Crow, National Security Task Force Outlines Climate Crisis Threats
This week, House Democratic Caucus National Security Task Force Co-Chair Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO), joined by Select Committee on the Climate Crisis Chair Rep. Kathy Castor (D-FL), Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-TX), a Member of the House Armed Services Committee, and Hon. John Conger, Director of the Center for Climate and Security held a virtual roundtable where they outlined the multitude of national security threats posed by climate change both at home and abroad. This discussion comes on the heels of a newly unveiled report by the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, which provides a roadmap for Congress to meet the challenges of the climate crisis.
CO-CHAIR CROW: […] We know that climate change is really the issue of our generation and it impacts every element of life, including national security. I come at this issue from a lot of different angles. I was a soldier myself that fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. I'm now a Member of Congress that sits on the Armed Services Committee. I represent an Air Force base that is dealing with the very real issues of climate change and extreme weather as we look at what our installations need in the decades to come to deal with this crisis.
So for me, looking at climate change, we know that it's changing fundamentally the face of the planet. We know with sea level rise, we are going to deal with more pandemics. We are going to deal with refugee displacements and instability throughout the world, more extreme weather and more difficult operating environments where our soldiers are around the world. We're already paying for this. Last year, the Department of Defense had to spend billions of extra dollars to help rebuild Air Force bases that had to deal with extreme weather. And as more and more of this happens, the costs of dealing with this for not only American taxpayers, but for people around the world, are going to continue to increase.
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REP. CASTOR: The House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis released a climate action plan at the end of June. It is a five hundred plus page action plan for the Congress to tackle climate change. […] So in our report, we make a number of recommendations to the Department of Defense that can be enacted by Congress. First of all, the Department of Defense already has a climate change adaptation roadmap that requires the DOD to analyze climate impacts on our national security or the missions of our armed forces, global conflicts and geopolitical instability. We recommend that we have to update and modernize that adaptation roadmap. We have to bolster the Interagency Climate Security Advisory Council, which was established under the Fiscal Year 2020 NDAA to assess the global security implications of climate change. We have to bring the civilian population together with our defense experts to exchange important climate information. We want that group to actually go through scenario-based stress testing so that our armed services can cope with the disruptions that climate change will bring.
In addition to ensuring that our missions are cognizant of the challenges the warming climate brings, our military installations also need to become more resilient to the climate impacts. So our report recommends that our installations, domestically and internationally, strengthen themselves through their energy supply, through the vehicles that they use, transitioning to clean electric vehicles and making sure that charging infrastructure is in place. They also need to be more resilient to sea level rise. […] Overall, if you take a step back, what we need to do to combat and tackle the impacts of climate change, we've got to transition to a 100 percent clean energy economy.
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REP. ESCOBAR: We also have to look at where the big producers of greenhouse gases and greenhouse emissions are, and frankly, the military is one of those contributors. We are part of what's making things more challenging. That presents an opportunity, though. And the opportunity is: How can the military, which has already in many ways led on this issue, how can it really push and lead even further, especially when we've lost so much ground over the last two years? That's why I am so proud to have worked on bicameral legislation, the DOD Climate Resiliency and Readiness Act, which requires that DOD adapt its infrastructure and operations to address climate change and work toward true energy efficiency.
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We are already spending money on the consequences of not having addressed the climate crisis. And so, it is far more efficient, effective -- it's commonsense that we should get on the preventative side, that we need to get on the front end. And so we need to use every avenue preferable, and the NDAA is an important avenue toward addressing the climate crisis.
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HON. CONGER: Climate change is reshaping the world. So, it's not just a security issue. It's an economic issue. It's a health issue. I think one of the things that the military has recognized for quite some time is that they give themselves a blind spot if they ignore this issue and pretend it doesn't exist. And so, they don't. They pay attention and they have paid attention. […] Let me just talk about those risks just to sort of set the stage here. […] First, there are installation impacts. There are infrastructure impacts. And at those installation, there are training and readiness impacts from extreme weather, from flooding, from drought, from wildfires, from permafrost thaw. All of these things affect infrastructure. All of these things affect how people train and operate on a base.
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A second sort of set of impacts are the new missions that the DOD has to think about. The best example of this is the opening Arctic where the Navy has a whole new ocean to patrol, and Russia and China are both looking to exert influence over this new operating area. We have to be prepared to operate there too.
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The third one is what we often call the threat multiplier impact. It's the fact that climate change around the world makes bad situations worse. When you have food insecurity and water scarcity, you have sea level rise and economic displacement in migration. That tends to lead to friction and can lead to conflict. And those are the kinds of conflicts that we have to react to.
Video of the full roundtable and Q&A can be viewed here