Climate Order

A draft White House executive order requiring a 20 percent cut in greenhouse-gas emissions from the federal government, currently circulating among federal agencies, could prompt the Defense Department to call for amending acquisition rules to allow for investments in costly energy efficiency and other low-emitting technologies, InsideEPA.com reported late last week. Specifically:

The draft order could also revive long-standing concerns from DOD over spending restrictions currently enshrined in the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), which generally require agencies to procure the most cost-effective goods and services.

DOD officials have long argued that such approaches hamper their ability to procure low-carbon technologies, which often have high upfront costs and do not achieve significant savings, making it difficult for the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Office of Management & Budget (OMB) to approve under their current budget scoring approaches.

Brian Lally, DOD’s facility energy director, told InsideEPA recently that the department’s existing drive to increase its energy efficiency and reduce GHG emissions is hampered by the scoring procedures, which CBO and OMB use to calculate projects’ compliance with the federal acquisition rules.

The scoring should be revised, Lally said, to allow the military services to undertake projects -- such as constructing new, highly efficient buildings -- that have high up-front costs but could achieve significant savings that OMB and CBO do not currently consider. He added that he is building support within the department to push the Obama administration for such a change in the rules. . . .

Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s acquisition chief Ashton Carter also said May 26 that the Pentagon is working on ways to incorporate energy efficiency considerations into acquisition policy, in line with the department’s own expert recommendations. Carter told an audience of leading military policy experts that energy will be a key driver of military purchasing decisions under the current administration. Specifically, the department is working to incorporate the fully burdened cost of fuel -- the true cost of delivering fuel to the military end user -- into acquisition decisions, which would militate toward lower energy consumption in vehicles and systems.

That story got the attention of New Republic blogger Bradford Plumer, who writes in a post today:

To put this in context, the U.S. military is the world's single biggest oil buyer, and accounts for about 80 percent of the federal government's energy demand (and about 1 percent of all U.S. demand). And, for the past few years, the Pentagon has been contemplating an energy diet. It's easy to see the motivation here: In 2008, the military shelled out about $20 billion for energy, more than double the $10.9 spent in 2006, thanks to the spike in oil prices, and no one in the Pentagon sounded terribly thrilled with writing a $10 billion check to the Middle East.