Officials at the White House, the most prestigious refuge for the nation’s stubborn cohort of climate crisis deniers, are finding that some federal departments and agencies aren’t interested in or haven’t even heard about Donald Trump’s plan to set up a team to challenge scientific findings on climate change. And one of them, the Department of Defense, is especially out of step with this grotesque nonsense. The Pentagon has spent nearly a decade looking into, making plans, and adopting measures to deal with the impacts of climate change, which it considers a serious matter of national security.
The idea for this Presidential Committee on Climate Security came from William Happer, a senior director at the National Security Council who noted in an interview a decade ago:
“This is George Orwell. This is the ‘Germans are the master race. The Jews are the scum of the earth.’ It’s that kind of propaganda” [...] “Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. Every time you exhale, you exhale air that has 4 percent carbon dioxide. To say that that’s a pollutant just boggles my mind. What used to be science has turned into a cult.”
Juliet Eilperin, Brady Dennis, and Missy Ryan at The Washington Post reported this week:
Several agencies have informed the National Security Council, which launched the initiative, that they do not anticipate taking part. Others, including some spearheading the government’s climate research, such as NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, say that no one has contacted them about it. And last week, four top U.S. military officials testified before Congress that they continue to see climate change as a significant security threat. [...]
Jon Powers, an Iraq War veteran who served as federal chief sustainability officer, said the military has become attuned to climate change given its global footprint and massive energy consumption.
This week there have been more official discussions of the matter. On Wednesday, at a House Oversight and Reform Committee addressing “The Need for Leadership to Combat Climate Change and Protect National Security,” the usual denier foolishness was prominent. Afterward, a good deal of media coverage focused on the exchange with former Secretary of State John Kerry, who helped negotiate the 2015 Paris climate agreement. Kerry had gotten into it with Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who made a ludicrous comparison between his engineering degrees and Kerry’s degree in political science.
But while this little confrontation produced a few well-deserved smirks, the substance of the hearing, another last week at the Senate Armed Services Committee, and one in early March shows that while climate change is a hoax and joke at the White House, the Pentagon takes it with deadly seriousness.
Kerry told committee members that climate change is a “threat multiplier” whose impacts can create or exacerbate conflicts:
"The only people cheering the president's apparent attempt to erase climate change from U.S. national security considerations live in Beijing and Moscow," Kerry said. "China and Russia have for years been mapping the resource competition, military implications and geostrategic challenges that climate change will present in an ever-changing, climate-affected Arctic. What a gift to them if we stop making our own assessments because we have our heads buried in the sand while their eyes are on the tundra.”
Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.) said every dollar that's spent on climate research is money unspent on flight training, tank maintenance or weapon marksmanship. He said the military's focus on climate change could erode its war fighting capability.
"There are tigers in the world, and we need men and women that we train to beat those tigers to be elite at every level," he said. "Forcing the department to spend money on anything but preparations to do their mission has an opportunity cost, and it's measured in tombstones in Arlington. We must not use a single dollar of the Department of Defense budget to address the climate change issue."
While that comment may have generated smiles among the science deniers at the Heartland Institute and Heritage Foundation, Green’s view has not been Pentagon policy since 2009. While officials there may not buy Sen. Bernie Sanders’s statement in the 2016 debates with other Democratic presidential contenders that climate change is the most serious national security challenge the U.S. faces, they do not argue that it’s a small matter. On the contrary. The
2010 Quadrennial Defense Review discusses the potential national security impacts of climate change at some length, with more than 25 mentions. And in the 2014 QDR, it is
noted:
Finally, the Department will employ creative ways to address the impact of climate change, which will continue to affect the operating environment and the roles and missions that U.S. Armed Forces undertake. The Department will remain ready to operate in a changing environment amid the challenges of climate change and environmental damage. We have increased our preparedness for the consequences of environmental damage and
continue to seek to mitigate these risks while taking advantage of opportunities. The Department’s operational readiness hinges on unimpeded access to land, air, and sea training and test space. Consequently, we will complete a comprehensive assessment of all installations to assess the potential impacts of climate change on our missions and operational resiliency, and develop and implement plans to adapt as required.
Climate change also creates both a need and an opportunity for nations to work together, which the Department will seize through a range of initiatives. We are developing new policies,strategies, and plans, including the Department’s Arctic Strategy and our work in building humanitarian assistance and disaster response capabilities, both within the Department and with our allies and partners.
Mark Green seems to think this approach should not be included in the Pentagon’s planning for its mission. That’s obviously not the view of the people in charge of such planning.
Last month at a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren quoted from an intelligence community report that concluded climate change would create "competition for resources, economic distress, and social discontent" throughout the world. She then posed a question of Army Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, commander of the U.S. European Command, and Army Gen. Stephen Lyons, commander of the U.S. Transportation Command:
"I've asked this question to other combatant commanders, so I want to make sure that I get this on the record. Gen. Scaparrotti and Gen. Lyons, do you agree with the intelligence community's assessment of the climate change threat?" Warren asked.
"I do, and I believe that, as you noted, much of this will be drivers for potential conflict, or at least very difficult situations that nations have to deal with," Scaparrotti responded. [...]
"Anything that degrades our ability to project and sustain power globally at our time and place of choosing is a concern, and we know that we have to operate in any conditions whatsoever," [Lyons] said.
Early last month, Kerry and 57 other national security and intelligence officials and former secretaries of Defense and State signed an open letter blasting the White House stance on an adversarial assessment of federal climate science studies, including the National Climate Assessment. The letter stated that:
"...imposing a political test on reports issued by the science agencies" will harm national security by creating blind spots for those tasked with protecting the nation.
"It is dangerous to have national security analysis conform to politics," the group wrote. "Our officials' job is to ensure that we are prepared for current threats and future contingencies. We cannot do that if the scientific studies that inform our threat assessments are undermined. Our national security community will not remain the best in the world if it cannot make decisions based on the best available evidence."
That, of course, makes no never-mind to the deniers in the White House and Congress.