The underrated way energy efficiency has made life better, and climate progress possible.
Consumer tech news tends to focus on the latest gadget like a new smartphone camera, but the boring old refrigerator ought to get its share of credit — when we weren’t looking, the fridge got really good.
Since the 1970s, the standard fridge has grown in size, but uses a quarter of the energy of those older models. And you’re getting more for less money, since the manufacturer price of the fridge has halved (adjusting for inflation) in those 50 years. Walk into a Home Depot or Lowes for a replacement, and you can trust that whatever you come out with could be bigger than what you had before, work better than expected, and still not raise your energy bill.
It’s not just the refrigerator that’s transformed. Clothes washers and dishwashers have also become more powerful while using less energy and water. LED lights use 75 percent less energy and last 25 times longer than incandescent. And when US energy-related carbon emissions peaked in 2007, one overlooked factor for that peak was better efficiency.
All this progress is thanks, in part, to former President Jimmy Carter, who entered hospice at age 98 in late February. While in office, he pioneered many of these gains in US efficiency.
From 1977 to 1980, Carter proposed and signed a series of laws that raised the floor for efficiency in the home. One of the most pivotal included creating the Department of Energy, and setting up the appliance standards program that exists today. They cover 65 categories that make up 90 percent of home energy usage, including washing, drying, lighting, refrigeration, heating, cooling, and cooking.
Overall, Carter was “the first president to pass a law on energy efficiency standards that had teeth,” says Jay Hakes, a former administrator of the Energy Information Administration and former director of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library.
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Appliance Standards Awareness Project
“The impacts were extraordinary,” Jeff Genzer, an attorney with Duncan, Weinberg, Genzer & Pembroke who has served as counsel to the National Association of State Energy Officials since 1986. “Even though he was in office for only four years, what the advent of appliance standards produced in terms of [lower] energy costs for all consumers in the United States has to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars.”
The changes Carter made did more than just make products more efficient. They catalyzed a change in our perception of efficiency — which is still evolving today. The idea of efficiency gradually no longer meant coping with less, but about doing even more with less. Efficiency became a desired feature of the system, a way of improving people’s lives, while giving them more control of the energy system. We don’t get much of a say in which power plant we use, but we do have a say in our appliances.
Efficiency in Carter’s time was seen as a sacrifice
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How Americans thought of energy efficiency in the 1970s is, perhaps, best explained by a particular cardigan sweater.
In early 1977, the US was still reeling from an oil embargo, in which allied Arab nations blocked oil exports to the US in retaliation for its support for Israel in the 1973 war. The event coincided with gas prices quadrupling that caused a period of stagflation.
Carter in response tried to tap into what was left of a post-World War II ethos of political unity and sacrifice for the greater good, explained Hakes. He delivered a series of national speeches framing energy conservation as an unfortunate but necessary sacrifice. Wearing a cardigan in one, he asked Americans to put on their own sweater and lower their thermostats to save energy. He called it “energy conservation.”
“Carter, because of that cardigan sweater, made a lot of people think they were going to be freezing in the dark, but that’s not the case at all,” executive director of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) Steven Nadel said.
The unpleasantry of efficiency became a common theme in his speeches. In April 1977 he acknowledged his coming energy proposals would be unpopular because they “will cause you to put up with inconveniences and to make sacrifices.” Some of the proposals included new speed limits for cars (which are more efficient at lower speeds) and an oil profits windfall tax.
The parlance of the time was to talk about energy conservation, which was the language Carter used most in his speeches. A sign of its bad reputation was how politicians slowly phased out using the term “conservation” in favor of today’s preferred vocabulary — efficiency.
It turns out that the policies that had the most lasting impact were not unpleasant at all. Mandatory standards raised the floor for efficiency, while the extra-efficient technologies get a voluntary Energy Star recognition.
Appliance standards require very little sacrifice, even though they took years to finally take hold. The 1978 National Energy Conservation Policy Act enacted Carter’s vision by directing the Department of Energy to set new minimum floors for appliances that were economically and technologically feasible. Ronald Reagan reversed the eight major rules from Carter before they could take effect. But, ultimately, Reagan faced an appeals court reversal forcing him to issue his own standards, which led to a congressional amendment in 1987. The court order found Reagan’s inaction illegal because of the earlier Carter law enacted, explained Nadel.
The estimates of how much consumers have saved as a result vary, but are massive by any metric. In 2015, the Department of Energy estimated that it saved households $63 billion in utility bills for that year. Over the decades, though, the benefits have probably accrued to $1 trillion.
Carter may be better remembered today for installing solar panels on the White House than his efficiency programs. But his impacts were more pervasive, if hidden from view. “One of the things that the energy efficiency advocates bemoan is the fact that you can see a solar panel, a windmill, and a hydropower facility; you really can’t see energy efficiency,” Genzer said.
How efficiency was rebranded to mean higher quality of living
To be fair, Carter didn’t only frame conservation as sacrifice. He also talked of opportunity. “In fact, it is the most painless and immediate way of rebuilding our nation’s strength,” he said in a landmark 1979 speech. “Every gallon of oil each one of us saves is a new form of production. It gives us more freedom, more confidence, that much more control over our own lives.”
This rhetoric, unfortunately, was ahead of its time. Eventually, the US had new technology came along that made it easier to give consumers more options and control, but it was a limiting factor of the time.
Clean energy technology was too expensive and difficult to produce to be an easy substitute for fossil fuels. Fuel-switching, or being able to swap a coal plant for gas or renewables, wasn’t a real possibility. So cutting down costs did have to involve some level of using less.
The difference today is that the technology has caught up. Electric alternatives to fuel-burning products are relatively easy and low-cost. That includes induction stoves and electric heat pumps and water heaters. These aren’t just more efficient than the gas stove and gas-burning furnace and boiler, but a lot of consumers prefer them because of performance (induction stovetops do not get hot, and heat pump more evenly heats the home compared to gas).
Fossil fuel appliances have approached their limit to how efficient they’ll become. The very best furnaces out there are 95 percent efficient, whether they run on gas, oil, or propane, meaning that about 5 percent of the fuel is wasted energy. Heat pumps, in ideal conditions, blow that away, delivering two or three times the heating energy compared to what’s needed to run it. “The heat pump mainly takes the heat out of the air and just needs a little bit of energy to operate those compressors and equipment,” Nadel explained. “And that’s why it’s so much more efficient.”
The better technology gives Biden the chance to sell his own climate program as an opportunity that will improve quality of life, while Carter framed his programs as one of sacrifice. In a speech last fall talking about the Inflation Reduction Act and its investments in efficiency upgrades, Biden promised you’re “going to save a lot of money going forward because your utility bills will be lower. And that’s good for your wallet, but it’s also good for the environment because you’re using less energy.”
Efficiency now is all about the opportunism. It’s also more critical than ever to meeting climate change goals. As more buildings and cars switch from fossil fuels to electric power, efficiency will be equally important to make sure the grid is actually meeting the strain from rising demand.
The next big thing in efficiency is looking holistically at the building
Since the 1970s we’ve seen an important shift in energy efficiency. First, it was associated with “conservation” or the idea of sacrifice, then morphed into the benefits of saving on one’s energy bill and better technology. We’re shifting into a new era of energy efficiency today, one that is even more ambitious than the iterative progress over refrigerators (which still have room to improve by phasing out planet-warming hydrofluorocarbons). Now, it’s all about remaking buildings.
One main area households still have room to improve in energy conservation is their water heating. These are usually a household’s biggest utility expense, and new DOE standards would raise the bar for the lowest-performing appliances. All together, ACEEE counts standards for 47 appliances that are due for upgrades, including for water heating. These would save consumers and businesses a collective $41 billion by 2035. ACEEE estimated these updates also reduce carbon emissions at the equivalent of 13 to 25 coal plants by 2050.
The Inflation Reduction Act also changes the field, because it’s the largest federal investment in recent history to improve energy efficiency. The main crux of the law provides incentives and tax breaks to households, businesses, and manufacturers to insulate and weatherize buildings, as well as install technologies like the heat pump.
The IRA also starts to address another important, overlooked aspect of efficiency: the building itself. Buildings, not just the products that fill them, can make or break how much energy a household uses. “If you have leaks in your home or if you have really inefficient windows, no matter how efficient your appliances are, you’re still going to be using and wasting a lot of energy,” said Jamal Lewis, director of Policy Partnerships and Equitable Electrification at the advocacy group Rewiring America.
Biden’s overall tone is about what we have to gain from efficiency, not lose. And the IRA makes a big bet on efficiency as a politically popular, win-win proposition. “Look, we’re talking about real money here, to save, people,” said Biden. “And it’s just going to start kicking in now.”
Biden, like Carter, is using efficiency to help address similar economic challenges and an energy crunch stemming from events beyond US borders. The question is whether the public sees it the same way. The president can raise the bar and set an example. Ultimately, the challenge is not just learning to do more with less, but convincing people that this is a trait worth having in their next furnace, dryer, computer, or stove.
Building a longtermism that works for the people of tomorrow — and the people of today.
What do you call someone who’s not a longtermist? It might sound like the first half of a joke, but it’s a question that at first glance would seem to lack a satisfactory answer.
The proponents of longtermism — an offshoot of effective altruism (EA) — make their case based on three premises: future people matter, there could be a lot of them, and we can make their lives better or worse. This framing is all-encompassing, covering a lot of future, and it sets up what appears to be a dichotomy: if longtermism doesn’t appeal to you, then you must be for present-day people and causes instead. That would make you a “neartermist,” right? (Or more pejoratively, a “short-termist” — unable or unwilling to look beyond the moment — but no one wants to be labeled that.)
Within EA, neartermism would describe those who work on causes like disease or poverty in the developing world or ending factory farming, rather than working on efforts to ensure unborn people exist and flourish, such as reducing existential risk, or speeding up technological progress. Outside EA, neartermism would mean showing concern for the big, salient problems of 2023: climate impacts, social inequality, and all the other aching injustices in the world. Not to mention problems in one’s local community, like homelessness or pollution.
EA openly embraces the idea that some causes ought to be prioritized, based on factors like importance, neglectedness, and tractability. Building on those foundations, EA longtermists propose that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time — and in its strongest form, it becomes the key moral priority. This apparently zero-sum framing — present needs versus future needs — may go some way to explain why longtermism has attracted so much controversy in recent months (aside from EA’s other more recent scandals: financial, racial, sexual). In the eyes of critics, longtermist philosophy would seem to prioritize the aggregate well-being of 100 trillion-plus hypothetical people in the future over the actual living, breathing 8 billion people alive today.
Longtermists counter that the weaker versions of the philosophy are far less demanding, and that a lot of their efforts and spending — on say, reducing existential risk — are good for today and the future. If the world ends, the very real people of the present would be the first to suffer. But taken to an extreme, some critics fear the population ethics underpinning longtermism could lead to a form of mathematical blackmail, a bullet-biting justification for present-day neglect. Worse, that it could lead to real harm through fanatical acts to reduce tiny probabilities of danger sometime in the deep future. In EA parlance, this would be “taking the train all the way to crazy town.”
But does caring about the long-term fate of humanity and the planet need to come at the expense of the present? Is choosing one or the other inevitable? I do not believe so.
Over the past few years, I’ve been writing a book called The Long View. It’s about the benefits of extending one’s mind into longer-term timescales; not the days, weeks, or months we usually dwell in, but decades, centuries, millennia. Along the way, I’ve crossed paths with various “long-minded” individuals and organizations. I’ve met longtermists, but also those whose timeview is rooted in other values and habits: artists, scientists, anthropologists, historians, writers, Indigenous thinkers and more. (Disclosure: Open Philanthropy provided two career-development grants that supported The Long View, paid directly to the book’s research assistant and international publicist.)
Often these long-minded approaches speak different languages, with different priorities and values: some are transcendental and rooted in faith; others are secular and empirical. Some span timescales of centuries; others run to millions of years, many times longer than humans have existed. Some focus purely on humanity; others encompass the natural world too.
Encountering all these different perspectives has shown me that taking the long view can and should be plural and democratic. And crucially, they demonstrate that extending one’s circle of concern to tomorrow’s generations needn’t mean prioritizing the future above all. If anything, I’ve discovered that taking a longer view can often lend greater meaning to life in the present: offering perspective and hope amid crisis and difficulty, and a source of energy, autonomy, and guidance when it’s needed.
Over the course of writing the book, I’ve learned that I’m not a longtermist. But nor am I a neartermist either. So what are the alternatives?
Building a generational partnership
I began to think in earnest about longer-term time just under a decade ago, following a reflection about my daughter’s future. Not long after Grace was born in 2013, I realized something that I had never considered: there are millions of citizens of the 22nd century already living among us. They’re not time-travelers, of course. They are our children.
My daughter, to my astonishment, stands a pretty good chance of reaching 2100. She’ll be 86, just a few years more than the average life expectancy for a woman born in the UK. Her children, if she has them, could conceivably reach 2150 if future medicine allows. And, if the average lifespan rises and humanity doesn’t destroy itself, perhaps her grandchildren or great-grandchildren could end up seeing New Year’s Day of the 23rd century.
The apparently distant future, I realized, is far nearer and dearer to my own life than I thought. So I better do what I can to ensure it goes well.
This reflection about the long-term reach of my potential family ties, and my own ethical responsibilities, led me to the words of the 18th-century writer and politician Edmund Burke. In 1790, he wrote that:
Society is indeed a contract … a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.
This is an ethical view, centuries before effective altruism was even a notion, that acknowledges that future people matter: a sense of justice, equality, and beneficence toward tomorrow’s generations, built on the awareness of what our forebears did for us. You wouldn’t, however, call it longtermist.
Rather than a god-like population-ethics view — adding up the aggregate well-being of people across time within some utilitarian calculation, with the aim of engineering the most good — Burke’s framing emphasizes a partnership, situated in relationships, kin, society, and the connections that link one generation to the next.
This sentiment, that we hold a duty to posterity rooted in our generational ties, has come up time after time ever since. For example, in 1866, the British politician John Stuart Mill gave a rousing speech to Parliament about the world we inherit and the world we must leave behind: “It is lent to us, not given: and it is our duty to pass it on, not merely undiminished, but with interest.” In the 20th century, the economist John Maynard Keynes wrote about “economic possibilities for our grandchildren,” hoping for a world of abundant prosperity and leisure time for, well… us (shame that didn’t quite work out). And later, in 1992, the vaccine pioneer Jonas Salk framed our cross-generational obligations with a simple question: “Are we being good ancestors?”
A couple of years ago, the writer and researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner — who co-wrote parts of William MacAskill’s longtermist book What We Owe The Future — proposed that longtermism could do more to embrace this approach. “Most of all, I hope that more will take seriously the long arc of time,” he wrote. “Our civilization is an intergenerational enterprise.” He suggested this cross-generational view of ethics might be called “Burkean longtermism.” But if anything, I would argue that longtermism is a modern variant of this long-held if oft-ignored moral principle — not the other way round.
Burke himself was not the first to identify the values of stewardship and benevolence toward future generations. Such thinking has emerged within societies and cultures for millennia; perhaps most famously as the Seventh Generation principle, which is thought to go back to the centuries-old Great Law of the Iroquois Confederacy. It’s usually taken to mean making decisions that benefit the next seven generations, but for some Native American scholars, it could also be interpreted as respecting the span of seven generations from your great-grandfather to great-grandchild.
Another often-mentioned example is the Maori proverb Ka mua, ka muri, which translates as “walking backward into the future,” emphasizing how the learnings of past generations can provide a guide to what’s ahead. Respect your ancestors, goes the wisdom, and they can help you in return.
But there are other non-Western ethical frameworks that deserve to be more widely known. The researcher Cecil Abungu and his team have been collecting examples of long-term thinking in Africa, including Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, and Uganda. He wanted to dispel a myth in 20th-century Western philosophical literature that traditional African communities lacked a conception of the future. “Very many communities did have words to describe the long, long, long-term future, even without knowing that something would definitely happen,” he told me recently. “And lots of communities have proverbs essentially saying that you have to take into account those who will come after you tomorrow.”
The project is ongoing, but so far Abungu has identified various examples of spiritual and ethical codes oriented to the future, evidence of the deliberate preservation of artifacts for tomorrow’s generations, as well as principles of land and resource stewardship.
One particularly intriguing case study came from the history of the Meru people of Kenya. Every year, he explains, the young men in the group were encouraged to raid the cattle of a neighboring community. It was half-necessary, half-pastime, he said, and while it admittedly involved theft, it was underpinned by an ethical principle oriented toward future people: the men understood that, even as they raided, they should leave some cattle behind. Why? So that the following generation could go raiding too, earning the same status. “It’s not a matter of survival, but more of a matter of flourishing, and living well,” Abungu said.
In other words, it was the belief that future people also deserve an opportunity to win praise from their peers and loved ones.
The politics and symbolism of time
Researching my book, I’ve encountered various other communities, campaigners, and nascent movements who strongly believe that future people matter, but wouldn’t describe themselves as either longtermist or neartermist. I’d suggest a better term would simply be “long-minded.” Again, these approaches have roots that go back decades, and they sit outside the world of analytic philosophy.
The ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau, for instance, campaigned back in the 1990s for a Bill of Rights for future generations, writing that future people “have a right to an uncontaminated and undamaged Earth and to its enjoyment as the ground of human history, of culture, and of the social bonds that make each generation and individual a member of one human family.” Citizens in the present day, he said, therefore have “a duty as trustee for future generations to prevent irreversible and irreparable harm to life on Earth and to human freedom and dignity.” One supporter, Pierre Chastan, was so inspired that he fashioned a boat out of wood in France, and sailed it to the UN in New York to deliver a barrel of petitions — wearing a Cousteau-style red beanie hat for the trip.
Such politically flavored intergenerational justice efforts manifest today as reports like the UN’s 2021 Our Common Agenda, the appointment of a second future generations commissioner in Wales last December, and recent discussion of a future generations bill in the UK House of Lords. Meanwhile, political scientists like Simon Caney at the University of Warwick in the UK have been exploring political reforms and policy proposals, on both a national and global level, that would foster greater rights for future people.
Then there are the symbolic long-minded approaches that have emerged in the world of art. One example is the growing community of people around the Scottish artist Katie Paterson’s Future Library in Oslo, Norway. In a forest north of the city, a grove of trees is growing — now about 4 feet tall — that will be used to print a special series of books written for future generations.
Every year, an author is invited to write a story that won’t be published until the year 2114. They are kept in a small space in Oslo’s central library called the Silent Room, which was designed to echo the rings of a tree. The first author was Margaret Atwood, who wrote a story called Scribbler Moon. And this May, the Vietnamese American writer and poet Ocean Vuong and German writer and book designer Judith Schalansky will hand over their manuscripts.
To do this, the authors are invited to visit the forest for an annual ceremony. When I attended the 2022 handover event, with Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dangarembga and the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard, it was amid 200 to 300 Oslo citizens: people walking their dogs, parents carrying children on their shoulders. They were all participating in a ritual act that encouraged reflection on legacy, art, and what we leave behind.
On the surface, there would seem to be a present versus future trade-off with the Future Library: after all, no one can read the books unless they live until 2114, and almost certainly, that won’t include any adult in attendance. But nobody I encountered in the Future Library community — writers, artists, local politicians, and members of the public — seemed to see this as a sacrifice. Rather, the project itself lends a sense of meaning. The act of spending that Sunday morning thinking beyond the salient distractions of the present, and doing so together, provided its own benefits.
Temporal virtues
What might strict longtermists make of all this? Are such approaches and timeviews compatible with the longtermism project, allowing for the pluralism and worldview diversification that some EA leaders have called for, or are they entirely separate? I’m a writer, not a philosopher or an EA, so that’d be for others to weigh in.
However, I would be intrigued to see more exploration of what happens when longtermism meets virtue ethics. The long-held moral principle of the duty to posterity is underpinned by what you might call “temporal virtues” — of benevolence, conscientiousness, temperance, and humility for the sake of future people. How these virtues fit (or not) with longtermism is something I’m not qualified to analyze, but I hope someone in that community, or an adjacent one, does.
What I can speak to, however, is how the long view has shaped my own personal perspective on the world. Through writing my book, I realized something counterintuitive: that taking the long view allows one to become more present-minded, able to see with far clearer sight what truly matters, what needs to change, what is dangerous and harmful — and what is worth enjoying and appreciating. Reaching for a longer view has provided a source of guidance and solace during some of the best and worst moments in my life: bringing a daughter into the world, and eight years later, losing a baby son.
The long view has also provided me with a clarity of purpose in the present, through the call to leave a better world behind for the following generation. Some might interpret that this means building a grand legacy, planning a utopia, or seeking to steer the trajectory of tomorrow. However, I believe any long-minded approach ought to be tempered by humility, democracy, and pluralism. The future, after all, belongs to everyone, and we can’t predict the needs and values of tomorrow’s generations any more than someone living a century ago could imagine all of ours today.
Instead, the greatest legacy we can seek to leave behind is choice. If we can ensure that people tomorrow have the ability and autonomy to decide their own path within a sustainable world, then that is enough. For me, that is what long-mindedness means — and it needn’t involve making a choice between whether you care for the near term or the long term.
Richard Fisher is the author of The Long View (Wildfire, March 30, 2023). He is an honorary research associate at University College London, and a writer for the website BBC Future.
The debate around which weapons to send to Ukraine, explained.
In January, all of Washington seemed rapt with the question of whether the US and Europe would send tanks to Ukraine.
Should they? Would they? Why weren’t they? Was it too risky? But also, what was taking so long? Later that month, the US decided to send advanced Abrams tanks and Germany agreed to send Leopards, which cleared the way for other European allies to send military vehicles.
A similar dynamic had unfolded around HIMARS missile defense systems that the US sent to Ukraine last year, and it mirrored the protracted debates over lethal aid long before that. Now, it’s playing out again, already, over F-16 fighter jets.
I have felt uneasy about these weapons debates. It’s not just the memes of Leopards and Javelin missiles, or the intimacy between the US arms industry and Ukraine. The debate around each new weapon has overshadowed the larger debate about the Ukraine war.
The constant shift, that once the Abrams decision was announced Washington moved on to talking about the next advanced system, irked me. Shouldn’t experts, Congress, and the public argue over what the US’s clearly defined interests are in Ukraine and how to achieve them — and how to make sure the war doesn’t drag on and lead to unintended consequences — rather than cheerleading weapons transfers? It seemed to me that the US was going to be debating which weapons systems the US would send to Ukraine every month.
But I’ve come to see the fact that there have been debates about each weapons system, with experts openly engaging in these questions in panels and policy papers, to be a good thing. It’s not the only conversation that we should be having, but it serves as a proxy for a serious inquiry into what the US is doing in Ukraine. And, crucially, each tranche of weapons that the US has sent to Ukraine tells us a lot about the Biden administration’s approach to the war at any given time.
US President Joe Biden has committed $47 billion of military assistance to Ukraine, and the conversation is ongoing. More debate about arms may lead to more caution and deliberation.
What we talk about when we talk about weapons
In early 2022, or even prior, most experts would tell you that they never would have imagined that the US would send Abrams tanks to Ukraine. Ditto the HIMARS missile defense system. And even the sheer volume of weapons sent to Ukraine exceeds all other US security assistance.
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But the Biden administration, through an incrementalist approach, has so far charted a careful path. Its support for Ukraine has managed the escalation ladder to avoid nuclear conflict with Russia while keeping European allies largely united in support of Ukraine, ultimately trending toward just an incredible amount of advanced arms for the country. The public debates that have preceded these escalations aren’t just glimpses of that deliberate cautiousness — they’re integral to managing these risks.
The primary US interest in this conflict is averting nuclear use and avoiding a direct war between NATO and Russia. Yes, there are other goals: defending sovereignty and international law, as well as signaling to other competitors like China. But avoiding all-out war is an imperative and necessary precondition for that. The decisions to send Ukraine certain classes of weapons speak to this goal, and each decision tells us a lot about how the Biden administration sees the state of the war.
Take the recent decision to send tanks.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had been appealing for tanks since the first months of Russian invasion. Initially, the idea seemed far-fetched and was thought to have dangerous knock-on effects, possibly leading Russian President Vladimir Putin to escalate the war. The US also had concerns that the Ukrainian armed forces wouldn’t be able to use the equipment effectively and that it would take at least a year to deliver them. Throughout the fall, Zelenskyy renewed calls for them in the US media and during his Washington visit pleaded for them directly to the White House.
By January, Chancellor Olaf Scholz had reportedly said behind closed doors that Germany would send Ukraine its easier-to-operate Leopard tanks — only if the US would send Abrams.
But the US Defense Department’s policy leader, Colin Kahl, said that Abrams’ complex jet engine made it a no-go. “I just don’t think we’re there yet,” he said upon returning from a visit to Kyiv. The Pentagon also suggested that the tanks wouldn’t make a huge difference for Ukraine on the battlefield.
After a rather public discussion about whether the US would send tanks over, the Biden administration changed its position, which led the way to Germany sending Leopard tanks. There was excitement in some quarters of Washington. The head of the usually dispassionate Brookings Institution’s Europe program, Constanze Stelzenmüller, called it “tanksgiving” and tweeted that she would wear leopard print to celebrate.
On March 21, the Pentagon announced a sped-up timeline for their delivery.
Some of this is about symbolism and the image of the US sending its most advanced systems to Ukraine. And some of it is very particularly about how it would shape Ukraine’s defense and prospective counter-offensive likely to unfold in the coming weeks.