“The bill cites a few points in support of the position that climate change is now an issue to be tackled by the Defense Department.”
Advocates of governmental intervention to prevent the human effects on climate change succeeded in furthering their cause this week on Capitol Hill when a compromise on important defense legislation lead to a provision requiring the Pentagon to study the impacts of climate change on American military operations.
The legislation in question is the long awaited National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that is expected to have implications for a slew of important national level issues including strategy development in regards to North Korea and Afghanistan, as well as spending on several important military projects.
According to the added provision, “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.”
The bill cites a few points in support of the position that climate change is now an issue to be tackled by the Defense Department. First, it makes reference to certain statements by the Department’s own head Secretary James Mattis indicating concern of the “destabilizing” effects of human activity on the environment. Mattis has given quite a bit of attention to the issue of climate change despite the position of his boss playing down the problem.
Climate change is now an item of interest for national security. It is now codified as such. This is a major victory for climate policy advocates.
Second, is the very real threat that the climate has become to United States military assets. One poignant example is the Air Force radar installations on the Marshal Islands that are expected to be flooded over the next ten years. The project, known as Space Fence, is situated on a tiny atoll and has already received nearly $1 billion in funding. The rising salty seas threaten to wreak havoc on the site’s infrastructure. Apparently neither military planners nor the site’s civilian contractor, Lockheed Martin, gave serious consideration to that threat when designing the installation and choosing a site, despite warnings from the island nation’s environmental agency.
This bill is the latest in the years long political war revolving around the climate change issue. This war has hit important milestones as of late which have undoubtedly contributed to this latest legislative move. Earlier this month, 13 federal agencies unveiled a comprehensive report on the phenomenon of climate change, the central thrust of which was asserting the human factor in the gradual change of Earth’s environment over the past century, due primarily to the burning of fossil fuels. The report explicitly contradicted the position of the current administration, including Trump’s pick to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Kathleen Hartnett White, who holds human activity to be only a minor factor in changes to the global climate.
The report’s release date was “perfect timing”, as the United Nations convention on climate change was about to take place in Bonn, Germany, inevitably putting the US in a place of international pressure of sorts to explain its policies in light of its own government’s findings.
The strategy of laying responsibility on the Pentagon to investigate climate change from a national defense perspective is just “expanding the net” so to speak for the areas that climate policy will affect. Environmental issues will no longer be the prerogative of the EPA or similar domestically focused agencies.
Climate change is now an item of interest for national security. It is now codified as such. This is a major victory for climate policy advocates.
The issue for the conscientious observer to perhaps be wary of is this: Will this open the door for the Pentagon to be a tool of advancing other political agendas that are not directly connected to national defense?
We have already seen incidents in which the Defense Department was dragged into other social issues over the past months, like the aftermath of Trump’s “transgender ban” preventing such individuals from serving openly in the military.
Hopefully these events and others like it will not begin trends of manipulating our national defense infrastructure for the furthering of political interests.
