Climate and National Security

Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.” ― William Faulkner

Access to objective, researched information is crucial to the enormously difficult task of maintaining a true participatory democracy.  This has always been true, but it is even more so now given the political reality that we find ourselves in since January 20, 2025.

This edition of Notes From The Chair and for at least April and May will therefore attempt to do exactly that.  We will also focus on the misleading information from the Defense Department about the impact of climate change on national security.

In April, we will focus on the economic opportunity inherent in transitioning to a renewable economy - despite the overwhelming misleading information coming from Washington We will also summarize the misleading rhetoric from the Trump administration and from big oil about the impact of renewable energy in the United States.  

In May we will tell the truth about the impact of climate change on the farming community and briefly, on the impact of climate change on health. 

The Truth About The Impact of Climate Change on National Security

On Sunday, March 9, 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted on X, “The @DeptofDefense does not do climate change crap. We do training and warfighting."

 According to a report written by Haley Britzky from CNN and published on Sunday, March 9, 2025 Hegseth  and other senior Pentagon officials have pointed to climate programs as a prime example of wasteful spending in the military. As Britzky reported, Acting Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Salesses also made it clear that funding would be cut in a statement last month, saying the Pentagon will “cease unnecessary spending that set our military back under the previous administration, including through so-called ‘climate change’ and other woke programs.”

Officials and experts warn that Pentagon plans to cut climate programs will hurt national security

But, according to Britsky, “some officials and experts argue such thinking is short-sighted.”  That is certainly true, according to multiple documents published by the Department of Defense and the National Security Agency.

A commentary written by Andrew R. Hoehn and Thom Shanker and published by Defense One on June 30, 2023 adapted from the authors' book, Age of Danger: Keeping America Safe in an Era of New Superpowers, New Weapons, and New Threats (Hachette, 2023) - makes this point clear: 

The military does not have the luxury of debating climate change, a reality now adding a powerful, destabilizing force to fragile, unstable areas of the world. Once-in-a-century ocean storms happen several times each season. Drought prompts food shortages, civil unrest, and mass migration. Island nations that once served as safe ports could vanish under rising seas. All of these complicate the Defense Department's efforts to combat global instability, even as it has to admit that the American armed services are the world's largest consumers of fossil fuels.

Andrew Hoehn is the RAND Corporation's senior vice president for research and analysis; he formerly served as a top strategist for the U.S. Department of Defense. Thom Shanker is director of the Project for Media and National Security at George Washington University; he previously was a New York Times reporter and editor.

In 2017, Jim Mattis—retired Marine general and President Trump’s first defense secretary—told Congress, “Climate change can be a driver of instability and the Department of Defense must pay attention to potential adverse impacts generated by this phenomenon.”

On October 7, 2021, the Defense Department offered its clearest statement ever acknowledging the risks of climate change to national security and to the military's ability to carry out its mission: “Climate change is an existential threat to our nation's security, and the Department of Defense must act swiftly and boldly to take on this challenge and prepare for damage that cannot be avoided,” said Defense Secretary J. Lloyd Austin III.

The Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community published by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on February 6, 2023 Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community -and- The Department of Defense Climate Action Plan 2024 – 2027 presented on September 5, 2024 are just two of many examples of reports prepared by the Department of Defense and the National Security Agency over the years that has consistently made the point that climate change is real and poses a threat to national security.

The section of the 2023 intelligence community report that addresses climate change begins with the following Climate change will increasingly exacerbate risks to U.S. national security interests as the physical impacts increase and geopolitical tensions mount about the global response to the challenge. The increasing physical effects of climate change also are likely to intensify or cause domestic and cross-border geopolitical flashpoints. As temperatures rise and more extreme climate effects manifest, there is a growing risk of conflict.

In their 2023 article Hoehn and Shanker say, While no Pentagon-specific predictions are available, the Office of Management and Budget released a government-wide assessment warning that, for the rest of this century, the U.S. government could spend an extra $25 billion to $128 billion each year to deal with six types of climate-related disasters: coastal disaster relief, flood insurance, crop insurance, health care insurance, wildland fire suppression, and flooding at federal facilities.

And for anyone who thinks that the reality of climate’s  impact on national defense is new and, even more importantly for the current Secretary of Defense who has not paid attention to history or to multiple reports from his own department and from NSA - I close with a summary included in an article published in the Defense One June 18 2024 by Erin  Sikorsky, Director of the Center for climate security titled Climate Change Is A Threat, Not A Distraction, to the US Military Climate change is a threat, not a distraction, to the US military:Historian John Ross writes that when President-elect John Kennedy asked outgoing President Dwight Eisenhower why D-Day had gone so well, Eisenhower replied, “Because we had better meteorologists than the Germans!" As the United States confronts more frequent and intense extreme weather events due to climate change, more ships and guns alone will not be enough to deter and defend against the threats we face. The U.S. military must ensure it has more thoroughly considered climate change than its adversaries to keep our country safe.

 William Faulkner was right: raising our voices for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed can change the world. For those who understand the impact of climate change and the economic opportunity inherent in transitioning to a renewable future, Faulkner’s words are not just a reminder, but an obligation.