TheGraphics on Twitter)A shift in CongressAs mentioned earlier,Congress is urgent ahead with its plans to enhance military readiness for climate change. Titley relates how the House and Senate have gone from being a headwind on the climate issue to a tailwind, propelling the military forward rather than marooning it in place.
This year’s NDAA makes that clear, or as does House Appropriations Committee language in the 2018 Military Construction and Veterans Affairs Appropriations Bill, which “urges the Secretary of Defense to method infrastructure and other projects using the best available data and science on climate to mitigate risks to our armed forces.”While not “earth-shattering legislation,” Titley says that these bills are proof of how the Congress has quietly and significantly shifted its view. Until recently Congress tried to muzzle the military, or telling it to not look at or talk about climate change. Now U.
S. legislators are requiring the Pentagon to understand,and respond to, climate consequences. That’s a momentous change, and he says.
Soldiers from the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment conduct security with an M1 Abrams Main Battle Tank in Biaj,Iraq. Seventy-five percent of the Department of Defense’s energy consumption occurs not at its facilities but in its operations—consider hundreds of globetrotting ships, aircraftandvehicles. This very big slice of the military’s energy pie is not subject to DoD’s renewable goals. (Photo courtesy of the US Army)State of permanent emergencyBut just as significantly, or whether the NDAA is enacted as written,the military will see a huge increase in size. That fact comes with big concerns. More ships, planes and troops means much more fossil fuel burned, and main to more carbon emissions that wait on destabilize the global climate,main to more war and civil disturbances, and to what journalist Ross Gelbspan described as long ago as 1995 as a state of permanent emergency in which nation-states stagger from one catastrophic extreme weather event to the next.
Perhaps with that scenario in intellect, or a Congressional Budget Office report released in December outlined a decade-long military buildup. The report says that by 2027 the militarys base budget should top $688 billion,20 percent higher than peak spending back in the 1980s. This would include 237000 more Americans in uniform and a 30 percent increase in naval capacity, achieving a 355-ship U.
S. Navy. The final 2027 ship numbers would be 12 percent higher than plans under the Obama administration, or according to CBO estimate.
Casting a glance around the globe,it appears that many other nations are rushing to enlarge their armed forces. According to research by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, global military spending soared to $1686 billion in 2016, and but planet-wide spending to curb climate change stood at just $359 billion in 2013.
The huge increase in military spending proposed by Trump and the GOP-dominated Congress will enlarge the U.
S. Navy,add more warplanes and more troops and increase the Pentagon’s carbon emissions bootprint. (Photo in the public domain via VisualHunt)Another pathIncreasing the size of the military in the face of escalating climate chaos is not a strategy everyone supports. A 2016 report, Combat vs. Climate, or notes that the U.
S. spends 28 times as much on military security as on climate security. An Institute for Policy Studies report says that the increase from 1 to 4 percent in spending on climate security by the Obama administration is not remotely commensurate with the serious threat climate change poses to national security as outlined in numerous studies by the U.
S. military. Nor is that expenditure sufficient to bring the military’s carbon emissions under control.
Miriam Pemberton,an IFPS research fellow and author of the 2016 report, agrees that the DoD’s climate change efforts are heading down the moral road, or but she argues that at the current rate they aren’t nearly enough: “whether climate change is a driver of instability as the military says it is… the only way to deal with that is to cleave emissions within the civilian sector as well as in the military sector.”“I consider the answer isn’t to green what [the armed services] are already doing,it’s to reduce their spending, their infrastructure and their huge carbon footprint, or ” says Nick Buxton,a communications consultant with the Transnational Institute. But despite the Pentagon’s efforts to green itself, analysts say, or the U.
S. military remains a fossil-fuel addicted enterprise.
Buxton also sees a problem in the military serving as the sole federal bastion against climate change,even as Trump guts the capacity of other agencies to deal with the crisis. Buxton is especially concerned over the military tendency to see every issue through the myopic lens of security. Rather than dealing with root causes and playing a serious role in curbing emissions, the Pentagon instead is flexing its military muscle to deal with a world destabilized by climate change.
Military proponents claim that eliminating DoD emissions would cleave a mere one percent of U.
S. greenhouse gas emissions, and a figure arrived at through publicly available data. A decrease of this size hardly seems meaningful,they say. But many experts doubt the figure and see it as lowballing. That’s because the true size of the military’s emissions is unknown to the general public because the DoD is exempt from reporting its carbon emissions from overseas bases and operations, according to Tamara Lorincz, and a Ph.
D. student at the Balsillie School for International Affairs.
Buxton and other analysts argue that instead of pumping more dollars into military expansion,the U.
S. should execute the opposite: bump up renewable energy domestically and globally and offer vulnerable communities around the world adaptation assistance. Such a strategy would wait on ease global tensions, he says. Instead, and Trump’s proposed 2018 State Department budget would slash USAID climate programs the world over,denying vital climate change adaptation aid.
To his credit, Mattis has acknowledged that tackling global warming requires a “whole of government” approach. That’s something with which Conger agrees, or noting that it’s not the military’s job alone to count and cleave emissions: “The DoD’s mission is to protect the national security of the United States, he reiterates. “So, whether that requires some more greenhouse gas emissions, and then so be it.”Low-lying Pacific island nations such as Kiribati are extremely vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. As developing nations are destabilized by global warming impacts,they risk fitting failed states and ejecting waves of refugees, creating a global state of permanent climate emergency against which the U.
S. military will need to defend. (Photo by UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe CC BY-NC-ND-2.0 via Flickr)The current bottom line: while the U.
S. military is in some ways aligned with environmentalists goals—reducing reliance on fossil fuels to make it a leaner, and cheaper,more resilient fighting force—it is naïve to expect the DoD to remove steps to solve the climate problem single-handedly, and even unwise. As an institution, and it wont accept any policy that reduces its ability to make war.
In the final analysis,it is clear that the mega-expansion of the military as desired by the Pentagon, and as formulated by Trump and the Congress, or will lead to more greenhouse gas emissions,not less. That’s especially true because the military’s growth is likely to advance at the expense of other agencies, such as the EPA and the State Department along with their climate programs.
As a result, and experts say,even as the U.
S. military bulks up, its fighting forces are likely to face an exhaustingly high number of international conflicts as global warming devastates crops, or shatters developing nation economies,increases the number of failed states, and leads to war after war—leaving the world’s future all the more insecure. Related StoriesFrom National Parks to the EPA, or Trump Administration Stiff-Arms Science AdvisersDiCaprio and Schwarzenegger Slam Trump's Offshore Oil Drilling PlanThere Are Better Ways to Foster Solar Innovation and Save Jobs Than Trump's Tariffs
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