Jules

0’ - From the invasion of Ukraine to heat waves, from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz to the new China shock, the EU seems to time and again suffer through world events that it cannot control. But this lack of control is an illusion. It's the result of decades of underinvesting in Europe. We're underinvesting in our technological sovereignty, underinvesting in our defense, and of course underinvesting in climate mitigation and adaptation. We urgently need to acknowledge the scale of the challenge and to do all that it takes to take back control of our destiny. And in this quest for a stronger Europe, we believe clean technologies are our first line of defense. Homegrown clean technologies can protect us from future energy crises, they can decentralize our energy system, making it harder to attack, and they can provide the industrial leadership and the jobs that we need for our society to prosper.

In this new season, we'll meet the innovators, the investors, and the policymakers who are championing clean technologies to build a stronger Europe. I'm Jules Besnainou, and you're listening to Time to Scale, a podcast by Cleantech for Europe.

01’12 - To kick off this second season of the podcast, we are incredibly honoured to have with us today General Tom Middendorp, also known as the Climate General. General Middendorp, hello.

General Tom Middendorp

01’20 - Good afternoon.

Jules

01’21 - General, you were the Netherlands’ Chief of Defense from 2012 to 2017, and you served in the Dutch military for a total of 38 years. When you retired, you established the International Military Council on Climate and Security, and in 2022, you published a book called The Climate General. Maybe for our listeners that might not know you that well, could you tell us a bit about your personal journey first? What led you to serve in the military?

General Tom Middendorp

01’47 - Well, that's a long time ago, but I think I joined the military in a post-Cold War period, a postwar period, because I wanted to be challenged, and I wanted to do something meaningful with my life, meaningful for our society with the responsibility from an early age. I never regarded myself as a typical military, but what kept me there for 38 years was the combination of people, purpose, and complexity. I've been deployed several times to Afghanistan. I was responsible for Dutch contributions in more than 20 international missions around the world, and that taught me that security is rarely just military. It also taught me how important it is to understand the underlying root causes. In places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Mali, I saw how conflict is shaped by governance, by poverty, resources, demographics, and the physical environment. And it learned me that you cannot fix problems that you don't understand, and you cannot understand insecurity by looking at it just from a military angle.

Jules

02’56 - So, if you take us through that kind of military career, when did you start noticing the intersections between security and climate? And, I guess, why did it take such an important turn towards the end of your career?

General Tom Middendorp

03’10 - Well, I think during my operational work, during my deployment, and later as the Chief of Defense, I came to see climate change through three different kind of security lenses. First of all, climate change can shift geopolitics. If you look at the Arctic area, it's a clear example: melting ice. It's opening up a completely new arena with new sea routes, access to resources, and turning a whole region into an arena for strategic competition. Secondly, it acts as a threat multiplier, and I've seen that happen in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, where insecurity was never only about armed groups. Water stress, food insecurity, loss of livelihoods, weak governance could all deepen instability and create fertile grounds for extremism and organized crime. And thirdly, climate change directly affects military readiness. Extreme heat, floods, wildfires, water shortages can disrupt bases, logistics, infrastructure, equipment, and our operations. And then, when I became a Chief of Defense, that broader picture became increasingly important. Because you do not just want to prepare for the last war; you also want to understand what will shape the next war, and that's why, for me, climate change became one of the defining challenges of this century. Also, from a security perspective, I stopped seeing it as primarily an environmental issue. To me, it is a geopolitical, a societal, and an operational security issue as well.

Jules

04’47 - Can you maybe take us and share a few examples of concrete military or security situations that you were confronted with as the Chief of Defense that really intersected with climate or with cleantech?

General Tom Middendorp

05’00 - Yes, well, concrete examples were in Afghanistan, where I saw how water scarcity drove people to despair and how that created tensions in the populations, and how Taliban misused those tensions to to gain leverage over those populations. I saw it in Iraq, where Daesh occupied the Buzhul Dam and used water distribution as a power instrument. They could control the distribution of water, and they blackmailed the local population to cooperate with them. And I saw this in Somalia, where the increasing droughts drove people into desperation and into the hands of piracy. So, it is aggravating insecurity around the world, and it's not some kind of a future and distant topic, it's happening already.

Jules

05’46 - I guess if you think about these various threats, I mean, in your role as Chief of Defense, was there one or, you know, a series of threats that specifically kind of kept you awake at night?

General Tom Middendorp

05’56 - What keeps me awake at night is not the separate threats, but the way these threats are interacting with each other, they don't stand alone. They interact with each other, they depend upon each other, and they can cascade through different spaces. So it's not just about hybrid. It's not just about insurgence or extremism. It's about the combination, and that combination is widening now. It's widening towards energy security, towards resource dependence, and the increasing scarcities we see around us. And that kind of concerns me increasingly.

Jules

06’34 - Let's get to the picture of today, right? So, since you wrote the book in 2022, we've seen a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. We've seen the U.S. become, to say the least, an unreliable ally. Obviously, the recent war in Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. And if we look further to the east, we have China that's becoming increasingly assertive, especially in its use of cleantech value chains. Right. And so, in your sense, since you wrote the book, how has the security picture changed, and how has the intersection with climate changed?

General Tom Middendorp

07’07 - I think we have entered a new era, and I think we are all feeling it, but we find it hard to accept, and we don't know the answers. But we all come from a very long period of stability since the Second World War, we have been stable, we have been secure. We also come from a very predictable world. We work with global supply lines, with just-in-time management systems, very streamlined because it was all very secure, it was all safe, it was all predictable. And we come from a period of abundance. We had abundant resources, and that is changing now, because we are increasingly faced with shortages, with scarcities, and that drives competition. Every country wants to secure its access to resources, wants to secure its access to energy, and other vital supply chains that they depend on, and that gives increasing competition once we are confronted with more scarcity, and we see the world getting more divided about that. And we see that first, my own country first kind of policies are very tempting for politicians. They first want to take care of their own interests before they start cooperating with others, and that changes the whole setting in the world, and that's what concerns me. And what climate change does? Climate change is an important element in all of this because it makes it harder to bridge the gap between a growing demand worldwide and a limited ability to meet that demand. It reduces the liveable and arable space in the world, and it drives scarcity. The combination of these big trends really forces into a new era - an era where the dependencies that we had over the last periods are now turning into vulnerabilities.

Jules

08’54 - In this new era, it looks from the outside of the security world, right? But it looks like almost Europe is coming last to this idea of competition, right? We're being a bit forced by maybe the U.S. by China, by a number of other players, by Russia, of course, to think more in in competitive terms versus in global cooperation terms. Where do you see Europe in in that picture? And, I guess, how has the European security reflection evolved over the past few years?

General Tom Middendorp

09’22 - Well, I think we had a lot of wake-up calls. It started with Ukraine, and then the new U.S. presidency with a very changing attitude on global trade, and we saw the trade wars coming up. We saw now saw the Iran crisis and the Strait of Hormuz, and the impact of choke points worldwide on our securities and our certainties. So we are wakening up, but we have a lot of catching up to do. What we did in that long period of stability is that we outsourced almost everything. We outsourced our security to the U.S., we outsourced our technology to Silicon Valley, our production to China, our energy for to a large extent to the Middle East or Russia, and in this new era of competition, those dependencies are turning into vulnerabilities. So for Europe, it's becoming increasingly important to stand up its own feet, and also to become more of a power player in this new world game, and we cannot do that separately. France cannot do that separately. None of our nations can do that separately. We have to do that together. So it also calls for more coordinated action from a European perspective. But we have to catch up. We have to catch up on technology. We have to catch up on independence in our energy systems, et cetera. And also on security.

Jules

10’45 - We'll get, of course, to the cleantech aspect of this, right? How can clean technologies play a role in this picture? But maybe first, you said that we'd had a number of wakeup calls in the past few years. I totally agree with that. I mean, they've been pretty brutal wake up calls, right? But it still doesn't feel like we're totally awoken to the new reality. I don't know what your sentiment is, but at least for us tracking EU policy quite closely, it feels like there is always you know a big blip in terms of  a wakeup call, and then somehow we're always tempted to go back to the status quo.

General Tom Middendorp

11’14 - Yeah, it's always hard to change. We only change when we feel an urgency or when we see an opportunity. Those are the two big drivers of change. We don't feel really the urgency. We do see the wakeup calls. We do see it coming closer, but it doesn't affect us directly as much as that we start changing. So unfortunately, we need crises before we really change, and that's the whole catch situation that we're in. Because when you're in a crisis, it's too late to change. In the Netherlands, we have learned you can't build a dike during a storm. You need to be ahead of the storm, and I think that's a bit of the situation where also our politicians are in. It's a struggle between the urgent and the important, and history shows that mostly the urgent wins. The daily crises dominate the news; they dominate the political debate, and it takes away the attention of future crises and future problems. And those are more the important elements, like climate change and like the increasing resource scarcity. I think these are the challenges of tomorrow, and if we don't start addressing them now, we will face the consequences of that, and then suddenly there is panic, and we want to change very drastically, but we have lost a lot of time to do so. That's kind of the situation that we're in, kind of an interval between the old and the new era, and I hope that we can accelerate that and that we can start moving ahead of the game.

Jules

12’40 - We'll get into the concrete ideas technologically, and how they potentially apply to defense, to operations, to the broader security picture. Maybe a last question before that is: So you published your book in 2022. Have you seen many more generals become climate generals since, or do you still feel like you're one of a kind?

General Tom Middendorp

13’00 - Well, when I started, I was one of a kind, and it did make me popular. Climate General was a nickname I got, and it was not meant as a compliment; it was meant as a joke. But I decided to embrace that name because it reflected the nexus between climate and security. It reflected that climate is not a standalone issue; that it's not just an environmental issue, but that it is also a security issue, and that's what I wanted to show to the world. So I embraced the title, and when I retired from the military eight years ago, I dedicated my life to this topic. I lead a global network on this area with experts from more than 40 countries, and these are all leaders. These are all climate generals working on the same topic, and it's good to see that I'm not a lone fighter anymore. NATO has embraced the topic, had made it a priority. They even set up a whole centre of excellence in Canada, and they are now translating that into all kinds of policy papers. And I see an increasing number of countries from the military side adopting climate strategies. So there is a change going on within the security sector that they are aware that climate has a huge security dimension to it. So I'm very pleased to see that I'm not the only one anymore.

Jules

14’21 - Excellent. So let's get to the heart of the conversation, which is really how can clean technologies improve or change the security picture for a specific country and then and then globally. If I can maybe start by giving you proposing to you a bit of a landscape of the intersection of clean technologies and defense, and I'd love to hear your perspective on the various areas where you feel that they're most advanced, least advanced, what is easiest to be adopted by militaries, etc. etc. I would start maybe by the core of the of the question, which is potential dual use technologies, and in that category we would put things like you know e-fuels for military jets, for instance, that can be produced from renewable sources. Or batteries that can be used in drones, etc. etc. So the hardcore of you know how clean technologies are used in military operations. Then there's the broader, as you were saying, energy security system, right? How do we decentralize energy to make it less vulnerable to attacks? How do we do more geothermal so there's more infrastructure that's underground that's harder to hit, right? For us, a third kind of larger bucket is really the wider economic security. So, how do you secure your supply chains so that a specific adversary doesn't have a, you know, a chokehold over a specific kind of vital interest, right? And here, of course, I'm thinking of batteries and China and critical minerals, right? But there are many other examples in that are coming up. And then maybe finally, and that's where you were, I think, calling this a threat multiplier is all the technologies that have to do with just adaptation to climate change, right? Anything that helps you with advance warnings, or that helps you with cooling, or can help you with crops, or you know whatever technologies can kind of help you adapt to climate. Maybe first, do you see this landscape in the same way, or do you have other areas that you're interested in?

General Tom Middendorp

16’13 - No, I agree. I think that these areas that you mentioned are all kinds of tech areas that can help us become more climate resilient. That can help us become more resilient against these challenges that we just described. What I would like to add is that cleantech can help reduce dependencies as well, and not just dependency from imported fossil fuels by becoming more self-sufficient on energy and produce energy more locally, but also by innovating on alternative materials, the use of alternative materials. Because we don't want to replace one dependency by another. And if we import more clean technologies that are dependent upon critical minerals or upon one supplier in China, then you create a new vulnerability. So we also need to combine that with innovating, with innovations on the use of alternative materials and on circularity, so that we can reuse components, reuse the materials that are in there, and become more autonomous ourselves. That would be one addition I would like to make, and I think a second one would be to look at energy security and cleantech as part of a wider system. If you look at energy, it's very close connected to water security, to digital networks, to the transport system, to industries, communication, etc. If one system fails, the effects very quickly cascade into the others. So, cleantech and energy cleantech is not just standalone kind of issue. It's a more integrated part of Europe's strategic resilience.

Jules

17’52 - Absolutely. So maybe let's take some of these in order and get a bit of the temperature check in a way or the maturity check. Maybe starting with dual use technologies, so you know anything that directly helps military operations, like e-fuels or batteries for drones or others. What is your observation in terms of how fast militaries are adopting these technologies? Is there still a psychological barrier to green technologies, or is the picture changing, especially in Europe, where, as you say, we don't have fossil fuels?

General Tom Middendorp

18’20 - Yeah, I think there is a psychological barrier towards green, towards climate. For most military, climate is an important topic, but not their topic. It's something for other departments to take care of. So I think we should not talk about greening the military, but we do have to talk about new opportunities for the military to become more self-sufficient, and I think the clean technologies that we talk about here, they can provide the military those kind of opportunities. And I can mention several areas. First of all, microgrids and distributed renewable generation can make bases, military bases installations less dependent on central grids and less vulnerable to all kinds of disturbances in supply chains. Energy security, energy storage can help keep operations running when the grid goes down, and energy efficiency matters because the safest energy is the energy that you don't need to produce, so that would be one area. Another area would be on circularity. The more we can become independent and of suppliers like China and other countries where we have single supply lines that can be used as an instrument in the bigger power play, the more independent we can become, the better it is. So, if through circularity we can help the military reduce those kind of dependencies, that would also be a very big add-on. And I think also synthetic fuels and e-fuels can play an important role in improving that self-sufficiency of the military and at the same time addressing climate goals. So it's about finding the smart combinations between security and climate.

Jules

20’03 - Do you see militaries across Europe and within NATO accelerating their adoption of, for instance, synthetic fuels or microgrids?

General Tom Middendorp

20’10 - I think awareness is growing, but the level of maturity still varies per country. Climate change remains a very uncomfortable topic for defense organizations because militaries are rightly focused at readiness, at deterrence, at operational effectiveness. That's on the top of their minds, and that's why framing matters so much. Climate and energy issues gain much more traction when they are approached as a risk multiplier and as an operational opportunity, rather than mainly through climate targets, and the key question is not how do we become greener, but how does climate and energy vulnerabilities affect our ability to operate? How can these new technologies make us more resilient and less dependent? And I think more European countries are now integrating climate security considerations into their defense plan, and I already mentioned NATO and what several countries are doing. So there is a change going on, but we have to find that win-win kind of approach.

Jules

21’13 - If we go to the wider kind of energy security or system security, as you characterized it, what lessons do you draw from the Ukraine conflict, in terms of, you know, building an energy system that can resist to conflict?

General Tom Middendorp

21’27 - I think that resilience and Ukraine shows that resilience is about much more than protection. Resilience is not an add-on that you can put on top of the current energy systems. We need to be resilient by design, and that starts with protection, but that also has to do with reducing those dependencies. It also has to do with our ability to recover, and this also has to do with how we organize our energy system. And what Ukraine is doing now very quickly is shifting from a more centralized energy system to a very distributed energy system, and that allows them to be less vulnerable. Networks, very decentralized energy system with smart energy hubs that that generate their own energy, are very hard to disrupt. Are very hard to target with cyber or with sabotage acts. And even when you succeed, you take at one element, but all the other elements keep on functioning. So you're much less vulnerable. I think that's a big lesson that we can take out of it. So my motto for our own future energy system would be: create a system that is as decentralized as possible and as centralized as needed.

Jules

22’38 - Do you see that motto being adopted throughout Europe these days?

General Tom Middendorp

22’42 - No. But I think, I hope, we are learning that lesson. It's certainly something that I advocate, and I see many countries now relooking at their energy strategy, also looking at how to become more autonomous on their energy. And I think it will always be a mix. It will always be a mix of centralized production and decentralized. But I do see very, very good examples of smart energy hubs that can help communities, local villages, but also industrialized areas to become more self-sufficient on energy, and that also helps the government because companies want to invest in that. They don't want to depend upon the grid that doesn't always work. They want to be autonomous. They want to grow where they can. Also, communities want to invest in that because then they can keep on functioning, also, when there are frictions. And the good news is also that everything you invest in that local grid goes to your local economy. It doesn't go away to the big multinationals. So there are a lot of win-win issues in decentralizing this whole climate energy issue.

Jules

23’46 - It's fascinating what you say, and we feel it in a day-to-day basis, right? Where you see citizens, individuals, and communities go much faster in that decentralized future than governments, right? They're very excited by the idea of you know even your home being independent or semi-independent or contribute to the grid. And that's I think something that that Europeans have taken to, righ,t in in the past few years, even when the governments have been much slower to adapt.

General Tom Middendorp

24’14 - But we do have very centralized systems at this moment. We have very centralized import of energy or production of energy that we distribute through the country, it's very top down. And that's the big change we need to go through from a very top-down system to a more hybrid top down and bottom-up system. But if you can create more local ownership, then you also create another level of acceptance in local populations. And now we build solar or windmill parks next to villages, and they all protest against it because they don't have the benefit of those windmills. They only have the downside of it. But if it becomes more local ownership, where they benefit from, where it where it keeps down their energy bill, then suddenly you get a completely different kind of attitude.

Jules

25’01 - In that quest for autonomy or for distributed energy, a lot of the equipment that we're using these days comes from China. We were placing this economic security as one of the categories, and you talked a lot about reducing our dependencies. Are you worried about the dependencies we're developing on Chinese equipment, specifically in clean technologies like solar cells and batteries?

General Tom Middendorp

25’24 - We need to look at our dependencies more smartly. If you become fully dependent of one country, then you have to assume that they can use that as an instrument against you. If you go against their policies, if you have an argument with China, they will use this as a means of pressuring us, as a means of complying us. So it makes us vulnerable, and of course that doesn't mean that we cannot do business with China. But I do think that we need redundance in our system; that we need to be able not to depend upon one supplier. I also believe that innovating on the use of alternative materials, on the use of circularity, can help us economically. I've seen great examples in Europe, great examples of salted batteries with much more capacity than the current lithium batteries, great example of solid-state batteries, of fully circular solar panels. We are building them here in Europe already, but we don't buy them because they are a bit more expensive. And I think that's what we need to change. We need to accommodate that that we build things here in Europe that we can reuse that in Europe so that we can become less dependent on external suppliers. And it's very hard because China is now dumping at very low costs, very low prices, all kinds of technologies into our markets, and that's where we need Europe. That's where we need to Europe to balance that, balance the power play by China with developing our own potential.

Jules

26’57 - But you know, as we know, with the internet, if it's free, it's because you're the product, right? So, if if China is doing all this dumping, it is to create these dependencies, as you say, and use it as leverage later. So I guess with this question of cost that you raise, this is pretty much the crux of the argument that we're also trying to make in the EU, which is, yes, sure, you're going to have some security premium if you want to diversify your supply chains, or if you want to adopt things like European-made solid-state batteries, but it is worth it in in the long run. As Chief of Defense, obviously you've had to fight for numerous military budgets, right? How does that process work, and you know how do you make these trade-offs easily understandable to policymakers?

General Tom Middendorp

27’39 - Well, that's the hardest part of my work. We have suffered budget cuts for 20 years. When I started my position as Chief of Defense, I had to reduce 12,000 people again, on top of all the other reductions, and that made it a hard job. So my goal, my overall goal in the five and a half years that I was Chief of Defense, was to turn the tide, to show to the public that security is not just a cost matter, but it is added value. I think that is the argument that we can use nowadays as well. I think everybody now sees that we need to invest in security. We are investing in the military at the moment. We are investing in energy security because we feel the need to do so, so we also start to acknowledge the fact that you have to put money in something that doesn't deliver money. And you can make that more clear by, I think, showing the cost of not being resilient. I think there was a recent UK research on the cost of the latest energy crisis in the UK, and their conclusion was that the cost of that crisis in the Ukraine war was higher than the cost of the total energy transition. We are now in the second energy crisis, and we will go to a third and a fourth energy crisis if we don't change our policies. So, what is smart policy? Is smart policy just to wait for it to happen and then try to fix that over and over again, or is it to change the system and never let it happen again? I know the answer, you know the answer, and I think that's the way of convincing politicians that the cost of not being resilient, the cost of not doing going through an energy transition and stay vulnerable on energy is much and much higher than the cost of the transition itself.

Jules

29’30 - So if we zoom in a bit on cleantech financing, we learn at cleantech school I want to say, but I started my career in the U.S. in the early 2010s, and we could see how much financing for relatively early stage innovations, but then also for commercialization, came from the defense sector, right? Even in in energy and in cleantech. And I feel like this is something that has really been missing in the European picture, I hope it's changing now. But I guess when you were in the job, what was the role of the military in actually funding some of these dual-use technologies or some of these readiness or operational technologies? What could you see in terms of the results?

General Tom Middendorp

30’12 - Defense has always played that role. If you look at many of the technologies that we use in the civil sector, nowadays come from the military sector. The GPS, the Internet, the microwave, they all originated in the military sector. So there has always been that interaction. Nowadays, especially on energy, many of these technologies are developed in the civil sector, but are also of military use, it’s also the other way around. And I think that defense can have two roles: they can be a customer, and they can be an innovation partner for cleantech. It’s a two-way street, and it has to be a two-way street. Defense will invest in cleantech only when it has an operational value, when it leads to greater autonomy, more resilience, lighter logistics, better effectiveness. And that’s why models like the DARPA are interesting, because they start with an operational challenge, not with one technology. And I think defense is particularly valuable as a platform for experimentation, system integration and scaling. Because military capabilities increasingly depend upon combining technologies into new operational concepts. Defense will never buy separate small technologies, cleantech technologies, they will look at the combinations in new concepts, in a new energy concept of creating local energy, producing local energy or storing local energy and distributing them. So it's about finding the smart combinations between different technologies. So the message to cleantech for me would be twofold. Don't sell defense as a climate target, or your cleantech as a climate target, and don't sell it as an individual technology, but work with defense to build more integrated operational solutions. And you can do that through participating in the big program. NATO has big innovation programs, the EU has the big innovation programs, also looking at energy resilience. And here different kinds of tech companies come together to build more integrated solutions. And I think that's, if you can help build those kinds of solutions, the doors of the military will immediately open up.

Jules

32’29 - Yeah, so that was gonna be my question is, do you start to see some of these systems like DARPA being implemented in Europe?

General Tom Middendorp

32’25 - I see a growing interest on the military side to adopt these kinds of technologies. And I see NATO now has initiated the Diana project, which is an innovation kind of project of program to facilitate all kinds of innovations also in this area. And it is kind of following the DARPA example. It is smaller in scale, it's not as big yet, but it is an opening. And I think we can further elaborate on that. And especially on the EU side, I think there's a lot of opportunity. We have the European Development Fund that we have been doing over the last years that kind of facilitates experimentation and innovation in the defense sector. But we need to acknowledge that 80-90% of all the technology that defense uses is dual use technology. In our communication systems, in our IT systems, in all even in our weapons systems, much of the technology is dual use. And we only combine it into applications, into different kinds of applications, but the technology itself is dual use. And we can use them. And that is a great area of cooperation. And I think we need to expand that. And especially now in the EU, while we are putting more and more money into the resilience and security, I think this opens up an opportunity for larger public and private cooperation on these areas.

Jules

34’00 - Maybe we wrap up by talking a bit about what happened this summer in Europe and what we can learn from it in terms of and where we could potentially use technologies to better adapt. So obviously, we just went through weeks and weeks of severe heat waves that I think were one of these other wake-up calls for our population and our citizens. You've seen this in much tougher environments in Afghanistan and in Iraq. What would be top of mind ways that we can better adapt to climate change in Europe? And how do we make this top of the political priorities?

General Tom Middendorp

34’39 - Especially the last part is a difficult one. But I think what we need to learn again, and we have learned it in the past, but we need to relearn it because in the last 80 years, we have been spoiled and we have become lazy. But what we need to relearn is assume disruption. And disruption is something that will happen. And that means that we have to look at our systems in a way that disruption will happen. And how can we protect it against them? How do we deal with disruption when it occurs? How can we keep on functioning under stress? That's kind of a mindset that we use. I think what we could learn from the recent crisis is that Europe should use clean tech, not just for reducing emissions, not just for achieving climate goals, but to reduce its exposure to vulnerable energy material supply chains. And I think it also shows the power of local solutions, local generation, local storage, local efficiency. The droughts also affected our energy system. It became harder and harder to cool the energy suppliers, the energy production facilities, the nuclear facilities, but also the other energy production facilities. They need water for cooling. If water becomes scarce, then the cooling becomes a problem. And that affects our energy security. So the combination with local energy supply, with local energy systems makes you less vulnerable against these kinds of influences. It creates kind of a redundancy in your system, and it makes you more resilient. But it does require us to break through institutional stovepipes, because what we are facing are cascading effects through all kinds of sectors. And we are still dealing with them in very stovepiped departments and sectors. So what we need to do is breach that and come to more integrated solutions. That's also where the military can help by combining security with climate goals. I think it's very needed that we bring together governments, defense, industries, investors, and technology providers in more shared outcomes. And that means setting more centralized targets, what do we need to achieve, and bringing these sharp minds together to come to integrated solutions. Because the opportunity is that with one investment, we can serve several objectives. Energy transition is not just an answer to climate. It's also an answer to security problems that we face now. It's also an answer to competitiveness, to strategic autonomy. So I think those kinds of solutions will help us forward.

Jules

37’29 - And it helps your pitch with policymakers on the budget, right? If you can kill two birds with one stone.

General Tom Middendorp

37’34 - Exactly, exactly.

Jules

37’36 - We'll have to assume disruption, I think, is a really good one to keep in our minds. And we have become lazier. I totally agree. I think we'll leave it here. General, thank you so much for your time. We've reached the end of this episode. I really want to thank you. These are incredibly helpful, especially for us that are maybe a bit outside of the security world, but understand how important our industry is for that sector.

General Tom Middendorp

37’55 - You're welcome.

Jules

37’57 - To all of you, thank you so much for tuning in to the first episode of this second season of Time to Scale, a podcast by Cleantech for Europe. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate and review it, share it with a friend or send us your feedback and questions. We'll put the links to General Middendorp's social media and the International Military Council on Climate and Security in the episode notes. And see you all soon.

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