Greening the military

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this includes geo-political instability/migration, well see chaos disruption

includes pollution

also includes damage to mil capability by agw

merri ok

see also NSC nat'l security eg Susan Rice

619 capt bak

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in the past mil only fed agy to stand up to denier b43 admin; later added to official list of global threats; and back off under trump?

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biden

https://www.eenews.net/articles/meet-the-pentagons-climate-team/

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11 22 mil exempt from report ghg?

https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/world-burns/

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https://theconversation.com/a-military-perspective-on-climate-change-could-bridge-the-gap-between-believers-and-doubters-128609

As experts warn that the world is running out of time to head off severe climate change, discussions of what the U.S. should do about it are split into opposing camps. The scientific-environmental perspective says global warming will cause the planet severe harm without action to slow fossil fuel burning. Those who reject mainstream climate science insist either that warming is not occurring or that it’s not clear human actions are driving it.

With these two extremes polarizing the American political arena, climate policy has come to a near standstill. But as I argue in my new book,“All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change,” the U.S. armed forces offer a third perspective that could help bridge the gap.

I’ve studied military and security issues for decades. Although President Trump has called climate change a hoax and worked to reverse the Obama administration’s climate initiatives, senior U.S. military officers have long been aware of warming’s detrimental effects.

Military leaders believe climate change seriously threatens U.S. national security. They contend it is stirring up chaos and conflict abroad, endangering coastal bases and stressing soldiers and equipment, which undermines military readiness. But rather than debating the causes of climate change or assigning blame, they focus on how warming undermines security, and on practical steps to slow its advance and minimize damage.... [see bak][

A military perspective on climate change could bridge the gap between believers and doubters

Michael Klare, Hampshire College

US military leaders have to plan for operations all over the world, so they can't afford to ignore climate change or debate its causes.

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michael klare: all hell breaking loose etc bks

military DoD

https://kpfa.org/episode/talkies-january-2-2020/

[talkies 1/2/20  2010 drought russia lost 1/3 wht crop --> arab spring?! food scarce africa and ME, food #1 expense in poor ppl budget --> anger at elites, libya, syria WAR, threat multiplier] desertification push nomadic into sub-s different ethnic and religion, jihadis exploit; nigeria boko; mali niger

ctr for naval    CNA report 2007

migrants tend to be rural ppl: carrib, centr am ...got to city for jobs (gangs)

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1119 icn

Military Bases Face Increasingly Dangerous Heat as Climate Changes

BY: DAVID HASEMYER

By mid-century, troops could face an extra month of extreme heat days if nothing is done to lower greenhouse gas emissions, a new report shows. Some training bases will see much worse.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/were-headed-for-a-world-where-all-hell-is-breaking-loose/

no lnx

We’re headed for a world where all hell is breaking loose

Written by Michael T. Klare / TomDispatch November 15, 2019

The Situation Room, October 2039: the president and vice president, senior generals and admirals, key cabinet members, and other top national security officers huddle around computer screens as aides speak tokey officials across the country. Some screens are focused on Hurricane Monica, continuing its catastrophic path through the Carolinas and Virginia; others are following Hurricane Nicholas, now pummeling Florida and Georgia, while Hurricane Ophelia lurks behind it in the eastern Caribbean.

On another bank of screens, officials are watching horrifying scenes from Los Angeles and San Diego, where millions of people are under mandatory evacuation orders with essentially nowhere to go because of a maelstrom of raging wildfires. Other large blazes are burning out of control in Northern California and Alaska, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington State. The National Guard has been called out across much of the West, while hundreds of thousands of active-duty troops are being deployed in the disaster zones to assist in relief operations and firefighting

With governors and lawmakers from the affected states begging for help, the president has instructed the senior military leadership to provide still more soldiers and sailors for yet more disaster relief. Unfortunately, the generals and admirals are having a hard time complying, since most of their key bases on the East and West Coasts are also under assault from storms, floods, and wildfires. Many have already been evacuated. Naval Station Norfolk, the nation’s largest naval base, for example, took a devastating hit from Monica and lies under several feet of water, rendering it inoperable. Camp Pendleton in California, a major Marine Corps facility, is once again in flames, its personnel either being evacuated or fully engaged in firefighting. Other key bases have been similarly disabled, their personnel scattered to relocation sites in the interior of the country.

Foreign threats, while not ignored in this time of domestic crisis, have lost the overriding concern they enjoyed throughout the 2020s when China and Russia were still considered major foes. By the mid-2030s, however, both of those countries were similarly preoccupied with multiple climate-related perils of their own — recurring wildfires and crop failures in Russia, severe water scarcity, staggering heat waves, and perpetually flooded coastal citiesin China — and so were far less inclined to spend vast sums on sophisticated weapons systems or to engage in provocative adventures abroad. Like the United States, these countries are committing their military forces ever more frequently to disaster relief at home.

As for America’s allies in Europe: well, the days of trans-Atlantic cooperation have long since disappeared as extreme climate effects have become the main concern of most European states. To the extent that they still possess military forces, these, too, are now almost entirely devoted to flood relief, firefighting, and keeping out the masses of climate refugees fleeing perpetual heat and famine in Asia and Africa.

And so, in the Situation Room, the overriding question for U.S. security officials in 2039 boils down to this: How can we best defend the nation against the mounting threat of climate catastrophe?

The Unacknowledged Peril

Read through the formal Pentagon literature on the threats to American security today and you won’t even see the words “climate change” mentioned. This is largely because of the nation’s commander-in-chief who once claimed that global warming was a “hoax” and that we’re better off burning ever more coal and oil than protecting the nation against severe storm events or an onslaught of wildfires. Climate change has also become a hotly partisan issue in Washington and military officers are instinctively disinclined to become embroiled in partisan political fights. In addition, senior officers have come to view Russia and China as vital threats to U.S. security — far more dangerous than, say, the zealots of ISIS or al-Qaeda — and so are focused on beefing up America’s already overpowering defense capabilities yet more.

“Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security,” the Department of Defense (DoD) affirmed in its National Defense Strategy of February 2018. “Without sustained and predictable investment to restore readiness and modernize our military to make it fit for our time, we will rapidly lose our military advantage.”

Everything in the 2018 National Defense Strategy and the DoD budget documents that have been submitted to Congress since its release proceed from this premise. To better compete with China and Russia, we are told, it’s essential to spend yet more trillions of dollars over the coming decade to replace America’s supposedly aging weapons inventory — including its nuclear arsenal — with a whole new suite of ships, planes, tanks, and missiles (many incorporating advanced technologies like artificial intelligence and hypersonic warheads).

For some senior officers, especially those responsible for training and equipping America’s armed forces for combat on future battlefields, weapons modernization is now the military’s overriding priority. But for a surprising number of their compatriots, other considerations have begun to intrude into long-term strategic calculations. For those whose job it is to house all those forces and sustain them in combat, climate change has become an inescapable and growing concern. This is especially true for the commanders of facilities that would play a critical role in any future confrontation with China or Russia.

Many of the bases that would prove essential in a war with China, for example, are located on islands or in coastal areas highly exposed to sea-level rise and increasingly powerful typhoons. Naval Support Facility Diego Garcia, a major logistical and submarine base in the Indian Ocean, for example, is situated on a low-lying atoll that suffers periodic storm flooding and is likely to be submerged entirely well before the end of the century. The Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site, focused on preparing American defenses against the future use of nuclear missiles by either North Korea or China, is located on Kwajalein Atoll in the midst of the Pacific Ocean and is also destined to disappear. Similarly, the country’s major naval base in Asia, at Yokosuka, Japan, and its major air facility, at Kadena on the Japanese island of Okinawa, are located along the coast and are periodically assaulted by severe typhoons.

No less at risk are radar facilities and bases in Alaska intended for defense against Russian Arctic air and naval attacks. Many of the early-warning radars overseen by the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, a joint U.S.-Canadian operation, are located on the Alaskan and Canadian shores of the Arctic Ocean and so are being threatened by sea-level rise, coastal erosion, and the thawing of the permafrost on which many of them rest.

Equally vulnerable are stateside bases considered essential to the defense of this country, as well as its ability to sustain military operations abroad. Just how severe this risk has become was made painfully clear in late 2018 and early 2019, when two of the country’s most important domestic installations, Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida and Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, were largely immobilized by extreme storm events — Hurricane Michael in one case and a prolonged rainfall in the other.

Tyndall, located on a narrow strip of land projecting into the Gulf of Mexico, housed a large fraction of America’s F-22 “Raptor” stealth fighter jets along with the 601st Air and Space Operations Center (601st AOC), the main command and control unit for aerial defense of the continental United States. In anticipation of Michael’s assault, the Air Force was able to relocate key elements of the 601st AOC and most of those F-22s to other facilities out of the hurricane’s path, but some Raptors could not be moved and were damaged by the storm. According to the Air Force, 484 buildings on the base were also destroyed or damaged beyond repair and the cost of repairing the rest of the facilities was estimated at $648 million. It is, in fact, unclear if Tyndall will ever again serve as a major F-22 base or house all the key military organizations it once contained.

Offutt Air Force Base plays a similarly critical role in America’s defense operations, housing the headquarters of the Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM), which is responsible for oversight of all U.S. nuclear strike forces, including its intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Also located at Offutt is the 55th Wing, the nation’s premier assemblage of reconnaissance and electronic-warfare aircraft. In March 2019, after a severe low-pressure system (often called a “bomb cyclone”) formed over the western plains, the upper Missouri River basin was inundated with torrential rains for several days, swelling the river and causing widespread flooding. Much of Offutt, including its vital runways, was submerged under several feet of water and some 130 buildings were damaged or destroyed. USSTRATCOM continued to operate, but many key personnel were unable to gain access to the base, causing staffing problems. As with Tyndall, immediate repairs are expected to run into the hundreds of millions of dollars and full restoration of the base’s facilities many millions more.

Wildfires in California have also imperiled key bases. In May 2014, for example, Camp Pendleton was scorched by the Tomahawk Fire, one of several conflagrations to strike the San Diego area at the time. More than 6,000 acres were burned by the blaze and children at two on-base schools had to be evacuated. At one point, a major munitions depot was threatened by flames, but firefighters managed to keep them far enough away to prevent a catastrophic explosion.

An even more dangerous fire swept through Vandenberg Air Force Base, 50 miles north of Santa Barbara, in September 2016. Vandenberg is used to launch satellite-bearing missiles into space and houses some of the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense missile interceptors that are meant to shoot down any North Korean (or possibly Chinese) ICBMs fired at this country. The 2016 blaze, called the Canyon Fire, burned more than 12,000 acres and forced the Air Force to cancel the launch of an Atlas V rocket carrying an earth-imaging satellite. Had winds not shifted at the last moment, the fire might have engulfed several of Vandenberg’s major launch sites.

Such perils have not (yet) been addressed in Pentagon documents like the National Defense Strategy and senior officers are normally reluctant to discuss them with members of the public. Nonetheless, it’s not hard to find evidence of deep anxiety among those who face the already evident ravages of climate change on a regular basis. In 2014 and 2017, analysts from the U.S. Government Accountability Office visited numerous U.S. bases at home and abroad to assess their exposure to extreme climate effects and came back with startling reports about their encounters.

“At 7 out of 15 locations we visited or contacted,” the survey team reported in 2014, “officials stated that they had observed rising sea levels and associated storm surge and associated potential impacts, or mission vulnerabilities.” Likewise, “at 9 out of 15 locations we visited or contacted, officials stated that they had observed changes in precipitation patterns and associated potential impacts,” such as severe flooding or wildfires.

Look through the congressional testimony of top Pentagon officials and you’ll find that similar indications of unease abound. “The Air Force recognizes that our installations and infrastructure are vulnerable to a wide variety of threats, including those from weather, climate, and natural events,” said John Henderson, assistant secretary of the Air Force for installations, environment and energy, at a recent hearing on installation resiliency. “Changing climate and severe weather effects have the potential to catastrophically damage or degrade the Air Force’s war-fighting readiness.”

Threats to the Home Front

At a time when U.S. bases are experiencing the ever more severe effects of climate change, the armed forces are coming under mounting pressure to assist domestic authorities in coping with increasingly damaging storms, floods, and fires from those same climate forces. A prelude to what can be expected in the future was provided by the events of August and September 2017, when the military was called upon to provide disaster relief in the wake of three particularly powerful hurricanes — Harvey, Irma, and Maria — at the very moment California and the state of Washington were being ravaged by powerful wildfires.

This unprecedented chain of disasters began on August 26th, when Harvey — then a Category 4 hurricane — made landfall near Houston, Texas, and lingered there for five agonizing days, sucking up water from the Gulf of Mexico and dumping it on that area in what proved to be the heaviest continuous rainfall in American history. With much of Houston engulfed in flood waters, the DoD mobilized 12,000 National Guard and 16,000 active-duty Army troops to assist in relief operations.

Such cleanup operations were still under way there when Irma — a Category 5 storm and one of the most powerful hurricanes ever detected in the Atlantic Ocean — struck the eastern Caribbean, Puerto Rico, and southern Florida. Guard units sent by Florida’s governor to assist in Texas were hastily recalled and the Pentagon mobilized an additional 4,500 active-duty troops for emergency operations. To bolster these forces, the Navy deployed one of its aircraft carriers, the USS Abraham Lincoln, along with a slew of support vessels.

With some Guard contingents still involved in Texas and cleanup operations just getting under way in Florida, another Category 5 storm, Maria, emerged in the Atlantic and began its fateful course toward Puerto Rico, making landfall on that island on September 20th. It severed most of that island’s electrical power lines, bringing normal life to a halt. With food and potable water in short supply, the DoD commenced yet another mobilization of more than 12,000 active-duty and Guard units. Some of them would still be there a year later, seeking to restore power and repair roads in remote, harshly affected areas.

If finding enough troops and supply systems to assist in these relief operations was a tough task — akin to mobilizing for a major war — the Pentagon faced a no less severe challenge in addressing the threats to its own forces and facilities from those very storms.

When Hurricane Irma approached Florida and the Keys, it became evident that many of the Pentagon’s crucial southern installations were likely to suffer severe damage. Notable among them was Naval Air Station (NAS) Key West, a major hub for U.S. operations in the Caribbean region. Fearing the worst, its commander ordered a mandatory evacuation for all but a handful of critical personnel. Commanders at other bases in the storm’s path also ordered evacuations, including at NAS Jacksonville in Florida and Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay in Georgia. Aircraft at these installations were flown to secure locations further inland while Kings Bay’s missile-carrying submarines were sent to sea where they could better ride out the storm. At least a dozen other installations were forced to relocate at least some personnel, planes, and ships.

Clusters of Extreme Events

While the extremity of each of these individual climate disasters can’t be attributed with absolute certainty to climate change, that they occurred at such strength over such a short time period is almost impossible to explain without reference to it. As scientists have indicated, the extremely warm waters of the Atlantic and Caribbean contributed to the fury of the three hurricanes and extreme dryness in California and the American West has resulted in severe recurring wildfires. All of these are predictable consequences of a warming planet.

That means, of course, that we can expect recurring replays of summer 2017, with multiple disasters (of ever-increasing magnitude) occurring more or less simultaneously. These, in turn, will produce ever more demands on the military for relief services, even as it is being forced to cope with the impact of such severe climate events on its own facilities. Indeed, the National Research Council (NRC), in a report commissioned by the U.S. Intelligence Community, has warned of just such a future. Speaking of what it termed “clusters of extreme events,” it noted that warming temperatures are likely to generate not just more destructive storms, but also a greater concentration of such events at the same time.

“Given the available scientific knowledge of the climate system,” the report notes, “it is prudent for security analysts to expect climate surprises in the coming decade, including… conjunctions of events occurring simultaneously or in sequence, and for them to become progressively more serious and frequent thereafter, and most likely at an accelerating rate.”

Combine the ravages of Harvey, Irma, Maria, Katrina, and Sandy with the wildfires recently blasting across California and you get some sense of what our true “national security” landscape might look like. While the Pentagon, the National Guard, and local authorities should be able to cope with any combination of two or three such events, as they did in 2017 (although, according to critics, the damage to Puerto Rico has never been fully repaired), there will come a time when the climate assault is so severe and multifaceted that U.S. leaders will be unable to address all the major disasters simultaneously and will have to pick and choose where to deploy their precious assets.

At that moment, the notion of focusing all our attention on managing military rivalries with China and Russia (or other potential adversaries) will appear dangerously distracting. Count on this: U.S. forces sent to foreign bases and conflicts (as with the never-ending wars of this century in the Greater Middle East and Africa) will undoubtedly be redeployed homeward to help overcome domestic dangers. This may seem improbable today, with China and Russia building up their arsenals to counter American forces, but scientific analyses like those conducted by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the NRC, suggest that those two countries are then no less likely to be facing multiple catastrophes of their own and will be in no position to engage in conflicts with the United States.

And so there will come a time when a presidential visit to the Situation Room involves not a nuclear crisis or the next major terrorist attack, but rather a conjunction of severe climate events, threatening the very heartbeat of the nation.

Michael T. Klare is the Five College Professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. His newest book, The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources, has just recently been published.  His other books include: Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy and Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America’s Growing Dependence on Imported Petroleum. A documentary version of Blood and Oil is available from the Media Education Foundation.

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climate Crimes

The Military Has Done Little to Prepare As Climate Change Threatens Guantánamo

Miriam Pensack

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https://theintercept.com/2019/09/15/climate-change-us-military-war/

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/we-spend-billions-we-dont-have-to-protect-fossil-fuels-on-the-other-side-of-the-planet

no lnx

We spend billions we don’t have to protect fossil fuels on the other side of the planet

Written by Bob Hennelly / Salon August 4, 2019

In the same news wave that brought word that July at least equaled, if not surpassed, the hottest month in recorded history,  President Trump signed off on a  $2.7 trillion budget that includes an obscene $738 billion on the military.

Word of July’s spiking heat comes as June was reported as the hottest June on record. The climate change dislocations are already upon us as news report document how unprecedented drought in countries like Honduras and Guatemala are forcing farmers and their families off their land and sending them on the northward migration that can easily end in a cage somewhere in the American southwest.

The Pentagon is a major contributor to global warming and climate change that’s the most clear and present danger to our collective survival. And much of its global mission is focused around protecting the Persian Gulf states because those countries have reserves of fossil fuels that we desperately need to stop burning.

“We have always lived through hot summers. But this is not the summer of our youth. This is not your grandfather’s summer,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres, announcing the global weather data in New York.

The international agency said July 2019 will be around 1.2°C (2.6°F) warmer than the pre-industrial era.

“All of this means that we are on track for the period from 2015 to 2019 to be the five hottest years on record,” Guterres said. “This year alone, we have seen temperature records shattered from New Delhi to Anchorage, from Paris to Santiago, from Adelaide and to the Arctic Circle. If we do not take action on climate change now, these extreme weather events are just the tip of the iceberg. And, indeed, the iceberg is also rapidly melting.”

He continued, “Preventing irreversible climate disruption is the race of our lives, and for our lives. It is a race that we can and must win.”

Based on the bi-partisan nature of the budget deal Trump just signed, it’s clear few inside the beltway are capable to step back and consider the tragic irony that we are saddling future generations with trillions of dollars in debt so we can continue to maintain a warfighting machine whose emissions are hastening the demise of a livable planet.

In an academic paper by Neta Crawford, with the Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs, we learn the Pentagon “is the world’s largest institutional user of petroleum and correspondingly, the single largest producer of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the world and in  2017, its “greenhouse gas emissions were greater than the greenhouse gas emissions of entire industrialized countries as Sweden or Denmark.”

“With an armed force of more than two million people, 11 nuclear aircraft carriers, and the most advanced military aircraft, the US is more than capable of projecting power anywhere in the globe,” writes Crawford. “Further, the US has been continuously at war since late 2001, with the US military and State Department currently engaged in more than 80 countries in counterterror operations” making it “the world’s largest  institutional user of petroleum and correspondingly, the single largest producer of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the world.”

But the destructive insanity of our ever-escalating military spending is compounded by the fact that to keep our armored camo-carousel turning, we have to come up with close to$600 billion a year just to service the debt alone.

The bipartisan budget deal comes in the aftermath of the Trump $1.5 trillion tax cut that also blew up the debt, as it accelerated wealth concentration at the very top of America’s wealth pyramid.

And so just what do we have to show for our $22 trillion debt? We are a nation whose critical infrastructure; transportation, water, and energy systems are all on the brink of failure. And this wholesale deterioration has occurred as our rich have gotten richer and richer and the public debt piled up to the stratosphere.

In 2017 the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the nation’s energy infrastructure a D+. By some estimates, it would cost between $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion to upgrade.

That same year, ASCE gave the national water supply system a D, reporting that much of the nation’s water supply pipes that were laid in the early 20th century had long passed their useful lifespan. While the lead contamination in the water supply in places like Flint and Newark make headlines the 240,000 water main breaks a year that waste two trillion gallons of potable water don’t float to the top of the news wave.

Similarly, our wastewater systems receive only a D+ from ASCE with an additional 56 million users to be connected to the already antiquated and overburdened systems over the next 20 years.

For whatever reason, once public discourse turns to the well-documented state of disrepair of our infrastructure or global warming, it becomes like weight loss, something we talk about, but we never get around to actually doing anything about.

We are a nation whose critical infrastructure; transportation, water, and energy systems are all on the brink of failure even as it stands to be mightily stressed by the weather ahead.

This wholesale hollowing out of the basic systems we rely on to live has occurred as our rich have gotten richer and richer while the public debt we are all on the hook for is piled up to the stratosphere.

And the corporate news media says the Green New Deal is reckless.

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U.S. Soldiers Falling Ill, Dying in the Heat as the Climate Warms

BY: DAVID HASEMYER

A 60 percent rise in military heat illnesses in the past decade and several deaths suggests the U.S. military isn't prepared for worsening climate change, an ICN/NBC investigation shows.

Read More

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https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-navy-fossil-fuels-2016jul07-story.html

 DAVID IGNATIUS, THE WASHINGTON POST

JULY 7, 2016

5:50 PM

The week of July 4th is a good moment to salute an unlikely champion of saving energy and switching to alternative fuels — the U.S. Navy.

Once a supreme fuel-guzzler whose energy needs sometimes dictated foreign policy, the Navy has become a model for how the country can curb its appetite for fossil fuels.

The Navy’s energy diet began seven years ago with an edict from newly appointed SecretaryRay Mabus, who issued five goals for radically changing how the Navy bought and consumed fuel. A former Mississippi governor who had served two years as U.S. ambassador to Riyadh in the mid-1990s, Mabus worried about how vulnerable the U.S. military was to foreign energy sources.

The Navy, like most military services, likes its traditions.

So the idea of a “Great Green Fleet” met considerable resistance from admirals and their allies in Congress. The Navy brass resisted, in particular, Mabus’ commitment in 2009 to switch the Navy’s consumption so that by 2020, at least 50 percent of its fuel would come from alternative sources.

At that time, many Navy commanders thought that 30 percent was a realistic target.

The Navy has already exceeded that 50 percent target in its contracts for fuel ashore, Mabus told me in a recent interview. And it expects to meet the overall goal well before 2020.

Under the rules Mabus set for transition, the alternative fuels must be ready to “drop in” for any requirement, including jet fuel for an F/A-18 Hornet; the fuels must be competitively priced; and any biofuels can’t take land away from food production.

Mabus, who served aboard a cruiser in the early 1970s, argues that this energy shift is as much about national security as about environmental goals. Saving fuel reduces combat vulnerability: He notes that in Afghanistan, the Marine Corps suffered one Marine killed or wounded for every 50 convoys of fuel. Less fuel consumption means fewer casualties.

The Navy’s main push has involved alternative fuels for ships, planes and shore facilities.

The cost curve has come down sharply: Mabus says that four years ago when the Navy began buying jet fuel that used a heavy mix of biofuel, it cost $25 a gallon. Today, it costs less than $2 a gallon.

The Navy is also making some new “hybrids,” such as the amphibious assault ships USS Makin Island and USS America.

These ships use electric propulsion for lower speeds and save the gas turbines for higher speeds. Mabus says the “Prius of the sea,” as he jokingly calls the Makin Island, was able to remain at sea 44 days longer than expected without refueling. Over a ship’s lifetime, the savings could add up to $250 million, the Navy says.

Mabus also pushed the Navy and Marines to begin using alternative technologies for electricity. The Navy is refitting ships to use long-lasting LED lights; so far, 7 percent of the fleet has made this transition, saving the equivalent of 1 million gallons of marine diesel fuel annually. Marines deployed in combat are now using solar panels, where possible, to produce power that would otherwise come from generators and batteries. For a Marine company, this could spare troops from lugging 700 pounds of batteries into combat.

Another nice thing about using green technology in combat, says Mabus, is that it’s quiet.

He notes a comment by a SEAL Team officer after a recent deployment: “When you turn off the generator, you can hear the bad guys.” In remote, rural areas of Afghanistan, “a generator is likely putting a target on your back,” says Mabus.

The Navy has always been at the cutting edge with energy: Sailing vessels that depended on the wind gave way to steamships, which were replaced by diesel-powered vessels, which made way for nuclear carriers and submarines. Mabus says the Defense Department is still the largest single user of fossil fuels on earth, with the Navy accounting for about one-third of that total.

Climate change is a very practical problem for a seagoing Navy.

Melting polar ice changes the strategic map of the world; rising sea levels are expected to displace up to 150 million people living in coastal areas by 2050, adding to global instability; the Navy’s prize Atlantic port of Norfolk may be at risk, as sea levels rise through this century.

Occasionally, environmental and defense policy converge.

Mabus’ energy initiative, which drew jeers at first, now looks like a demonstration of how to make the country stronger and greener at the same time.

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https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2019/06/a-new-report-says-the-pentagon-isnt-prepared-to-battle-climate-change/

no lnx

Inside the Department of Defense, climate change is settled science. At least six times in the last two years, senior military leaders have acknowledged as much to lawmakers during oversight hearings. Nonetheless, the Pentagon continues to botch its stated plans to fortify military bases and infrastructure against the looming threat of rising sea levels, drought, wildfires, and other climate-related threats, a report from the independentGovernment Accountability Office concluded this week.

The report, which was published on Wednesday, found that most installations visited by auditors “did not fully assess the risks associated with extreme weather and climate change effects.” Many of these bases did not substantially incorporate climate projections into their planning, including ones in areas at increased risk for flooding like Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii. The report only found one project, across the 23 Army, Navy, and Air Force bases reviewed in total, that was designed according to projections of some climate change-related threat.

Climate change has become an increasingly visible concern for the Pentagon over the past year of extreme weather. Camp Lejeune, the largest Marine Corp base on the East Coast, and Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida were each devastated by hurricanes. Congress awarded both bases nearly $3 billion in disaster aid last week, but another hurricane season looms without a serious reckoning from the Pentagon as to how to cope with the menace from the storms.

The disconnect between acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan and congressional Democrats, who have repeatedly emphasized this issue in hearings, became obvious in January when the Pentagon neglected to list the installations most vulnerable to climate change, as mandated by Congress. When they submitted a revised report in March, they did not include Tyndall and Camp Lejeune. Rep. Jim Langevin (D-RI), a House Armed Services Committee member, compared the Pentagon’s effort at the time to “a student rushing to finish a term paper” in a statement to Mother Jones. “Given this record, the assurances from the Secretary that he cares about resiliency ring hollow,” he said.

Under President Barack Obama, the Pentagon published a climate change roadmap and issued a department-wide directive to incorporate climate change risks into future planning and construction efforts. Those efforts have continued under President Donald Trump but are no longer a priority and, according to some former officials, even a liability given the commander in chief’s skepticism of global warming. “Tying things to climate change could invite a scrutiny that was undesired,” retired Rear Adm. Jonathan White, who led a Navy task force on climate change, told Mother Jones in December.

In other instances, White House officials have censored government employees from linking climate change to national security. Last week, a State Department intelligence agency was blocked from submitting prepared testimony to a House Intelligence Committee hearing on climate change. White House officials marked up the unreleased text, which was based on research from federal science agencies, with comments objecting to its “climate alarm propaganda.” That revelation followed similar stories of Trump administration officials blocking the release of a collective statement at last month’s Arctic Council meeting, which Secretary of State Mike Pompeo attended, over opposition to climate change references in it.

Unless the Pentagon gains some urgency, the drumbeat of criticism from independent watchdogs like GAO will keep coming. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who has used her perch on the Senate Armed Services panel to hammer the Pentagon’s efforts to adapt to climate change, has already asked GAO to investigate “the impacts of climate change on defense contractors and the defense supply chain.”

Until then, read GAO’s report from this week here:

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https://theconversation.com/the-defense-department-is-worried-about-climate-change-and-also-a-huge-carbon-emitter-118017

Scientists and security analysts have warned for more than a decade that global warming is a potential national security concern.

They project that the consequences of global warming – rising seas, powerful storms, famine and diminished access to fresh water – may make regions of the world politically unstable and prompt mass migration and refugee crises.

Some worry that wars may follow.

Yet with few exceptions, the U.S. military’s significant contribution to climate change has received little attention. Although the Defense Department has significantly reduced its fossil fuel consumption since the early 2000s, it remains the world’s single largest consumer of oil – and as a result, one of the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters.

A broad carbon footprint

I have studied war and peace for four decades. But I only focused on the scale of U.S. military greenhouse gas emissions when I began co-teaching a course on climate change and focused on the Pentagon’s response to global warming. Yet, the Department of Defense is the U.S. government’s largest fossil fuel consumer, accounting for between 77% and 80% of all federal government energy consumption since 2001.

In a newly released study published by Brown University’s Costs of War Project, I calculated U.S. military greenhouse gas emissions in tons of carbon dioxide equivalent from 1975 through 2017.

Today China is the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, followed by the United States. In 2017 the Pentagon’s greenhouse gas emissions totaled over 59 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. If it were a country, it would have been the world’s 55th largest greenhouse gas emitter, with emissions larger than Portugal, Sweden or Denmark.

CC BY-ND

The largest sources of military greenhouse gas emissions are buildings and fuel. The Defense Department maintains over 560,000 buildings at approximately 500 domestic and overseas military installations, which account for about 40% of its greenhouse gas emissions.

The rest comes from operations. In fiscal year 2016, for instance, the Defense Department consumed about 86 million barrels of fuel for operational purposes.

Why do the armed forces use so much fuel?

Military weapons and equipment use so much fuel that the relevant measure for defense planners is frequently gallons per mile.

Aircraft are particularly thirsty. For example, the B-2 stealth bomber, which holds more than 25,600 gallons of jet fuel, burns 4.28 gallons per mile and emits more than 250 metric tons of greenhouse gas over a 6,000 nautical mile range. The KC-135R aerial refueling tanker consumes about 4.9 gallons per mile.

A single mission consumes enormous quantities of fuel. In January 2017, two B-2B bombers and 15 aerial refueling tankers traveled more than 12,000 miles from Whiteman Air Force Base to bomb ISIS targets in Libya, killing about 80 suspected ISIS militants. Not counting the tankers’ emissions, the B-2s emitted about 1,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases.U.S. Petroleum Oil and Lubrication [pix Airmen deployed to RAF Fairford refuel B-52 and B-2 bombers training in the United Kingdom.]

Quantifying military emissions

Calculating the Defense Department’s greenhouse gas emissions isn’t easy. The Defense Logistics Agency tracks fuel purchases, but the Pentagon does not consistently report DOD fossil fuel consumption to Congress in its annual budget requests.

The Department of Energy publishes data on DOD energy production and fuel consumption, including for vehicles and equipment. Using fuel consumption data, I estimate that from 2001 through 2017, the DOD, including all service branches, emitted 1.2 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases. That is the rough equivalent of driving of 255 million passenger vehicles over a year.

Of that total, I estimated that war-related emissions between 2001 and 2017, including “overseas contingency operations” in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Syria, generated over 400 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent — roughly equivalent to the greenhouse emissions of almost 85 million cars in one year.

Real and present dangers?

The Pentagon’s core mission is to prepare for potential attacks by human adversaries. Analysts argue about the likelihood of war and the level of military preparation necessary to prevent it, but in my view, none of the United States’ adversaries – Russia, Iran, China and North Korea – are certain to attack the United States.

Nor is a large standing military the only way to reduce the threats these adversaries pose. Arms control and diplomacy can often de-escalate tensions and reduce threats. Economic sanctions can diminish the capacity of states and nonstate actors to threaten the security interests of the U.S. and its allies.

In contrast, climate change is not a potential risk. It has begun, with real consequences to the United States. Failing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will make the nightmare scenarios strategists warn against – perhaps even “climate wars” – more likely.[twt]

A case for decarbonizing the military

Over the past last decade the Defense Department has reduced its fossil fuel consumption through actions that include using renewable energy, weatherizing buildings and reducing aircraft idling time on runways.

The DOD’s total annual emissions declined from a peak of 85 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2004 to 59 million metric tons in 2017.The goal, as then-General James Mattis put it, is to be “unleashed from the tether of fuel” by decreasing military dependence on oil and oil convoys that are vulnerable to attack in war zones.

Since 1979, the United States has placed a high priority on protecting access to the Persian Gulf. About one-fourth of military operational fuel use is for the U.S. Central Command, which covers the Persian Gulf region.

As national security scholars have argued, with dramatic growth in renewable energy and diminishing U.S. dependence on foreign oil, it is possible for Congress and the president to rethink our nation’s military missions and reduce the amount of energy the armed forces use to protect access to Middle East oil.

I agree with the military and national security experts who contend that climate change should be front and center in U.S. national security debates. Cutting Pentagon greenhouse gas emissions will help save lives in the United States, and could diminish the risk of climate conflict.

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https://theintercept.com/2019/04/15/climate-change-military-elizabeth-warren/

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https://www.ecowatch.com/military-largest-polluter-2408760609.html

Whitney Webb

Last week, mainstream media outlets gave minimal attention to the news that the U.S. Naval station in Virginia Beach had spilled an estimated 94,000 gallons of jet fuel into a nearby waterway, less than a mile from the Atlantic Ocean.

While the incident was by no means as catastrophic as some other pipeline spills, it underscores an important yet little-known fact—that the U.S. Department of Defense is both the nation's and the world's, largest polluter.

Producing more hazardous waste than the five largest U.S. chemical companies combined, the U.S. Department of Defense has left its toxic legacy throughout the world in the form of depleted uranium, oil, jet fuel, pesticides, defoliants like Agent Orange and lead, among others.

In 2014, the former head of the Pentagon's environmental program told Newsweek that her office has to contend with 39,000 contaminated areas spread across 19 million acres just in the U.S. alone.

U.S. military bases, both domestic and foreign, consistently rank among some of the most polluted places in the world, as perchlorate and other components of jet and rocket fuel contaminate sources of drinking water, aquifers and soil.Hundreds of military bases can be found on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) list of Superfund sites, which qualify for clean-up grants from the government.

Almost 900 of the nearly 1,200 Superfund sites in the U.S. are abandoned military facilities or sites that otherwise support military needs, not counting the military bases themselves.

"Almost every military site in this country is seriously contaminated," John D. Dingell, a retired Michigan congressman and war veteran, told Newsweek in 2014. Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, North Carolina is one such base. Lejeune's contamination became widespread and even deadly after its groundwater was polluted with a sizable amount of carcinogens from 1953 to 1987.

However, it was not until this February that the government allowed those exposed to chemicals at Lejeune to make official compensation claims. Numerous bases abroad have also contaminated local drinking water supplies, most famously the Kadena Air Force Base in Okinawa.

[Between 1946 and 1958, the U.S. tested 66 nuclear weapons near Bikini atoll. Populations living nearby in the Marshall Islands were exposed to measurable levels of radioactive fallout from these tests. National Cancer Institute map]

In addition, the U.S., which has conducted more nuclear weapons tests than all other nations combined, is also responsible for the massive amount of radiation that continues to contaminate many islands in the Pacific Ocean. The Marshall Islands, where the U.S. dropped more than sixty nuclear weapons between 1946 and 1958, are a particularly notable example. Inhabitants of the Marshall Islands and nearby Guam continue to experience an exceedingly high rate of:(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}::{ cancer.

The American Southwest was also the site of numerous nuclear weapons tests that contaminated large swaths of land. Navajo Indian reservations have been polluted by long-abandoned uranium mines where nuclear material was obtained by U.S. military contractors.

One of the most recent testaments to the U.S. military's horrendous environmental record is Iraq. U.S. military action there has resulted in the desertification of 90 percent of Iraqi territory, crippling the country's agricultural industry and forcing it to import more than 80 percent of its food. The U.S.' use of depleted uranium in Iraq during the Gulf War also caused a massive environmental burden for Iraqis. In addition, the U.S. military's policy of using open-air burn pits to dispose of waste from the 2003 invasion has caused a surge in cancer among U.S. servicemen and Iraqi civilians alike.

While the U.S. military's past environmental record suggests that its current policies are not sustainable, this has by no means dissuaded the U.S. military from openly planning future contamination of the environment through misguided waste disposal efforts. Last November, the U.S. Navy announced its plan to release 20,000 tons of environmental "stressors," including heavy metals and explosives, into the coastal waters of the U.S. Pacific Northwest over the course of this year.

The plan, laid out in the Navy's Northwest Training and Testing Environmental Impact Statement, fails to mention that these "stressors" are described by the EPA as known hazards, many of which are highly toxic at both acute and chronic levels.

The 20,000 tons of "stressors" mentioned in the Environmental Impact Statement do not account for the additional 4.7 to 14 tons of "metals with potential toxicity" that the Navy plans to release annually, from now on, into inland waters along the Puget Sound in Washington state.

In response to concerns about these plans, a Navy spokeswoman said that heavy metals and even depleted uranium are no more dangerous than any other metal, a statement that represents a clear rejection of scientific fact. It seems that the very U.S. military operations meant to "keep Americans safe" come at a higher cost than most people realize—a cost that will be felt for generations to come both within the U.S. and abroad.

Reposted with permission from our media associate MintPress News.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/fake-science-the-white-house-reportedly-wants-a-new-dodgy-panel-of-scientists-to-challenge-the-governments-climate-change-findings/

White House intends to create a new panel of scientists with the intention of attacking the scientific consensus, both within and outside the federal government, that climate change poses a clear and severe threat to the world, a new report from Washington Post revealed Sunday.

According to the report, officials in the National Security Council want to arrange the group so that it would be outside the normal scrutiny such advisory panels typically require.When formal advisory committees are usually set up, they are subject to stringent regulations that require public meetings, accommodation of records requests, and membership standards.

Apparently, the White House doesn’t want the public to have clear insight into a committee designed to spread propaganda and disinformation about clearly established science.

The report said that President Donald Trump was unhappy with the fact that the law requires it to the publication of the National Climate Assessment. This review, compiled and rigorously reviewed by career scientists across the administration, stressed the serious threat posed to the United States and abroad by climate change and CO2 emissions. Since this contradicts GOP orthodoxy and conflicts with its anti-regulation agenda and the interests of corporate donors, Trump and his party are eager to combat these findings.

The Post noted that even within the military — the branch of government that Republicans most revere — the science of climate change has long been accepted as fact, even under GOP administrations.

“In 2003, the Pentagon commissioned a report to examine how an abrupt change in climate would affect America’s defense capabilities: Its authors concluded that it ‘should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a U.S. national security concern,'” the Post said.

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Pentagon: Climate Change Is Real and a 'National Security Issue' 1/19.

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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/why-green-new-deal-advocates-should-address-militarism

medea b

In the spirit of a new year and a new Congress, 2019 may well be our best and last opportunity to steer our ship of state away from the twin planetary perils of environmental chaos and militarism, charting a course toward an earth-affirming 21st century.

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The environmental crisis was laid bare by the sobering December report of the UN Climate panel: If the world fails to mobilize within the next 12 years on the level of a moon shot, and gear up to change our energy usage from toxic fossil, nuclear and industrial biomass fuels to the already known solutions for employing solar, wind, hydro, geothermal energy and efficiency, we will destroy all life on earth as we know it. The existential question is whether our elected officials, with the reins of power, are going to sit by helplessly as our planet experiences more devastating fires, floods, droughts, and rising seas or will they seize this moment and take monumental action as we did when the United States abolished slavery, gave women the vote, ended the great depression, and eliminated legal segregation.

Some members of Congress are already showing their historic mettle by supporting a Green New Deal. This would not only start to reverse the damage we have inflicted on our collective home, but it would create hundreds of thousands of good jobs that cannot be shipped overseas to low-wage countries.

Even those congresspeople who want to seriously address the climate crisis, however, fail to grapple with the simultaneous crisis of militarism. The war on terror unleashed in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attack has led to almost two decades of unchecked militarism. We are spending more money on our military than at any time in history. Endless wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria and elsewhere are still raging, costing us trillions of dollars and creating humanitarian disasters. Old treaties to control nuclear arms are unraveling at the same time that conflicts with the major powers of Russia and China are heating up.

Where is the call for the New Peace Deal that would free up hundreds of billions from the overblown military budget to invest in green infrastructure? Where is the call to close a majority of our nation’s 800-plus military bases overseas, bases that are relics of World War II and are basically useless for military purposes? Where is the call for seriously addressing the existential threat posed by nuclear weapons?

With the crumbling phenomenon of outdated nuclear arms control treaties, it is unconscionable not to support the recently negotiated UN treaty, signed by 122 nations, to prohibit and ban nuclear weapons just as the world has done for chemical and biological weapons. The U.S. Congress should not be authorizing the expenditures of $1 trillion for new nuclear weapons, bowing to corporate paymasters who seek a larger arms race with Russia and other nuclear-armed countries to the detriment of our own people and the rest of the world. Instead, Congress should take the lead in supporting this treaty and promoting it among the other nuclear weapons states.

Environmentalists need to contest the Pentagon’s staggering global footprint. The U.S. military is the world’s largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels and the largest source of greenhouse gases, contributing about 5 percent of global warming emissions. Almost 900 of the EPA’s 1,300 Superfund sites are abandoned military bases, weapons-production facilities or weapons-testing sites. The former Hanford nuclear weapons facility in Washington state alone will cost over $100 billion to clean up. The U.S. military has also spread toxic chemical contaminants in and around bases worldwide, sickening millions.

If climate change is not addressed rapidly by a Green New Deal, global militarism will ramp up in response to increases in climate refugees and civil destabilization, which will feed climate change and seal a vicious cycle fed by the twin evils of militarism and climate disruption. That’s why a New Peace Deal and a Green New Deal should go hand in hand. We cannot afford to waste our time, resources and intellectual capital on weapons and war when climate change is barreling down on all of humankind. If the nuclear weapons don’t destroy us, then the pressing urgency of catastrophic climate will.

Moving from an economic system that relies on fossil fuels and violence would enable us to make a just transition to a clean, green, life-supporting energy economy. This would be the quickest and most positive way to deal a death knell to the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned about so many years ago.

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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Underfunding, lack of strategic planning and denialism are hindering the U.S. Defense Department’s climate response.

By Dan Ross

(October 1, 2018) — A rock seawall protecting the Air Force’s Cape Lisburne Long Range Radar Station on Alaska’s northeastern coast is under increasing duress from extreme weather patterns affecting Arctic sea ice—nearly $50 millionhas been spent replacing vulnerable parts of the wall already.

In 2013, a late summer monsoon rainstorm struck Fort Irwin, in California, flooding more than 160 buildings and causing extensive damage that took weeks to clean up. Some buildings were out of commission for months.

The 2012 Waldo Canyon Fire, one of the most destructive wildfires in Colorado’s history, only narrowly missed Peterson Air Force Base. The fire cost some $16 million to battle.

These are just some of the findings that make up a U.S. Department of Defense vulnerability report, published earlier this year, looking at the impact of climate change on more than 3,500 military installations. Its conclusion? That more than half of these installations are affected by flooding, drought, winds, wildfires, storm surges and extreme temperatures. Drought proved the single biggest challenge to the military, affecting nearly 800 bases. Next up was wind, which affected more than 750 bases, while non-storm surge-related flooding impacted a little more than 700 bases.

“As an institution, the military sees climate change as a threat to what they do on multiple levels,” said Michael Klare, professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College. “It’s a threat to their bases. It’s a threat to their operations. It creates insurgencies. It creates problems for them. They’re aware of that, and they want to minimize those impediments.”

Indeed, climate change has long been on the military’s radar. It was the George W. Bush administration, for example, that required the Defense Department to procure 25 percent of its energy for its buildings from renewables by 2025. Even President Ronald Reagan received military memos warning of global warming. While in 2014, the department published a roadmap establishing an outline to deal with the threats from climate change within the military, as ordered by then-President Barack Obama.

Although President Trump’s administration is known for its climate change denialism, major figures within the military are still noticeably vocal about the issue. In February, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats warned in a Worldwide Threat Assessment that the impacts from global warming—more air pollution, biodiversity loss and water scarcity—are “likely to fuel economic and social discontent—and possibly upheaval—through 2018.” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has been called the “lone green hope” for his long-established views on the threat of global warming.

Given the immediate threat of rising sea levels, the U.S. Navy is leading the charge to better understand these impacts at the ground level. Last year, a Navy handbook provided a planning framework for incorporating the threat of climate change into development projects at Navy installations. To put this into context, a 2016 Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) analysis of 18 military installations along the U.S. East coast and the Gulf of Mexico found that by 2050, most of these bases will experience 10 times the number of floods than they do currently. In about 80 years, eight of the bases could lose as much as 50 percent of their land to rising seas. Naval Air Station Key West, in Florida, could be almost entirely underwater by the end of the century.

“We did use the high sea level rise scenario because generally, the military has a low tolerance for risk,” said Shana Udvardy, UCS climate preparedness specialist and a co-author on the study. “And we’re basically on track for the high scenario because of the rate of ice sheet melting. It’s very likely to happen, and it’s after mid-century that we’ll really see the changes in the extent and frequency of tidal flooding.”

According to U.S. Geological Survey scientist Curt Storlazzi, who has studied the effects of global warming on military installations on the Marshall Islands for the Defense Department, the twin impacts of rising sea levels and storm waves will increase the magnitude of flooding there by “double” in the next couple of decades. “That’s going to negatively impact both the military and civilian populations,” he said. “That’s the big takeaway—most civilian and defense infrastructure doesn’t do well with salt water.”

The Center for Climate and Security, a non-partisan group of defense and national security experts, continues to study the myriad threats of climate change on the military. In a recent report, the group outlined how extreme weather patterns will expand the department’s role in tackling national and global security threats, highlighting how humanitarian assistance and disaster relief missions are “increasingly important responsibilities for military commanders around the world.”

But former Rear Admiral David Titley, professor of meteorology at Penn State University and an expert in climate change, the Arctic and national security, argues that the military as a whole has yet to really grapple with the problem of climate change in any long-term strategic way, nor has it looked at how to cost-effectively prioritize resources—views mirrored in a recent Government Accountability Office report.

Change could be on its way in this regard. Rep. Jim Langevin, the ranking Democrat on the Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee, pushed through an amendment in the 2018 defense spending bill directing the Defense Department to identify the 10 military installations most vulnerable to climate change and to identify ways to mitigate the forecasted damage. “You would argue that that’s where you put your first dollar towards buying down the risk,” Titley said. “There may be bases that have higher climate vulnerability, but the impact may not be that big a deal relative to others.”

Langevin also included a provision in the 2019 defense spending bill requiring the department to factor energy and climate resiliency efforts into major military installation plans. But Titley is circumspect about the Defense Department’s overall ability and willingness to institutionally get to grips with the problems climate change poses. “We’ll see whether the Department of Defense actually does that or not,” said Titley. “There’s no real leadership on this issue.”

Miriam Pemberton, a research fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank, said that the military’s public overtures on climate change ring a little hollow when stacked up against the actual dollars directed toward green initiatives within the military—efforts like biofuel to power aircraft carriersand solar energy in combat zones.

According to an Institute report from last year, “Combat vs. Climate,” the ratio in military spending in 2017 to deal with regular security threats versus climate change was 28:1—a slight improvement on the 2015 ratio of 30:1. But as the report finds, “spending 28 times as much on traditional military security as on climate security is hardly commensurate with the magnitude of this ‘urgent and growing threat,’ as the military has defined it.”

Further, while the military’s budget grew by $61 billion in 2018, the amount of money the department continues to funnel toward green initiatives and renewable energies hasn’t grown proportionately, said Andrew Holland, the American Security Project’s director of studies. Nor does the military, he said, see its primary mission as tackling climate change. Indeed, the military is the world’s largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels. Last year, the department used more than 85 million barrels of fuel to power ships, aircraft, combat vehicles and contingency bases. The cost? Nearly $8.2 billion.

“We have a military whose job is to fight and win America’s wars,” Holland said. “But where you can take clean energy initiatives that fight climate change and also increase the military’s operational ability to fight and win those wars, that’s a double win.”

Another obstacle is that there’s no “line item for climate change” within the defense spending bill, said the UCS’s Shana Udvardy. “So, it’s really up to each installation to figure out where they’re going to get the resources, and which resources they’re going to allocate to these types of adaptation measures,” she said. What’s more, both Udvardy and Holland agree that the military has recently grown increasingly secretive about its green initiatives, for fear of retaliation by the White House.

Trump has already pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord, for example, and signed an executive order rolling back all Obama-era climate change related actions within federal agencies. There are notable signs that this has trickled down to the Defense Department—the latest National Defense Strategy had been scrubbed clean of any reference to climate change, for example.

“None of us have any clue as to how bad it’s going to be,” said Michael Klare, about the impacts from global warming. “But this something that the military does understand better than most people—it’s not the polar bears we should be worried about, it’s about whole societies that are going to collapse and send out waves of migration, which we’re seeing already.”

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This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute, and originally published by EcoWatch.

Dan Ross is a journalist whose work has appeared in Truthout, the Guardian, FairWarning, Newsweek, YES! Magazine, AlterNet, Salon, EcoWatch, Vice and a number of other publications. He is based in Los Angeles.

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We’re Doomed. Now What? addresses the crisis that is our time through a series of brilliant, moving, and original essays on climate change, war, literature, and loss, from one of the most provocative and iconoclastic minds of his generation. Whether writing about sailing through the melting Arctic, preparing for Houston’s next big storm, watching Star Wars, or going back to the streets of Baghdad he once patrolled as a soldier, Roy Scranton handles his subjects with the same electric, philosophical, demotic touch that he brought to his groundbreaking New York Times essay, “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene.”audio interview 7/18.  video:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHxNjKW9omE

what is thinking good for?" facts/communication problem?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgx-yFczGjU  90 min

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https://psmag.com/environment/our-government-is-in-two-minds-over-climate-change

TRUMP AND THE MILITARY ARE AT ODDS ON CLIMATE CHANGE

While the Trump administration has largely rejected climate change as an issue, the Department of Defense and Congress have identified it as a major potential threat to national security.

SEAN MOWBRAYJAN 18, 2018

The United States government appears to be of two minds, with utterly opposing worldviews, on climate change policy.

On one hand, the Trump administration has pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement, proposed eliminating three vital new climate satellites, reneged on an Obama-era $2 billion commitment to the Green Climate Fund, and wants to slash funding to the Environmental Protection Agency's domestic climate programs and the Department of State's USAID climate programs around the globe. The president has also denounced global warming as a hoax and a Chinese plot.

On the other hand, the Republican-dominated Congress has affirmed that climate change is a prominent national security threat and mandated that the Department of Defense (DOD) look closely at how climate change is going to affect key installations, while also addressing the need to boost the military's finances considerably to deal with global warming threats. When Trump's national security strategy—announced in January—erased climate change as a threat to U.S. security, that decision drew the ire of a bipartisan group of congressional legislators.

As a result of this dichotomy, the DOD has emerged as an unlikely champion of climate action in the Trump government, with the Pentagon declaring emphatically that a rapidly warming world is bringing with it alarming security risks ranging from rising sea level (which threatens naval bases such as Norfolk, Virginia, the largest in the world), to the "mother of all risks"—unpredictable and worsening political instability around the globe brought by climate chaos.

Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis.

Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis.

(Photo: Kevin Dietsch-Pool/Getty Images)

Indeed, Trump's own secretary of defense, Jim Mattis, was hailed before taking office as the "lone green hope," due to his recognition of global warming's clear and present danger.

However, the U.S. military is far from being environmentally friendly. It has a horrifically destructive record as one of the planet's worst polluters, and it also can lay claim to a heavy, and largely unreported, carbon footprint (it is the single largest institutional user of fossil fuels in the world).

A year into Trump's term, it remains to be seen whether the president's climate-unfriendly policies will curtail the DOD's global warming response. Complicating this question are efforts by the White House and Congress to wildly expand the size of the military, which could exponentially increase its fossil fuel footprint, something critics argue is the opposite of what is environmentally needed.

A BOOMING U.S. MILITARY BUDGET

Trump has been a notably unorthodox Republican president, with a frequently tenuous attachment to his party's agenda. But when it comes to military spending, he is in tune with long time GOP policy. Trump is currently seeking an $18 billion military bump for 2018, compared to 2017 levels, to be made at the expense of domestic spending, including the budget of the EPA.

Senator John McCain (R-Arizona).

Arizona Senator John McCain, head of the Senate Armed Services Committee, declared this figure as "inadequate" and laid out his plans for a much larger increase of $85 billion. The 2018 National Defense Authorization Act, signed by the president this past December, goes much further than Trump's own figure.

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The NDAA allots $700 billion, sailing past the $619 billion Congress agreed to in last year's bill, and includes a budget-cap-busting wish list that revamps the military and includes new navy ships, fighter jets, more troops, and a pay increase for all current officers.

Of course, that behemoth budget boost may never happen as it is Congress that has the final say on the military budget and it has yet to vote. NDAA spending for 2018 also exceeds caps set by the 2011 Budget Control Act, and it is uncertain where the increased spending will come from.

However, the NDAA does something Trump probably doesn't want it to do: it clearly designates climate change as a "direct threat" to the national security of the U.S. and orders the military to submit a "report on vulnerabilities to military installations and combatant commander requirements resulting from climate change over the next 30 years."

"A THREAT MULTIPLIER"

While the NDAA mandate is important, it is not entirely new. Climate change has been on the military's radar for well over a decade, but not due to the threat it presents to the planet's environment.

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First and foremost in the military mind is the Pentagon's mission: to defend the U.S. and its national interest. Seen within this framework, climate change is viewed as a "threat multiplier," rather than a distinct, standalone issue.

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"Climate change will contribute to food and water scarcity, will increase the spread of disease, and may spur or exacerbate mass migration," potentially leading to civil strife and war, reads the grim forecast outlined by the 2010 DOD Quadrennial Defense Review. The Pentagon isn't alone in its predictions; a report from the American Security Project says that 70 percent of the world's nations have assessed climate change as a threat to their national security.

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However, the U.S. Armed Forces response isn't to immediately cut its carbon emissions in order to curb climate change. Rather, it is to determine how best to defend against the instability and chaos that climate change may bring to the international community, as well as the threat it poses to U.S. military bases and operations around the globe.

THE WORLD'S OCEANS VS. THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE

At home, the threat to U.S. military installations is evident. A 2011 U.S. Navy report found that a three-foot rise in sea level would endanger 128 DOD installations, valued collectively at around $100 billion. A further study by the Union of Concerned Scientists delved deeper into the future of 18 bases which already face flooding: "By the end of this century, most installations can expect a large increase in the frequency of tidal flooding, storm surges that cover greater areas at increased depth, and loss of utilized land area to the sea."

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In short, said the UCS, U.S. coastal military bases face a "flooded future."

A three-foot sea level rise is already considered by scientists to be "locked in." But many researchers believe the world could be looking at rises of eight feet, and even up to 11 feet by century's end, which would swamp pretty much all current DOD base adaptation efforts.

Curt Storlazzi, a scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey, has been carrying out research on the Marshall Islands with funding from the DOD, to look at how climate models threaten U.S installations there. He says that, in the past, the islands were over-washed by storms roughly once every 20 to 30 years. Now, it's more like once, or even twice, per decade.

"All I can say is we're talking decades, not centuries," before the islands are over-washed so frequently that they become almost uninhabitable, he adds. The recent Congress Armed Forces Appropriations bill states quite clearly: "In the Marshall Islands an Air Force radar installation built on an atoll at a cost of [$1 billion] is projected to be underwater within two decades."

This is a looming reality U.S. coastal military installations face around the globe—many will be overrun by the sea and lost forever soon, without the firing of a single shot by a hostile power.

"UNLEASH US FROM THE TETHER OF FUEL"

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As already mentioned, the DOD is the world's oil-hungriest institution; it consumed 87.4 million barrels in 2014, with nearly half used by the Air Force, and a third burned by the Navy. A 2008 report entitled A Climate of War, and produced by Oil Change International, found that the second Iraq war emitted at least 141 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.

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The DOD also owns a mammoth amount of real estate, with several thousands of facilities and structures scattered globally, covering nearly 25 million acres—all with energy demands.

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That said, the U.S. military has been working over recent decades to reduce fossil fuel dependency. But this isn't meant to turn the military into "Prius-driving tree-huggers," explains Andrew Holland, senior fellow for energy and climate at the American Security Project. The No. 1 Pentagon priority is improving mission effectiveness—the ability to defend and promote U.S interests via military muscle.

Secretary of Defense Mattis' own concerns with the need to increase mission effectiveness by decreasing fossil fuel consumption can be traced back to the second Iraq war. In 2005, he penned a document, "Future Fuels," in which he called on the Pentagon to "unleash us from the tether of fuel." Reliance on oil left mobile units exposed in the Iraqi desert during refueling, and made the armed forces less nimble in their response to threats scattered across the vast desert battlefield.

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Soon after, President George W. Bush signed into force a bill that mandated the DOD reduce its fossil fuel dependency and ordered each branch to produce 25 percent of its facility energy from renewables by 2025. Since then, the Pentagon has increased energy efficiency at bases, reduced fuel use, and produced around 12.6 percent of its facility energy from renewables as of 2016.

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However, the vast majority, around 75 percent, of the DOD's energy consumption occurs not at facilities but in operations—think hundreds of globetrotting aircraft, ships, and vehicles. This very big slice of the military's energy pie is not subject to the DOD's renewable goals.

Still, renewable initiatives are now common-place across the services. Between 2011 and 2015, the DoD nearly tripled the number of renewable energy projects on its bases.

This, however, doesn't mean that preparing for climate change is now the No. 1 priority. Mattis "is not saying it's the most important issue on his plate, he's just saying it is an issue," explains John Conger, former DOD comptroller and senior advisor for the Center for Climate and Security. War, and preparedness for it, is still where the action is.

A BIG, GREEN FIGHTING MACHINE?

...

===

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/14122017/military-climate-change-risk-cost-bases-overseas-congress-gao-report

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https://www.alternet.org/environment/global-crisis-thats-creating-215-million-refugees-each-year

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https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-change-national-security-risk-2517211746.html

President Donald Trump signed the National Defense Authorization Act into law Tuesday. The act would require the Pentagon to do a report on how military installations and overseas staff may be vulnerable to climate changeover the next 20 years.

The following language was included in the act:

"Climate change is a direct threat to the national security of the United States and is impacting stability in areas of the world both where the United States Armed Forces are operating today, and where strategic implications for future conflict exist."

Does President Trump know that with a stroke of his pen he just confirmed what climate scientists and military officials have been saying for years: Climate change is a major threat to U.S. national security and our armed forces overseas?

The reality is that climate change couldn't care less about political party affiliation, which is why legislators on both sides of the aisle—especially those on the frontlines of climate change impacts—fought to retain this language in the final bill.

While this move is a bright spot in an otherwise bleak Congress, we need to do much, much more to support local and state governments in their efforts to combat climate change. And certainly more needs to be done to convince the president of the scientific truths of climate change and the importance of acting sooner rather than later on the risks it poses.

Check out a recent blog from Union of Concerned Scientists President Ken Kimmell for more information on this act.

To examine a recent Union of Concerned Scientists report highlighting the vulnerability of coastal military bases in the U.S. to sea level rise and storm surge, click here.

Angela Ledford Anderson is the director of the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

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migration:  https://ic.ucsc.edu/college8core/c8wiki/index.php/The_Grapes_of_Wrath#Migration.2FHomelessness

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Rising Seas Are Flooding Virginia’s Naval Base, and There’s No Plan to Fix It 10/17.

https://ic.ucsc.edu/college8core/c8wiki/index.php/Sea_Level_Rise#Stories.2FReports

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https://features.propublica.org/military-pollution/military-pollution-contractors-scandal-toxic-cleanups

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...The military is one of the country’s largest polluters, with an inventory of toxic sites on American soil that once topped 39,000. At many locations, the Pentagon has relied on contractors like U.S. Technology to assist in cleaning and restoring land, removing waste, clearing unexploded bombs, and decontaminating buildings, streams and soil. In addition to its work for Barksdale, U.S. Technology had won some 830 contracts with other military facilities — Army, Air Force, Navy and logistics bases — totaling more than $49 million, many of them to dispose of similar powders.

In taking on environmental cleanup jobs, contractors often bring needed expertise to technical tasks the Pentagon isn’t equipped to do itself. They also absorb much of the legal responsibility for disposing of military-made hazards, in some cases helping the Pentagon — at least on paper — winnow down its list of toxic liabilities.

But in outsourcing this work, the military has often struggled to provide adequate oversight to ensure that work is done competently — or is completed at all. Today, records show, some of the most dangerous cleanup work that has been entrusted to contractors remains unfinished, or worse, has been falsely pronounced complete, leaving people who live near former military sites to assume these areas are now safe.

What the EPA inspector found when he visited Barksdale was an object lesson in the system’s blind spots.

Barrels of the waste hadn’t been shipped off and recycled, but rather were stored in a garage tucked away from the facility’s main operations. Further, shipping documents suggested that what waste had been sent off the base hadn’t gone to U.S. Technology’s recycling plant in Ohio, as an Air Force official first told the EPA, but instead had gone to company warehouses in at least two other states. Storing hazardous waste without a permit — and without immediately recycling it — can be illegal.

...

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https://www.ecowatch.com/pentagon-climate-change-2485164596.html

trump rev ignored?

Pentagon Moves Ahead With Obama-Era Climate Preparation Plan Despite Trump's Orders

The Department of Defense (DoD) has warned for years that climate change is a national security threat and, despite President Trump's orders, the agency continues to take steps to help the military navigate and prepare for the impacts of a warming planet.

As Military Times reports, the Pentagon is plowing ahead with its 2014 "Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap" even though Trump issued an executive order in March seeking to reverse Obama-era federal climate and clean energy initiatives.

Under Obama's orders, the Defense Department issued directive 4715.21 in January 2016 to implement the roadmap, which "lays out reasonable adaptation and mitigation actions to ensure or at least bolster our national security against measured and measurable climate change events, whatever the causes, or the duration, of the

observed events," as retired Navy Adm. Frank Bowman said.

But now—thanks to Trump–the agency is reviewing directive 4715.21 "to determine if it should be suspended, revised, or rescinded," Pentagon spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Patrick Evans told the publication.

However, the department is still preparing for the effects of climate change even though Trump told them to stop. For instance, as Military Times reports, the Naval Facilities Engineering Command (NAVFAC) Mid-Atlantic has been taking steps to protect the Hampton Roads base in Virginia—home to 60 Navy ships, hundreds of fix-wing and rotary aircraft and more than 83,000 active duty personnel. The 2014 climate roadmap, which Trump invalidated, stipulated that the assets were protected from a "projected sea-level rise of 1.5 feet over the next 20 to 50 years."

"I can't talk the science, but I can tell you what we've done," Todd Lyman, NAVFAC Mid-Atlantic spokesman, explained. "For many years, NAVFAC has been replacing any single-deck pier with double-deck piers. We've also built structures here at a higher elevation than code requires in an effort to improve stormwater management. The goal is for us to continue our mission, maintain resilience."

According to Military Times:

The DoD has found space to maneuver by separating the argument of climate change from the threats that more extreme sea states, wind and flooding can generate. Essentially, the DoD is moving forward by leaving the semantics of climate change to others.

"As Secretary Mattis has said, the department evaluates all potential threats that impact mission readiness, personnel health and installation resilience, then uses that information to assess impacts and identify responses," Evans said. "The effect of a changing climate is one of a variety of threats and risks, but it's not a mission of the Department of Defense."

It looks like the Pentagon's strategy is just to avoid using language related to climate change and instead focus on how the military can fortify its installations against extreme weather events and natural disasters (which, like Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, are linked to climate change.)

Unlike his White House boss, Defense Sec. Jim Mattis does not believe that climate change is a "hoax" invented by the Chinese.

"Climate change is impacting stability in areas of the world where our troops are operating today," Mattis wrote in March. "It is appropriate for the Combatant Commands to incorporate drivers of instability that impact the security environment in their areas into their planning."

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not sure why headline is scary

http://www.alternet.org/environment/beyond-harvey-and-irma-militarizing-homeland-security-climate-change-era

good update overview

klare

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11/14 conca

hmmn

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2014**/11/14**/does-our-military-know-something-we-dont-about-global-warming/#2e363eda4567

Every branch of the United States Military is worried about climate change. They have been since well before it became controversial. In the wake of an historic climate change agreement between President Obama and President Xi Jinping in China this week (Brookings), the military’s perspective is significant in how it views climate effects on emerging military conflicts.

China will be our biggest military and political problem by the middle of this century. It would be nice to understand what issues will exacerbate our struggles.

At a time when Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bush 41, and even British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, called for binding international protocols to control greenhouse gas emissions, the U.S. Military was seriously studying global warming in order to determine what actions they could take to prepare for the change in threats that our military will face in the future.

The Center for Naval Analysis has had its Military Advisory Board examining the national security implications of climate change for many years. Lead by Army General Paul Kern, the Military Advisory Board is a group of 16 retired flag-level officers from all branches of the Service.

This is not a group normally considered to be liberal activists and fear-mongers.

This year, the Military Advisory Board came out with a new report, called National Security and the Accelerating Risks of Climate Change, that is a serious discussion about what the military sees as the threats and the actions to be taken to mitigate them.

“The potential security ramifications of global climate change should be serving as catalysts for cooperation and change. Instead, climate change impacts are already accelerating instability in vulnerable areas of the world and are serving as catalysts for conflict.”

Bill Pennell, former Director of the Atmospheric Sciences and Global Change Division at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, summed up the threat in recent discussions about climate and national security:

“Theenvironmental consequences of climate change are a significant threat multiplier, which by itself, can be a cause for future conflicts. Global warming will affect military operations as well as its theaters of operations. And it poses significant risks and costs to military and civilian infrastructure, especially those facilities located on the coastline.”

“The countries and regions posing the greatest security threats to the United States are among those most susceptible to the adverse and destabilizing effects of climate change. Many of these countries are already unstable and have little economic or social capital for coping with additional disruptions.”

“Whether in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, or North Korea, we are already seeing how extreme weather events - such as droughts and flooding and the food shortages and population dislocations that accompany them - can destabilize governments and lead to conflict. For example, one trigger of the chaos in Syria has been the multi-year drought the country has experienced since 2006 and the Assad Regime’s ineptitude in dealing with it.”

So why is the country as a whole, and those who normally support our military, so loathe to prepare for possible threats from this direction?

In 1990, Eugene Skolnikoff summarized the national policy issues surrounding global warming and why it has been so difficult to rationally develop policy to address it.

“The central problem is that outside the security sector, policy processes confronting issues with substantial uncertainty do not normally yield policy that has high economic or political costs. This is especially true when the uncertainty extends not only to the issues themselves, but also to the measures to avert them or deal with their consequences.”

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“The climate change issue illustrates - in fact exaggerates - all the elements of this central problem. Indeed, no major action is likely to be taken until those uncertainties are substantially reduced, and probably not before evidence of warming and its effects are actually visible. Unfortunately, any increase in temperature will be irreversible by the time the danger becomes obvious enough to permit political action.”

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And this was in 1990!...

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http://www.globalpossibilities.org/a-new-strategy-for-american-sustainability-2/

Back in 2009, U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Michael McMullentasked his staff to create a “grand strategy” for the United States. That job fell to Navy Captain Wayne Porter and now-retired Marine Colonel Mark “Puck” Mykleby, who later turned the results from the multi-year research study into a book: The New Grand Strategy: Restoring America’s Prosperity, Security, and Sustainability in the 21st Century. At the Biophilic Leadership Summit at Serenbe, an agricultural community near Atlanta, Mykleby asserted that the United States is now deeply embedded in an “unsustainable global system” that makes it susceptible to shocks, particularly from climate change. In addition, we are stuck with a “20th century economic engine.” The way forward to future sustainability is found in walkable communities, regenerative agriculture, and greater resource productivity. “We need to rebuild our own strength and credibility by setting a new example.”

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Ask the Department of Defense, Too

The Dept. of Defense does not appear to share the Trump administration's concerns about renewable energy. In fact, the military has made significant investments in renewable energy in order to enhance national security—an investment that continues with Trump in the White House. The U.S. Navy just recently refuted misleading claims that a new wind farm could interfere with a radar system made by some Republican lawmakers in North Carolina who wrote a letter to the Trump administration.

Climate Change Is a Real Threat to Energy and National Security

In 2015, the Dept. of Energy released a report that documented the threat climate change poses to energy security—and by extension national security—in every region of the U.S.

The Dept. of Defense has also documented the national security risks posed by climate change— risks James Mattisacknowledged during his confirmation as Trump's Secretary of Defense.

Trump's efforts to rollback limits on carbon dioxide pollution from power plants and his embrace of the so-called "clean coal" put the nation's energy and national security at further risk from climate change. Preempting state and local support for renewables would only increase those risks.

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omg

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https://thinkprogress.org/house-votes-to-deny-climate-science-and-ties-pentagons-hands-on-climate-change-6fb577189fb0

Sea level rise impacting naval bases. Climate change altering natural disaster response. Drought influenced by climate change in the Middle East and Africa leading to conflicts over food and water — as in, for instance, Syria.

The military understands the realities of climate change and the negative impacts of heavy dependence on fossil fuels.

The U.S. House does not.

With a mostly party-line vote on Thursday, the House of Representatives passed an amendment sponsored by Rep. David McKinley (R-WV) that seeks to prevent the Department of Defense from using funding to address the national security impacts of climate change.

“You can’t change facts by ignoring them,” said Mike Breen, Executive Director of the Truman National Security Project, and leader of the clean energy campaign, Operation Free. “This is like trying to lose 20 pounds by smashing your bathroom scale.”

The full text of McKinley’s amendment reads:

None of the funds authorized to be appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used to implement the U.S. Global Change Research Program National Climate Assessment, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report, the United Nation’s Agenda 21 sustainable development plan, or the May 2013 Technical Update of the Social Cost of Carbon for Regulatory Impact Analysis Under Executive Order

In other words, the House just tried to write climate denial into the Defense Department’s budget. “The McKinley amendment would require the Defense Department to assume that the cost of carbon pollution is zero,” Reps. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Bobby Rush (D-IL) said in a letter to their colleagues before the vote. “That’s science denial at its worst and it fails our moral obligation to our children and grandchildren.”

The amendment forces the Defense Department to ignore the findings and recommendations of the National Climate Assessment and the IPCC’s latest climate assessment, specifically with regard to the national security impacts of climate change. It would also do the same for the Social Cost of Carbon, which provides a framework for rulemakers to take into account the societal, security, and economic costs associated with emitting more carbon dioxide.

If the Pentagon cannot use its funding to implement the recommendations from the NCA and the IPCC reports, the specific impacts on DoD would be vague — and troublesome — because the reports are crystal clear.

Earlier this month with the release of the National Climate Assessment, 300 leading climate scientists and experts told Americans in no uncertain termsthat time is running out to confront the dangerous impacts of climate change.

This week, 16 military experts agreed, telling Americans in a report that climate change is already threatening national security and the economy. The CNA Corporation Military Advisory Board authored the report, titled “National Security and the Accelerating Risks of Climate Change.”

The experts that authored the report have well over 500 years of combined military experience (580, according to a Climate Progress tally).

Military expertise like this hasn’t stopped gadflies in the Senate from trying to dismiss the report. “There is no one in more pursuit of publicity than a retired military officer,” said Senator James Inhofe (R-OK). “I look back wistfully at the days of the Cold War. Now you have people who are mentally imbalanced, with the ability to deploy a nuclear weapon. For anyone to say that any type of global warming is anywhere close to the threat that we have with crazy people running around with nuclear weapons, it shows how desperate they are to get the public to buy this.”

Despite criticism like this from the Senator from Oklahoma, many in the military understand the very real security threats posed by climate change, and have been taking action to address it. This isn’t idle talk. The steps the Department of Defense has been taking to cut its reliance on carbon-heavy fuels, however, are not just to lower greenhouse gas emissions.

Vice Admiral Lee Gunn (Ret.), and president of CNA Corporation’s Institute for Public Research, said “the American military, the single largest user of oil in the U.S., has recently begun transitioning to renewable and more efficient energy to improve its operational effectiveness and flexibility, with the added benefit of beginning to reduce its fossil fuel dependence and mitigate climate change.”

“Civilian and uniformed leaders of our military know it is increasingly risky to depend on a single fuel source; these leaders are diversifying the military’s sources of power to make our bases more resilient and our forces more effective,” said Vice Admiral Gunn.

The Defense Department is beginning to take action. It recently started work on its largest solar project to date, and has been making progress on its “Net Zero” energy initiative. The goal? For bases to produce as much energy as they consume, and for forward combat operations to not have to rely on oil-heavy supply lines.

The McKinley amendment was added to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which later passed, 325–98. Only three Republicans (Garrett, Gibson, LoBiondo) voted against the amendment, and four Democrats (Barrow, Cuellar, McIntyre, Rahall) voted for it.

The Senate held first markup of their version of the bill on Wednesday. The NDAA sets out the budget for the Department of Defense, and details the expenditures it can make, though this is different than the budget that actually awards the appropriations. That will happen later this year.

The NDAA is one of the few pieces of legislation that actually work close to normal — the House passes its version, and the Senate passes its version. It remains to be seen if the Senate will take up and pass a similar amendment, but even if it does not, the final decision will come during conference. The two chambers go to conference to iron out the differences before final passage and the president’s signature.

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http://www.ecowatch.com/glacier-retreat-climate-change-2345873774.html

Going, Going, Gone

By Andy Rowell

President Trump opens his eyes, but he does not see. Trump listens, but he does not hear. He speaks, but he makes no sense. How can the most powerful man be so completely ignorant about climate change? How can it be that as the evidence about climate change gets stronger, politicians like Trump seem to get more ignorant?

That is a question that is perplexing climate scientists and others fighting climate change.

Every day comes news that we are in deep, deep trouble. The Guardian reported this morning that "Climate change is rapidly becoming a crisis that defies hyperbole," with impacts "occurring faster in many parts of the world than even the most gloomy scientists predicted."

The newspaper reported on three recent studies which reveal there has been a "massive under-reporting" of the impacts of climate change:

• The first paper, published in Science found that current warming (just one degree Celsius) has "already left a discernible mark on 77 of 94 different ecological processes, including species' genetics, seasonal responses, overall distribution and even morphology—i.e. physical traits including body size and shape."

• A second paper, published in Nature Climate Change this February concluded that 47 percent of land mammals and 23 percent of birds have already suffered negative impacts form climate change. In total, nearly 700 species in these two groups are struggling over climate change. Entire ecosystems—some the size of states within the U.S.—are changing. Some are not surviving.

• A third study in PLOS Biology found that more than 450 plants and animals have undergone local extinctions due to climate change. As some struggle to adapt they may go extinct altogether.

Trump might not read the left-leaning Guardian or the scientific press, but he should be reading the Washington Post. Earlier this week the Washington Post reported on a recent paper by the Geological Society of America which "presents dramatic before-and-after photographs of glaciers around the world over the last decade."

The majority of the photos were taken by renowned photographer James Balog as part of the Extreme Ice Survey, which was featured in the 2012 documentary Chasing Ice. The videos and still photos show glaciers in fast retreat. For example, the Mendenhall Glacier in Alaska retreated 550 meters between 2007 and 2015.

Balog told the paper, "I do think that our most dominant sensory apparatus is our vision. So when you can deliver an understanding of the reality of what's going on through vision, rather than numbers or maps, that also has the unique ability to touch and influence people."

The paper's authors argue that photographic records "provide an outstanding avenue for education, because they display a record of ice that may never be seen again."

But Trump is ignoring the photographic evidence. If he will not listen to the scientists, maybe Trump will listen to the security experts.

Sherri Goodman, a former U.S. deputy undersecretary of defense and founder of the CNA Military Advisory Board, is speaking this week in Sydney at the Breakthrough Institute at screenings of The Age of Consequences documentary, a film about the security threat posed by climate change. It is said to be a must-watch film. As the Toronto Star noted about the film, "the election of a climate denier Donald Trump underscores the urgency of this documentary."

As the ice retreats, whole ecosystem change and species die out, sea levels rise and storms increase and droughts get worse, we will all be living with the consequences of a climate denier in the White House, a man who looks, but does not see. Even as the glaciers disappear before his eyes.

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http://www.alternet.org/documentaries/military-experts-give-climate-skeptics-scathing-warning-age-consequences

"Requiem for the American Dream” director Jared P. Scott is back with a new must-see documentary. Billed as "The Hurt Locker" meets "An Inconvenient Truth," his new film, "The Age of Consequences," offers a chilling warning for climate skeptics from an unlikely source — members of the U.S. military. 

"From my perspective, as a former member of the United States military with 30 plus years of service of service in uniform, climate change is what we call an accelerant to instability," argues retired Brig. Gen. Stephen Cheney in the film. "It is what's causing a lot of the conflict or helping assist the confict that's going on around the world. And you can see that on the front pages of the paper virtually every day."

"Consequences" also relies heavily on a landmark study by Richard Seager, a climate scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, linking Syria's 2007−2010 drought to its 2011 civil war.

"This is the first study that quantitatively draws a connection between climate change and the onset of the conflict," Seager explains in the film. "Farming families just cannot survive on the land when a drought lasts that long."

The drought in Syria forced to 1.5 million to flee their homeland, many of them young men.

"That has a major destabilizing imact when people have to pick up and leave," says Army officer Michael Breen, now executive director of the Truman National Security Project. "As anyone can tell you, a bunch of unemployed young men in a major city is not a recipe for social stability."

"The Age of Consequences" is now available for pre-order on iTunes. In honor of "Earth Hour", the film can be purchased for just $6.99 from Friday through Sunday. Every pre-order dollar to goes to the #cleanjobs4vets campaign to create more renewable energy jobs for veterans.

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hmmn wt

By Rowan Scarborough - The Washington Times - Sunday, February 7, 2016

The Pentagon is ordering the top brass to incorporate climate change into virtually everything they do, from testing weapons to training troops to war planning to joint exercises with allies.

A new directive’s theme: The U.S. Armed Forces must show “resilience” and beat back the threat based on “actionable science.”

It says the military will not be able to maintain effectiveness unless the directive is followed.It orders the establishment of a new layer of bureaucracy— a wide array of “climate change boards, councils and working groups” to infuse climate change into “programs, plans and policies.”

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PHOTOS: U.S. military's deadliest war machines

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The Pentagon defines resilience to climate change as: “Ability to anticipate, prepare for, and adapt to changing conditions and withstand, respond to, and recover rapidly from disruptions.”

To four-star generals and admirals, among them the regional combatant commanders who plan and fight the nation’s wars, the directive tells them: “Incorporate climate change impacts into plans and operations and integrate DoD guidance and analysis in Combatant Command planning to address climate change-related risks and opportunities across the full range of military operations, including steady-state campaign planning and operations and contingency planning.”

The directive, “Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience,” is in line with President Obama’s view that global warming is the country’s foremost national security threat, or close to it.Mr. Obama says there is no debate on the existence of man-made global warming and its ensuing climate change.Supporters of this viewpoint label as “deniers” any scientists who disagree.

http://www.**washingtontimes**.com/news/2016/feb/7/pentagon-orders-commanders-to-prioritize-climate-c/

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http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/03/department-defense-climate-change-dictionary

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http://ecowatch.com/2015/08/26/navy-invests-largest-solar-farm/

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ggl spon link by who?

http://thehill.com/sponsored/content/246588-marines-go-green-with-alternative-energy-tech

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http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/05/cia-closing-its-main-climate-research-program

On Wednesday, when President Barack Obama spoke at the US Coast Guard Academy's commencement ceremony, he called climate change "an immediate risk to our national security." In recent months, the Obama administration has repeatedly highlighted the international threats posed by global warming and has emphasized the need for the country's national security agencies to study and confront the issue.

So some national security experts were surprised to learn that an important component of that effort has been ended. A CIA spokesperson confirmed to Climate Desk that the agency is shuttering its main climate research program. Under the program, known as Medea, the CIA had allowed civilian scientists to access classified data—such as ocean temperature and tidal readings gathered by Navy submarines and topography data collected by spy satellites—in an effort to glean insights about how global warming could create security threats around the world. In theory, the program benefited both sides: Scientists could study environmental data that was much higher-resolution than they would normally have access to, and the CIA received research insights about climate-related threats.

But now, the program has come to a close.

"Under the Medea program to examine the implications of climate change, CIA participated in various projects," a CIA spokesperson explained in a statement. "These projects have been completed and CIA will employ these research results and engage external experts as it continues to evaluate the national security implications of climate change."

"There's a growing gap between what we can currently get our hands on, and what we need to respond better," said security expert Marc Levy.

The program was originally launched in 1992 during the George H.W. Bush administration and was later shut down during President George W. Bush's term. It was re-launched under the Obama administration in 2010, with the aim of providing security clearances to roughly 60 climate scientists. Those scientists were given access to classified information that could be useful for researching global warming and tracking environmental changes that could have national security implications. Data gathered by the military and intelligence agencies is often of much higher quality than what civilian scientists normally work with.

In some cases, that data could then be declassified and published, although Francesco Femia, co-director of the Center for Climate and Security, said it is usually impossible to know whether any particular study includes data from Medea. "You wouldn't see [Medea] referenced anywhere" in a peer-reviewed paper, he said. But he pointed to the CIA's annual Worldwide Threat Assessment, which includes multiple references to climate change, as a probable Medea product, where the CIA likely partnered with civilian scientists to analyze classified data.

With the closure of the program, it remains unclear how much of this sort of data will remain off-limits to climate scientists. The CIA did not respond to questions about what is currently being done with the data that would have been available under the program.

Marc Levy, a Columbia University political scientist, said he was surprised to learn that Medea had been shut down. "The climate problems are getting worse in a way that our data systems are not equipped to handle," said Levy, who was not a participant in the CIA program but has worked closely with the US intelligence community on climate issues since the 1990s. "There's a growing gap between what we can currently get our hands on, and what we need to respond better. So that's inconsistent with the idea that Medea has run out of useful things to do."

The program had some notable successes. During the Clinton administration, Levy said, it gave researchers access to classified data on sea ice measurements taken by submarines, an invaluable resource for scientists studying climate change at the poles. And last fall, NASA released a trove of high-resolution satellite elevation maps that can be used to project the impacts of flooding. But Levy said the Defense Department possesses even higher-quality satellite maps that have not been released.

Still, it's possible Medea had outlived its useful life, said Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a 23-year veteran of the CIA who had first-hand knowledge of the program before leaving the agency in 2009. He said he was not surprised to see Medea close down.

"In my judgment, the CIA is not the best lead agency for the issue; the agency's 'in-box' is already overflowing with today's threats and challenges," he said via email. "CIA has little strategic planning reserves, relatively speaking, and its overseas presence is heavily action-oriented."

Sen. John Barrasso said the CIA "should be focused on monitoring terrorists in caves, not polar bears on icebergs."

Over the past several years, climate change has gained prominence among defense experts, many of whom see it as a "threat multiplier" that can exacerbate crises such as infectious disease and terrorism. Medea had been part of a larger network of climate-related initiatives across the national security community. Medea's closure notwithstanding, that network appears to be growing. Last fall, Obama issued an executive order calling on federal agencies to collaborate on developing and sharing climate data and making it accessible to the public.

But the CIA's work on climate change has drawn heavy fire from a group of congressional Republicans led by Sen. John Barrasso (Wyo.). Barrasso said last year that he believes that "the climate is constantly changing" and that "the role human activity plays is not known." He recently authored an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal in which he listed the conflicts in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere as "greater challenges" than climate change. (The Syrian civil war, however, was likely worsened by climate change.)

Around the time Medea was re-instated by the Obama administration, the CIA formed a new office to oversee climate efforts called the Center for Climate Change. At the time, Barrasso said the spy agency "should be focused on monitoring terrorists in caves, not polar bears on icebergs." That office was closed in 2012 (the agency wouldn't say why), leaving Medea as the CIA's main climate research program.

So does the conclusion of Medea signal that the CIA is throwing in the towel on climate altogether? Unlikely, according to Femia. At this point, he said, US security agencies, including the CIA, are still sorting out what resources they can best offer in the effort to adapt to climate change. Regardless of whether the CIA is facilitating civilian research, he said, "continuing to integrate climate change information into its assessments of both unstable and stable regions of the world will be critical."

"Otherwise," added Femia, "we will have a blind spot that prevents us from adequately protecting the United States."

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5/15

http://www.alternet.org/environment/4-main-arguments-president-obama-tying-climate-change-national-security

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PentagonPentagon Climate ChangeBobby RushDepartment of DefenseNational Defense Authorization ActDavid MckinleyNational SecurityNdaaClimate ChangeHenry WaxmanNational Climate AssessmentDefense Budget

WASHINGTON -- The House passed an amendment to the National Defense Authorization bill on Thursday that would bar the Department of Defense from using funds to assess climate change and its implications for national security.

The amendment, from Rep. David McKinley (R-W.Va.), passed in what was nearly a party-line vote. Four Democrats voted for the amendment, and three Republicans voted against it. The bill aims to block the DOD from taking any significant action related to climate change or its potential consequences. It reads:

None of the funds authorized to be appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used to implement the U.S. Global Change Research Program National Climate Assessment, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fifth Assessment Report, the United Nation's Agenda 21 sustainable development plan, or the May 2013 Technical Update of the Social Cost of Carbon for Regulatory Impact Analysis Under Executive Order 12866.

"This amendment will prohibit the costs of the President's climate change policies being forced on the Department of Defense by the Obama Administration," wrote McKinley in a memo to House colleagues on Thursday that was obtained by The Huffington Post. "The climate is obviously changing; it has always been changing. With all the unrest around the [world], why should Congress divert funds from the mission of our military and national security to support a political ideology?"

Research suggests, however, that the Department of Defense has a number of reasons to be worried about climate change. The department said in its own evaluation last year that climate change presents infrastructure challenges at home and abroad. Meanwhile, a March Pentagon report found that climate change impacts are "threat multipliers," and that the rapid rise of global temperatures and associated extreme weather events could exacerbate issues like "poverty, environmental degradation, political instability and social tensions -- conditions that can enable terrorist activity and other forms of violence."

Nor is climate change a threat that the Obama administration dreamed up to distract the DOD. A National Intelligence Assessment issued during the George W. Bush administration concluded that climate change poses a significant threat to national security. And just this week, Tom Ridge, who served as homeland security secretary under Bush, said that climate change is "a real serious problem," one that "would bring destruction and economic damage" if we ignore it.

Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Bobby Rush (D-Ill.) sent a letter to colleagueson Thursday calling the McKinley measure "irresponsible."

"Science denial will not solve the problem," they wrote.

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JUMPS THE SHARK:

AlterNet [1] / By Cliff Weathers [2]

GOP Senator Attacks Retired Military Brass for Saying Climate Change Threatens Security

May 16, 2014 |

Republican Sen. James Inhofe is once again dismissing a report on climate change, attacking the integrity of the report's authors. While that's not news in itself, the targets of Inhofe's derision are 16 retired three- and four-star generals and admirals. Inhofe claims that retired military officers are just desperate for publicity, and don't understand the defense needs of the nation.

The generals and admirals wrote a federally funded report on climate change, assessing the threats of global weather events on national security.

Other Republicans, however, have been notably quiet since the report's release. Typically, they form a chorus to shout down any climate-change report, claiming that man-made climate change is fraud perpetuated by the "liberal agenda.” This time, the authors of the report are not scientists and environmentalists, the typical targets of conservative derision. It would be political suicide for any Republican to categorize such a large group of career military officers as liberals, especially in an election year.

The authors of the climate change report focused solely on their area of expertise, national security. They serve as the military advisory board for the CNA Corporation, a non-profit research and analysis organization in Alexandria, VA. They warned that climate change is not only a menace to the environment but presents the U.S. with several new security threats. The advisory board's report said that climate change has already led to conflicts over food and water because of droughts and extreme weather, and it anticipates that the incidence of these conflicts will increase exponentially. The report also predicted that the increase in catastrophic weather events would create more demand for U.S. military troops, and could cause damage to naval ports and military bases.

“Climate change can act as a threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world, and it presents significant national security challenges for the United States,” says the report, adding that conflicts will likely be felt “even in stable regions.”

The report says that climate events like flooding, prolonged drought and rising sea levels could result in population dislocation, waves of refugees and food insecurity. These would serve as “catalysts for instability and conflict,” in more vulnerable regions, aggravating existing stressors such as poverty, political instability and social tensions. Such conditions can enable terrorist activity and other forms of violence, according to the report.

The report concluded that the U.S. military should shift course, and adopt strategies to manage catastrophes and conflicts both domestically and internationally.

The report's forward was written byformer Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. They warned that “we no longer have the option to wait and see” and pleaded for a “bipartisan call to action.”

Responding to the report, Secretary of State John Kerry told the New York Times [3] that American foreign policy will need to adjust to respond to the climate events predicted. Kerry said, “The intelligence community takes it seriously, and it's translated into action.”

“Tribes are killing each other over water today. Think of what happens if you have massive dislocation, or the drying up of the waters of the Nile, of the major rivers in China and India,” Kerry said.

Pentagon officials also said they would use the report's findings to shape military policy; however, it is already moving in that direction. Last month, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel hosted 10 defense ministers of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations at a meeting in Hawaii where they discussed how their militaries can work together to effectively tackle non-traditional security challenges, including climate change and natural disasters. And in March, the Department of Defense announced it had drawn a direct link between the effects of global warming and terrorism.

“The department certainly agrees that climate change is having an impact on national security, whether by increasing global instability, by opening the Arctic or by increasing sea level and storm surge near our coastal installations,” said John Conger, the deputy under secretary of defense for installations and environment. “We are actively integrating climate considerations across the full spectrum of our activities to ensure a ready and resilient force.”

One of the report's authors, retired Rear Admiral David Titley, theformer oceanographer of the Navy, told the Huffington Post he hopes the message will be received differently by climate-change deniers as it comes from retired and respected U.S. military brass.

“This report is signed, not by environmentalists or climate scientists, but by 16 admirals and generals who collectively have over 500 years of service to our country,” said Titley, who is now a meteorology professor at Penn State University.

There is some speculation that the report could spawn a National Intelligence Estimate regarding climate change. NIEs are authored by the U.S.' 16 intelligence organizations and various military organizations and are used to evaluate security threats here and abroad, typically suggesting actions to be taken.

In 2007, then Sen. Hagel, a Republican, called for legislation requiring federal intelligence agencies to collaborate on a National Intelligence Estimate to evaluate the security challenges presented by climate change. He was joined by Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin. Although Hagel and Durbin's bill died in committee, a NIE was later released in 2008. No NIE on climate change has been released since.

Any mention of climate change by scientists, the media and the Obama administration is met with piranha-like attacks by Republicans that often climax in an abundance of media appearances to denounce the messengers. But with the exception of Inhofe, they've been notably hesitant to attack former top military officers.

Inhofe, of Oklahoma, is a ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He calls himself "a vocal skeptic of the established science that greenhouse-gas emissions contribute to global warming." He claims to believe the science of climate change is a "hoax."

"There is no one in more pursuit of publicity than a retired military officer," said Inhofe of the CNA Corporation study. "I look back wistfully at the days of the Cold War. Now you have people who are mentally imbalanced, with the ability to deploy a nuclear weapon. For anyone to say that any type of global warming is anywhere close to the threat that we have with crazy people running around with nuclear weapons, it shows how desperate they are to get the public to buy this."

Climate change, which was once considered an issue that would only pose problems many years from now, has moved firmly into the present. Although scientists caution against linking any single atypical climate event to climate change, they note that together these aberrant and severe weather events are consistent with global warming.

In March, the United Nations released a report stating that climate change is already cutting into the global food supply and fueling wars and natural disasters. The report stated that political instability and riots in Asia and Africa in 2008 were a direct result of food-price shocks brought on by regional weather events. The UN report warned that governments are unprepared to protect those most at risk.

Syria's civil war is believed to have been spurred by the droughts which have distressed the country since 2006. Three-quarters of the nation's crops have failed and nearly all of its livestock have died of thirst or hunger. Syria’s farmers abandoned their farms, fleeing to the cities in search of jobs and critically insufficient food supplies, creating regional social unrest. UN observers estimated that between 2 and 3 million of Syria’s 10 million rural inhabitants were reduced to extreme poverty, and this is the core cause of recent national instability.

See more stories tagged with:

climate change [5],

terrorism [6],

national security [7]

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Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/inhofe-attacks-retired-generals-and-admirals-over-climate-change

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AlterNet [1] / By Nick Buxton [2]

Cashing In on Catastrophe: How to Stop the Climate Crisis Profiteers

October 8, 2013  |

The recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, the most authoritative scientific study on our climate to date, confirmed what we all knew: that global warming is happening, yet we continue to pump carbon into the air regardless. For a short spell, the report prompted some hand-wringing over society's failure to heed scientists' warnings. Very few commentators, however, pointed to the dangerous possibility that the failure of political and business leaders may be due to calculation rather than cowardice.

Could it be that rather than burying their heads in the sands, some of our leaders are maintaining the pretense of tackling climate change while actually focused on how to manage its impact in their own interests [3]?

The evidence that, behind the political platitudes, the policy focus is shifting from tackling the causes to controlling the impacts of climate change is becoming more visible. In fact, the final conclusions of the IPCC report ended up at the last minute including a paragraph that suggested geoengineering could offset temperature increases. While the report pointed to some potential “side effects,” it nevertheless opened a door to countries that want to avoid any action that constrain their extractive industries and that are seeking to further meddle with our atmosphere regardless of the risks and human and environmental costs [4].

As Neth Daño of the watchdog group ETC noted, “The report doesn't discuss solar power or electric cars; it doesn't discuss public transport, carbon markets or any other actual or potential policy response to the climate crisis, so why have the authors chosen to devote the concluding paragraph to this highly speculative and dangerous technofix?”

Corporations, particularly those with ties to the fossil fuel industry, have long looked to half-baked or unproven technologies [5], like carbon capture, in order to justify continued exploitation of gas and oil reserves. Increasingly, they are also seeking salvation in technological solutions for the climate crisis that will result from their criminal intransigence. Rex Tillerson, CEO of oil giant ExxonMobil famously dismissed the need to act to stop climate change saying in 2012 that, “Changes to weather patterns that move crop production areas around—we'll adapt to that. It's an engineering problem, and it has engineering solutions.” His comments were recently echoed by Owen Patterson, UK's energy minister, who dismissed the dangers of climate change, saying it could be advantageous as it would allow the UK to grow new crops.

The growing emphasis on technological fixes or blithe suggestions about the positive benefits of a globally unstable climate have been paralleled by increased state investment in the military to control any "side effects" of climate change. The two trends are on the surface contradictory: one believes climate change can be fixed and prevented by technological wizardry; the other that it will happen but needs to be controlled. Nevertheless they combine around the idea that climate change needs to be managed in the interests of the powerful, no matter the consequences for everyone else.

In 2007, the Pentagon released a report that warned of the "age of consequences” in which “altruism and generosity would likely be blunted.”  A similar EU report released a year later talked of climate change as a “threat multiplier” that “threatens to overburden states and regions which are already fragile and conflict prone.” It warned that this would lead to “political and security risks that directly affect European interests.” These security-based strategies have been further developed in recent years along with an unparalleled expansion of surveillance, as we have seen thanks to Edward Snowden's revelations.

The language of military and corporate strategists is usually couched in terms of security.  But the focus of their in-depth reports on the threats of climate change to trade routes and competition for resources in the Arctic and energy supplies reveal that the concern of most military strategists is not how to protect vulnerable citizens from climate change, but rather how rich countries and their privileged classes can continue to control critical resources of food, energy and water. Turning climate change impacts into a matter of security for the few entrenches the injustice intrinsic to the climate crisis—that those who played the least role in causing it will feel its impact the most.

Retired Rear Admiral David Titley, and key advisor on climate and security issues sums up this prevailing attitude that calculates how to maintain power at times of instability: “When I was in the Navy, we tried to strip away the emotions associated with climate change as a political issue. It’s a change, and just like changing demographics, political regimes and economic conditions, we need to deal with it. If we don’t, we’re putting ourselves at a competitive disadvantage—and the United States military never wants to be at a competitive disadvantage.”

When security and military responses become the dominant way to deal with climate change, it is not hard to guess the consequences, particularly for those who are most vulnerable. New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina provides one of the most disturbing portraits and dystopian preludes of what the militarization of climate change looks like. As the waters receded after the devastating storm, stranded families, mostly from impoverished, neglected neighbourhoods, found themselves to be targets in a war zone rather than subjects of a rescue mission. The personal accounts by African American citizens shot at by their own armed National Guard troops and imprisoned in the Louisana Superdome strip away any notion that security at times of disaster is good for everyone.

As we have discovered to our cost in the war on terror, how we frame our response to crises such as terrorism or now climate change will have huge implications for our freedom, democracy and peoples' access to resources. If we support a military, technological or corporate response as the key way to address climate change, then it is not hard to imagine how this will lead to militarized borders, conflicts over dwindling energy supplies, increasing land and water grabs, and corporate profiteering.

We need to seek out new models of cooperation and solidarity for framing our response to this unparalleled, multi-faceted crisis. These models aren't utopian visions; they already exist. The hidden story of Katrina is one of neighborhoods working together to rescue and protect those most affected by the floods. In Cuba, neighborhood planning and basic shelter provision have saved many lives during times of extreme weather despite limited state resources. Around the world, communities are building resilience through initiatives such as Transition Towns that seek not only to reduce carbon emissions but also prepare communities to better cope with disasters and disruptions.

The key in all of these just solutions is that they put citizens at the heart of the solution. They do not view people as a problem that must be controlled, but rather the solution to building resilience at a time of climate uncertainty.

See more stories tagged with:

climate change [6]

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Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/environment/cashing-catastrophe-how-stop-climate-crisis-profiteers

Links:

[1] http://alternet.org

[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/nick-buxton

[3] http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/cashing-in-on-catastrophe

[4] http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/20Reasons.pdf

[5] http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20761-uks-carboncapture-failure-is-part-of-a-global-trend.html

[6] http://www.alternet.org/tags/climate-change

[7] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

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http://www.americanprogress.org/projects/climate-migration-security/view/

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Caribbean Water Supplies Severely Threatened By Climate Change, Scientists Warn

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/06/caribbean-water-supplies_n_3877475.html?view=print&comm_ref=false

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 The two leaders are: Steve Daines, Montana’s lone member of the U.S. House of Representatives, and former Army Capt. Mike Breen, who is now serving as the spokesman of Operation Free, a nationwide coalition of veterans and national security experts who recognize that climate change is a major threat, and support fast, bold action.

http://www.operationfree.net/

http://trumanproject.org/about/people/staff/michael-breen/

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WASHINGTON—A new report from the U.S. Center for Naval Analysesand the London-basedRoyal United Services Institute, two of the NATO alliance's front-line strategy centers, recommends putting more effort into fighting global warming than securing reliable supplies of fossil fuels.

The authors call the habitual American fixation on winning energy independence through expanded North American production of oil and natural gas "misguided." They say the "only sustainable solution" to the problem of energy insecurity is not through more drilling, but through energy efficiency and renewable fuels, like biofuels to replace oil.

Despite the steady supplies provided by the current U.S. drilling boom, "the increased domestic production of oil and natural gas is not a panacea for the country's energy security dilemma," they say.

And in blunt language, they criticize American policymakers and legislators for refusing to accept the "robust" scientific evidence that emissions of carbon dioxide are already causing harmful global warming, and for refusing to take actions that, if taken swiftly, could ward off its worst effects.

"Political leaders, including many in the United States, refuse to accept short-term costs to address long-term dangers even though the future costs of responding to disasters after they occur will be far greater," said their report, published this month.

The report, in the works for a year, was released as President Obama prepared to ramp up the administration's efforts on climate change, and while the State Department was immersed in its review of whether to approve the Keystone XL pipeline to carry tar sands oil from Canada to refineries in the United States.

In a major policy speech on Tuesday, Obama is expected to renew his commitment to regulating emissions from coal-fired power plants, as well as other measures involving renewable energy and green technologies, but not to tip his hand on the Keystone decision. Many in Washington believe that he wants to offer strict controls on power plants, the nation’s leading source of greenhouse gases, as a quid pro quo for approving the controversial pipeline, which is seen by opponents as a contributor to the global warming problem.

Keystone's proponents have described the project as important for energy security.

For several years, the view that global warming caused by burning fossil fuels is an overwhelming national security threat has been taking firmer hold in national security circles. In 2007, a report from CNA's military advisory board called climate change a "threat multiplier." In 2008, a formal National Intelligence Assessment found that climate change poses a serious threat to national security and long-term global stability. The Department of Defense's 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, a major planning document, warned that climate change may fuel conflict, put new strains on military forces operating in the field, and cause damage to military bases, especially ports exposed to rising seas and intense storms.

In an article published in Foreign Affairs online in June, Tom Donilon, the former National Security Adviser to President Obama, wrote: "The Obama administration's National Security Strategy recognizes the 'real, urgent, and severe' threat posed by climate change in no uncertain terms, stating, 'change wrought by a warming planet will lead to new conflicts over refugees and resources; new suffering from drought and famine; catastrophic natural disasters; and the degradation of land across the globe.'"

But the focus of Donilon's piece was on energy, not on climate change, and it spoke expansively of the importance of increased energy production to America's strength in the world. For example, it claimed that by helping to provide plentiful oil to satisfy world demand, the United States could more effectively squeeze Iran with an embargo, a strategy that otherwise would harm oil-deficient allies.

The new American-British report looks mostly at the other side of the coin, the risks presented by the burning of fossil fuels no matter where they come from.

It acknowledges the problems caused by Western reliance on imported oil, especially from unstable parts of the world. But the new report says that even more important is the compelling need to stop using fossil fuels in the first place, since the steady addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere is now posing imminent dangers to national security.

Even though the United States gets just 20 percent of its oil imports from the Middle East, the lowest share in four decades—and it could be headed toward being an oil exporter two decades from now—"the U.S. economy is highly sensitive to supply shocks and price fluctuations, regardless of the source of the oil," it says. "Even new, domestic sources of oil and gas do not free the United States from the risks of over-reliance, because the prices of these commodities will be determined by global markets," the report says......http://insideclimatenews.org/news/20130624/military-report-america-has-misguided-fixation-domestic-drilling

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rfk2:

MIL: rep commissed by Andrew Marshall, fr of SW and emince gris on strategy says

disater if climate shifts over a couple decades, as 1`2k yrs ago. 47 N Eur freeze

b/c of gulf stream,  famine, drought refugees "elevated  beyond sci debate to US

nat'l sec concern " cf Schwartz and Randall Encri Def oct 2003 ems.org

==

grist

U.S. Navy on its green initiatives: Damn the torpedoes!

By Philip Bump

Rep. Mike Conaway (R–Texas) hates the Navy's biofuel program. "It's not about proving the technology," he told Reuters. "It's [Navy Secretary Ray] Mabus wanting to waste money ... on a publicity stunt for his green fleet." Sen. John McCain (R–Ariz.) hates it too. "I don't believe it's the job of the Navy to be involved in building ... new technologies. I don't believe we can afford it."

How does the Navy respond? Cool story, bro.

The Navy has been at the forefront of energy innovation for over a hundred years, Mabus says, transitioning from sail, to coal, to oil and then to nuclear from the 1850s to the 1950s.

"Every single time there were naysayers," he said recently. "And every single time, every single time, those naysayers have been wrong, and they're going to be wrong again this time."

Earlier this month, the Navy announced a $62 million investment in biofuel technology. David Roberts has been covering this issue for a long time, noting that such investments in biofuels make an enormous amount of sense over the long term. As Mabus points out, the Navy uses 2 percent of all of the fossil fuels consumed in the United States. In 2011, the Daily Energy Report posted the breakdown of military energy consumption from 2009, below. That year, the military used 731 trillion British thermal units of oil.

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GOOD NEWS; GREENING

by Dominique Browning, via Moms Clean Air Force

As more polls show that a majority of Americans want action on carbon pollution and global warming, leadership on fighting climate change is coming from surprising places—starting with the military.

At a recent reception held by Environmental Defense Fund in Washington D.C….  Defense Secretary Leon Panetta gave a speech in which he connected the dots between climate change, energy and security issues. He became the highest-ranking official in the Obama administration to do so.

Panetta explained that his Department of Defense is facing a budget shortfall of more than $3 billion because of unexpected fuel costs. “I have a deep interest in more sustainable and efficient energy options,” he said. Secretary Panetta went on to describe how the U. S. military will be called on for humanitarian assistance in the face of rising seas, longer droughts, and more frequent and the severe natural disasters that are a result of global warming.

Secretary Panetta was followed on the podium by Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus, who has served since May 2009. In 1987, the Harvard-trained lawyer became the youngest governor in the nation when he won office in Mississippi. Mabus declared, in an inimitably rich Southern drawl: “We buy too much fossil fuel from the most volatile places on earth.”

He emphasized that “drilling alone will never solve our national security concerns over foreign oil.” Mabus went on to announce that the Navy has made a commitment to get 50% of its energy from renewable sources, like biofuels, solar and wind, by 2025. That’s the most ambitious goal for renewable energy in the country—higher even than California’s!

Mabus pointed out that the Navy has always led in pioneering new sources of fuel, whether it was from moving from sail to coal in the 1850s, to oil in the 20^th century, and nuclear energy in the 1950s. “Every time, there were doubters and naysayers,” he said forcefully. “Every time. And every single time, they were wrong and they will be wrong again this time.”

Mabus vigorously countered the argument that renewable energy is more expensive.“Well of course it is! Every new technology is more expensive. What if we hadn’t started using computers because they were more expensive than typewriters? What if we hadn’t started using cell phones because they were more expensive than land lines? Where would we be?”

Both Panetta and Mabus are on the front lines again—in a battle that will help us curb carbon emissions and lead us to energy independence. Anyone want to join the notoriously craven science deniers at the Heartland Institute in their claim that any leader who fights global warming is no better than tyrants and killers like Charles Manson, Osama bin Laden and Unabomber Kacyznski?

Go ahead. Make Secretary Mabus’ day.

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bad news: house 

http://grist.org/politics/republicans-try-to-force-the-military-to-use-dirty-energy-it-doesnt-want/

GOP tries to block use of cleaner fuels

Last week, the Republican-led House Armed Services Committee proposed a new Pentagon budget. Tucked away inside it was a provision that would prohibit the Department of Defense from buying any alternative fuels that cost more than conventional fossil fuels. TPM has the story.

Slate’s Fred Kaplan laments that this provision would kill the $12 million “Green Strike Group” program the Navy is running, which would field a strike group running entirely on biofuels (and a nuclear-powered carrier) for a naval exercise in June. The Navy hopes to have an entire “Great Green Fleet” in the water by 2016.

But the language is far broader than that. It would effectively prohibit military field-testing of any non-fossil fuel. After all, if alternatives were already cheaper than fossil fuels, they wouldn’t be alternatives. The Air Force couldn’t experiment with fuel blends for its jets. The Army couldn’t fuel its “Green Warrior Convoy.” This provision would explicitly ban the military from being an instrument of energy innovation.

GOP tries to push use of dirtier fuel

But wait! There is one expensive alternative fuel that congressional Republicans support. You see, Section 526 of 2007′s Energy Independence and Security Act prohibits the military from buying fuel that is more carbon-intensive than crude oil. Earlier this month, Rep. Bill Flores (R-Texas) offered an amendment to an appropriations bill, later passed by the House, that would bar the military from enforcing Sec. 526.

Why, you ask? “Placing limits on federal agencies’ fuel choices,” says Flores, “is an unacceptable precedent to set in regard to America’s energy policy and independence.”

Yes, I’ll let that irony sink in a moment.

Why are Republicans so keen to get rid of Sec. 526? Are there dirtier-but-cheaper fuels the military could be using?

Well, no. Instead, Republicans have seized on the idea of using the Fischer-Tropsch process to convert coal to liquid fuel (a technology made famous by Hitler — don’t tell the Heartland Institute). Building a plant to do this requires enormous capital investment, running one requires enormous operational and maintenance investments, and the result is … fuel more expensive than oil. This is to say nothing of the fact that it requires mining and transporting coal on the front end and releases up to 2.5 times as much CO2 as oil when burned.

So, let’s pause and review. The Republican position on military fuel choices is as follows: Congressional restrictions are an “unacceptable precedent” when they prohibit dirtier fuels, but necessary when they prohibit cleaner fuels. Also, it is unacceptable for the military to pay more for cleaner fuels, but necessary for it to pay more for dirtier fuel.

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caveats:http://grist.org/renewable-energy/the-promise-and-peril-of-a-shift-to-military-biofuels/

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more bad news, senate

Senate Republicans join House in second-guessing military leaders on biofuels

By David Roberts

http://grist.org/energy-policy/senate-republicans-join-house-in-second-guessing-military-leaders-on-biofuels/

Earlier this week, I wrote about the Republican-led House Armed Services Committee voting through a provision that would kill the U.S. military’s ambitious biofuels program. Last night, the Senate Armed Services Committee did the same, and worse. It voted not only to block purchase of any fuel more expensive than fossil fuels, but to “prohibit the construction of a biofuels refinery or any other facility or infrastructure used to refine biofuels unless the requirement is specifically authorized by law.” Congress micromanaging military energy strategy: What could go wrong?

“But David,” you’re saying, “Democrats have a majority in the Senate. The committee has 14 Democrats and only 12 Republicans. How could this happen?”

Jim Webb (D-Va.)

Check out the list of Dems on the committee. It’s a Who’s Who of cravens, warmongers, and preening faux centrists — some of the most reliably disappointing Dems in the Senate. But last night, only two of them voted against energy security and the best judgment of U.S. military leaders. (It goes without saying that every Republican voted against innovation; it’s now reflexive for them.) The two Dems flipped the final vote [PDF] 13-12 in favor of overriding the military.

Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.)

What ostensible Democrats had the vindictiveness, myopia, and dishonor necessary? Why, Jim Webb (Va.) and Joe Manchin (W.Va.), of course. Webb has long been a big booster of oil and coal, but voting to constrain military strategy in the name of preventing competitors to fossil fuels is low even for him. Manchin is, by all accounts, just dumb as a box of hair. His close election in 2010 convinced him that to survive he has to lunge right at every opportunity, so he lunges with abandon. He’d probably shoot a pool of algae with a rifle if his brain trust told him to. Above all, he is a servant of the coal industry, which needs to block biofuels as way to bully the military into using expensive and polluting coal-to-liquid fuels.

James Inhofe (R-Okla.)

Webb and Manchin, self-serving jerk and belligerent dunce, find their mirror image in the leaders of this backroom Republican insurgency against U.S. military policy: Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and James Inhofe (R-Okla.). Inhofe’s against clean energy because ARGLE BARGLE. McCain, though, used to be in favor. He used to talk about climate change quite a bit. Proposed a billor two on the subject, as I recall. But ever since he lost to Obama, he has been increasingly bitter.

John McCain (R-Ariz.)

Now he says, “Adopting a ‘green agenda’ for national defense of course is a terrible misplacement of priorities” and “the president doesn’t understand national security.” National security, to an overcompensating narcissist like John McCain, means war, threatening war, or doing something “tough” to show the world we’re ready for war. He doesn’t see how using less oil fits into that.

It is an unbelievable rebuke and insult to military leaders for Republicans in Congress to do this, but then again, Republicans in Congress have always had more fealty to fossil fuels than the military. Just imagine what will happen after November 2012!

The bill — the Pentagon budget for next year — still has to pass on the floor of the House and Senate, and then go to conference committee, and then to the president’s desk. At any of those junctures, these amendments could be stripped out. But things aren’t looking good so far.

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WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon's investment in green energy requires too much green paper for some in Congress.

A sharply divided Senate Armed Services Committee voted this week to prohibit the military from spending money on alternative fuels if the cost exceeds traditional fossil fuels such as coal, natural gas and oil. The move underscores congressional concern about the greater expense of clean energy sources such as biofuels as the Pentagon wrestles with smaller budgets. The committee, in crafting a sweeping defense budget for next year, also voted to block Pentagon construction of a biofuels refinery or any other facility to refine biofuels.

Both efforts passed on 13-12 votes that were disclosed Friday.

"In a tough budget climate for the Defense Department, we need every dollar to protect our troops on the battlefield with energy technologies that reduce fuel demand and save lives," said Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the top Republican on the Armed Services Committee. "Spending $26 per gallon of biofuel is not consistent with that goal. The committee's action corrects this misplacement of priorities."

The moves by the Senate panel follow even tougher steps in the Republican-controlled House challenging the Pentagon's investment in clean energy. That version of the defense bill would bar the military from buying alternative fuels if the cost exceeds traditional fossil fuels. The bill also exempts the Pentagon from some requirements under the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, which is designed to increase production of clean renewable fuels.

The law stipulates that if a federal department or agency uses alternative fuels, they cannot produce more greenhouse gases than regular petroleum.

In threatening to veto the House bill, the White House said it objected to provisions that would affect the Defense Department's "ability to procure alternative fuels and would further increase American reliance on fossil fuels, thereby contributing to geopolitical instability and endangering our interests aboard."

The department is the nation's largest consumer of energy, spending about $15 billion last year on fuel for tanks, ships, aircraft and other operations. In Afghanistan, the military uses more than 50 million gallons of fuel each month.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta recently said higher fuel costs have hit the Pentagon hard, creating a budget shortfall of more than $3 billion.

The Navy and Air Force have pushed to use more biofuels to operate its aircraft and ships, with military leaders suggesting a greater reliance on alternative sources in the next decade to ease dependence on foreign oil.

The Pentagon is pushing for $1.4 billion in next year's budget for investments in clean energy, including hybrid electric drives for ships, more efficient engines, better generators and solar power.

"As one of the largest landowners and energy consumers in the world, our drive is to be more efficient and environmentally sustainable," Panetta said in a speech earlier this month to the Environmental Defense Fund. "We have to be able to have the potential to transform the nation's approach to the challenges we are facing in the environment and energy security. We've got to look ahead to try to see how we can best achieve that."

Panetta went as far as to suggest that environmental threats stand as threats to national security.

"The area of climate change has a dramatic impact on national security: Rising sea levels, to severe droughts, to the melting of the polar caps, to more frequent and devastating natural disasters all raise demand for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief," he said.

Days later, Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe challenged Panetta's comments.

"Secretary Panetta has a real war to win, and he should not be wasting time perpetrating President Obama's global warming fantasies or his ongoing war on affordable energy," said the Oklahoma lawmaker. "At a time when the defense budget is being significantly reduced and the Pentagon is forced to make every dollar stretch even further, it is ludicrous for the DOD to spend billions of dollars on green energy projects. Instead, they should be using those funds on people, training and equipment."

It was Inhofe and McCain, who successfully pushed for the amendments limiting Pentagon investments in clean energy.

huffpo