesting role. Because of our scale, we’re like 80% of the federal government’s energy use. So we play a really important role in implementing some things as an agency of the federal government on things like our vehicle fleets in things like our purchase of electricity and things like fuel efficiency.

Other parts of the government are Treasury is more involved in tax policy and DOE is driving development of new technologies, although they also are playing an increasingly important role in execution of IRA and bipartisan infrastructure law funding.

So we have great partners across the executive branch, both in the White House and in the agencies. And I think we’re working hard right now in fact, to figure out how do we best work with DOE as they’re looking to execute projects. What role can the Department of Defense play in helping the administration achieve its objectives and also help demonstrate the capabilities that come with these clean energy technologies? It’s unique.

We used to do some of that. I don’t know if you remember back eight, nine years ago. We had some really good conversations with the interagency, but right now the scale and pace of activity is unlike anything that I’ve seen before.

Jon Powers:

Yeah. It’s a lot different when it’s buried a couple steps down. When it’s happening at the highest level it drives, it just drives the change. It drives … Folks know they’re going to be asked about it by their bosses, which drives the-

Joe Bryan:

Well, we have a national climate task force that is cabinet level, right?

Jon Powers:

Right.

Joe Bryan:

That exists. And we have agencies who are talking about we, the United States needs to compete on these technologies and trying to find the future. If we don’t get ahead of for the battery, for example, the battery supply chain challenges that we have, the whole world is changing and the United States has to assert itself in that competitive environment. I think there’s a pretty keen understanding across the executive branch that it’s time for us to move out and compete.

Jon Powers:

Interesting. So last question I always ask my guest, I’m going to take you back to Cleveland. You’re graduating and before you head off to the mountains of Maryland, if you sat down and could have a beer with yourself and give yourself a piece of career advice, what would it be?

Joe Bryan:

Well, first of all, I actually-

Jon Powers:

Or advice security-

Joe Bryan:

I couldn’t have a beer with myself I think because the drinking age is only.

Jon Powers:

Yeah. It’s Ohio. It’s fine.

Joe Bryan:

Yeah, it was Ohio.

Jon Powers:

Go to a Browns game.

Joe Bryan:

Yeah, go to a Browns game. I was of the 1980 version, the Brian Sipe …

Jon Powers:

There you go.

Joe Bryan:

The Brian Sipe cardiac kids years. I don’t know. Buffalo had some rough years in there.

Jon Powers:

We did. We did.

Joe Bryan:

Yeah.

Jon Powers:

I was an early ’90s Buffalo boy. So we had-

Joe Bryan:

It was Jim Kelly era.

Jon Powers:

That was our era, the Jim Kelly era.

Joe Bryan:

Yeah.

Jon Powers:

Bernie Kosar throwing side arm from Cleveland.

Joe Bryan:

That’s right. That’s right. Well, anyway. I thought about this and one thing, I guess, first of all, I have four teenagers now, so I know that any advice to my younger self is probably not going to be followed.

Jon Powers:

Right. Right.

Joe Bryan:

But we’ll start with that. We’ll start with that understanding. I guess what I would say is that don’t underestimate your ability to make a change. I mean you can actually make big change. And we talked about John Lewis at the onset here. When he was marching from Selma to Montgomery, the guy was in his early 20s. I think he was 22.

Jon Powers:

Amazing.

Joe Bryan:

So don’t ever underestimate your ability to make change. At the same time don’t overestimate your own importance. There’s this kind of healthy balance that I think there is between having the hope and optimism and belief that you can make a difference and believing that you’re the center of the universe and that everybody should kind of revolve around you. So trying to hit that sweet spot I think can be challenging. In this town it’s particularly challenging sometimes, as you know. But I think that one.

And the other thing would be like, it’s kind of trite. Don’t be so afraid to make mistakes and screw things up a little bit ’cause your path here is not a straight one. And if anybody looks, like I would never guess from living in a tent in the mountains of western Maryland that I would be sitting in the Pentagon in the Secretary of Defense’s front office. And if the Secretary of Defense at the time had looked at me then, they would’ve made the same prediction.

Jon Powers:

Yeah. Well, Joe, thank you so much for the fascinating conversation. I want to thank your team at the Pentagon. I know specifically the amount of work that goes into something like a podcast. And so thank you to Kelly Flynn and Daniel Parnes for the work, preparing this and testing the equipment and knowing that it’s great to hear this is the first podcast you’ve done because I know it’s not always easy to communicate out of the Pentagon, so I’m honored to be part of that. And I know it took a lot of work on your team side. So thank you so much.

And thank you. Thank you for your service. Going back in to do this, I know it was a monumental task for both you and your family. So thank you for doing it, both for obviously the administration, but for the country and for all of us. So thank you.

Joe Bryan:

Thanks a lot, Jon. Appreciate it. And I should also, by the way, thank your team and thank mine not just for putting together a podcast, but this is a team effort. This is team sport. None of us can do this on our own. Thanks, Jon.

Jon Powers:

Absolutely. And on that note, I want to thank our producer, Colleen Young, and you can always get more episodes of Experts Only at cleancapital.com. Look forward to continuing the conversation. Thanks.