Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Michael Klare on the Pentagon's view of Climate Change and the Risks of State Collapse
106 Plays3 years ago
Michael Klare, Five College Professor of Peace & World Security Studies, joins us to discuss the Pentagon's view of climate change, why it's distinctive, and how this all ultimately relates to the risks of great powers conflict and state collapse.
Topics discussed in this episode include:
-How the US military views and takes action on climate change
-Examples of existing climate related difficulties and what they tell us about the future
-Threat multiplication from climate change
-The risks of climate change catalyzed nuclear war and major conflict
-The melting of the Arctic and the geopolitical situation which arises from that
-Messaging on climate change
You can find the page for this podcast here: https://futureoflife.org/2021/07/30/michael-klare-on-the-pentagons-view-of-climate-change-and-the-risks-of-state-collapse/
Check out the video version of the episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bn57jxEoW24
Check out Michael's website here: http://michaelklare.com/
Apply for the Podcast Producer position here: futureoflife.org/job-postings/
Have any feedback about the podcast? You can share your thoughts here: www.surveymonkey.com/r/DRBFZCT
Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
2:28 How does the Pentagon view climate change and why are they interested in it?
5:30 What are the Pentagon's main priorities besides climate change?
8:31 What are the objectives of career officers at the Pentagon and how do they see climate change?
10:32 The relationship between Pentagon career officers and the Trump administration on climate change
15:47 How is the Pentagon's view of climate change unique and important?
19:54 How climate change exacerbates existing difficulties and the issue of threat multiplication
24:25 How will climate change increase the tensions between the nuclear weapons states of India, Pakistan, and China?
26:32 What happened to Tacloban City and how is it relevant?
32:27 Why does the US military provide global humanitarian assistance?
34:39 How has climate change impacted the conditions in Nigeria and how does this inform the Pentagon's perspective?
39:40 What is the ladder of escalation for climate change related issues?
46:54 What is "all hell breaking loose?"
48:26 What is the geopolitical situation arising from the melting of the Arctic?
52:48 Why does the Bering Strait matter for the Arctic?
54:23 The Arctic as a main source of conflict for the great powers in the coming years
58:01 Are there ongoing proposals for resolving territorial disputes in the Arctic?
1:01:40 Nuclear weapons risk and climate change
1:03:32 How does the Pentagon intend to address climate change?
1:06:20 Hardening US military bases and going green
1:11:50 How climate change will affect critical infrastructure
1:15:47 How do lethal autonomous weapons fit into the risks of escalation in a world stressed by climate change?
1:19:42 How does this all affect existential risk?
1:24:39 Are there timelines for when climate change induced stresses will occur?
1:27:03 Does tying existential risks to national security issues benefit awareness around existential risk?
1:30:18 Does relating climate change to migration issues help with climate messaging?
1:31:08 A summary of the Pentagon's interest, view, and action on climate change
1:33:00 Final words from Michael
1:34:33 Where to find more of Michael's work
This podcast is possible because of the support of listeners like you. If you found this conversation to be meaningful or valuable, consider supporting it directly by donating at futureoflife.org/donate. Contributions like yours make these conversations possible.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction & Episode Overview
00:00:04
Speaker
Welcome to the Future of Life Institute podcast. I'm Lucas Perry. Today's episode is with Michael Claire and explores how the US Department of Defense views and takes action on climate change.
Discussion on 'All Hell Breaking Loose'
00:00:17
Speaker
This conversation is primarily centered around Michael's book, All Hell Breaking Loose.
00:00:23
Speaker
In both this podcast and his book, Michael does an excellent job of making clear how climate change will affect global stability and functioning in our lifetimes through tons of examples of recent climate-induced instabilities. I was also surprised to learn that despite changes in administrations, the DoD continued to pursue climate change mitigation efforts despite the Trump administration's actions to remove mention and activism on climate change from the federal government.
Podcast Producer Search
00:00:51
Speaker
So if you've ever had any doubts or if the impact of climate change and its significance has ever or does ever fuel vague or fuzzy to you, this podcast might help remedy that. I'd also like to make a final call for applications for the podcast producer role. If you missed it, we're currently hiring for a podcast producer to work on the editing, production, publishing, and analytics tracking of the audio and visual content of this podcast.
00:01:19
Speaker
As the producer, you would be working directly with me and the FLI Outreach team to help grow and evolve this podcast. If you're interested in applying, head over to the careers tab on the futureoflife.org homepage or follow the link in the description. The application deadline is July 31st with rolling applications accepted thereafter until the role is filled. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to socialmedia at futureoflife.org.
Introducing Michael Claire
00:01:46
Speaker
Michael Clare is a five colleges professor of peace and world security studies. He serves on the board of directors of the Arms Control Association and is a regular contributor to many publications, including The Nation, Tom Dispatch, and Mother Jones, and is also a frequent columnist for Foreign Policy in Focus. Clare has written 14 books and hundreds of essays on issues of war and peace, resource competition, and international affairs. You can check out his work at michaelclare.com.
00:02:16
Speaker
And with that, I'm happy to present this interview with Michael Clare. So to start things off here, I'm curious if you could explain at the highest level, how is it that the Pentagon views climate change and why is the Pentagon interested in climate change?
Pentagon's View on Climate Change as a Threat
00:02:40
Speaker
Okay, so if you speak to people in the military, they will tell you over and over again that their top concern is China, China, China, China, followed by Russia, and then maybe North Korea and Iran. And they spend their days preparing for war with China and those other countries.
00:03:02
Speaker
Climate change intercedes into this conversation because ultimately they believe that climate change is going to degrade their capacity to prepare for and to fight China and other adversaries down the road.
00:03:22
Speaker
that climate change is a complicating factor, a distraction that will undermine their ability to perform their military duties. And moreover, they see that the
00:03:37
Speaker
threat posed by climate change is increasing exponentially over time. So the more they look into the future, the more they see that climate change will degrade their ability to carry out what they see as their primary function, which is to prepare for war with China. And so it's in that sense that climate change is critical.
00:04:00
Speaker
Now, then you go down in the specific ways in which climate change is a problem, but it's ultimately because it will distract them from doing what they see as their primary responsibility. So there's a belief in the validity of it and the way in which it will basically exacerbate existing difficulties and make achieving more important objectives more difficult.
00:04:27
Speaker
Something like that, climate change, they see as an intrusion into their workspace. You know, they're trained as soldiers to carry out their military duties, which is combat related. And they believe that climate change is very real and getting more intense as time goes on and it's going to pull them back.
00:04:55
Speaker
intrude on their ability to carry out their combat functions. It's going to be a distraction on multiple levels. It's going to create new kinds of conflicts that they would rather not deal with. It's going to create emergencies around the world, humanitarian disasters at home and abroad. All of these are going to suck away resources, time, effort, energy, money.
00:05:23
Speaker
that they believe should be devoted to their primary function of preparing for war with major enemies. What would you say the primary interests of the Pentagon are right now other than climate change?
00:05:38
Speaker
Other than climate change, well, the US Department of Defense at this time has a number of crises going on simultaneously. In addition to climate change, there's COVID, of course, like every other institution in US society.
00:05:55
Speaker
The military was hampered by COVID. Many service people came down with COVID. Some died, and it forced military operations to be restricted.
00:06:11
Speaker
ships had to be brought back to port because COVID broke out on ships. So that was a problem. The military is also addressing issues of racism and extremism in the ranks. That's become a major problem right now that they're dealing with. But they view climate change as the leading threat to national security of a non-military nature.
00:06:40
Speaker
So China was one of the first things that you mentioned. How would you also rank and relate the space of the considerations like Russia and nuclear North Korea and Iran?
00:06:52
Speaker
Sure. The Department of Defense just released their budget for fiscal year 2022, and they rank the military threats. And they say China is overwhelmingly the number one threat to U.S. national security, followed by Russia, followed by North Korea and Iran. And then down the list would be terrorist threats like Al Qaeda and ISIS.
00:07:21
Speaker
But as you know, the administration has made a decision to leave Afghanistan and to downgrade U.S. forces in that part of the world. So fighting terrorism and insurgency has been demoted.
00:07:40
Speaker
as a major threat to U.S. security. And even Russia has been demoted to second place. Over the past few years, Russia and China have been equated. But now China has been pushed ahead as the number one threat.
00:07:56
Speaker
The term they use is the pacing threat, which is to say that because China is the number one threat, we have to meet that threat. And if we can overcome China, the US could overcome any other threat that might come along. But China is number one.
00:08:14
Speaker
So there's this sense of top concerns that the Department of Defense has.
Balancing Military Preparedness with Climate Challenges
00:08:19
Speaker
And then this is all happening in a context of climate change, which makes achieving its objectives on each of these threats more and more difficult. So in the context of this interplay, can you describe the objectives of career officers at the Pentagon and how it's related to and important for how they consider and work with climate change?
00:08:43
Speaker
Sure. So if you're an aspiring general or admiral right now, as I say, you're going to be talking about how you're preparing your units, your division, your ship, your air squadron to be better prepared to fight China.
00:09:04
Speaker
But you also have to worry about what they call the operating environment, the OE, the operating environment in which your forces are going to be operating in. And if you're going to be operating in the Pacific, which means dealing with China, then you have a whole set of worries that emerges.
00:09:23
Speaker
We have allies there that we count on, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines. These countries are highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change and are becoming more so very rapidly.
00:09:39
Speaker
Moreover, we have bases in those places. Most of those air bases and naval bases are at sea level, are very close to sea level, and are over and over again assaulted by powerful typhoons and have been disrupted, have had to be shut down for days or weeks at a time.
00:10:02
Speaker
And some of those bases, like Diego Garcia and the Indian Ocean, for example, or the Marianas Islands, are not going to be viable much longer because they're so close to sea level. And sea level rise is just going to come and swamp them. So from an operating environment point of view, you have to be very aware of the impacts of climate change on the space in which you're going to operate.
00:10:32
Speaker
So it seems like the concerns and objectives of career officers at the Pentagon can be distinguished in significant ways from the perspective and position of politicians, right? So there's like some tension at least between career officers or the objectives of the Pentagon in relation to how
00:10:57
Speaker
some constituencies of the American political parties are skeptical of climate change? This was certainly the case during the Trump administration, because the commander in chief has one of his titles, President Trump for bad, the discussion of climate change. And, you know, he was a denier. He called it a hoax.
00:11:23
Speaker
And he forbade any conversation of that. So the U.S. military did have a position on climate change during the Obama administration. It had, as early as 2010, the Department of Defense stated that climate change posed a serious threat to U.S. security and was taking steps
00:11:49
Speaker
to address that threat. So when Trump came along, all of that had to go underground. It didn't stop, but the Pentagon had to develop a whole lot of euphemisms, like changing climate or extreme weather events.
00:12:08
Speaker
All kinds of euphemisms used to describe what they saw as climate change. But that didn't stop them from facing the consequences of climate change.
Pentagon's Climate Efforts Under Political Pressure
00:12:20
Speaker
During the Trump administration, U.S. military bases in the U.S. suffered billions and billions of dollars of damage from Hurricane Michael, from others that hit the East Coast and the Gulf of Mexico that did
00:12:37
Speaker
tremendous damage to a number of key US bases, and the military is still having to find the money to pay for that damage. The Navy in particular is deeply concerned that it's major operating bases in the United States. A Navy base by definition is going to be at the ocean.
00:13:00
Speaker
And many of these bases are very low-lying areas and already are being repeatedly flooded at very high tides or when there are storms. And the Navy is very aware that their ability to carry out their missions to reinforce American forces either in the Atlantic or Pacific are at risk because of rising seas. And they had to
00:13:29
Speaker
maneuver around Trump all during that period, trying to protect their bases but calling it by different names, calling the danger they faced by different names.
00:13:41
Speaker
Right, so there's this sense of Trump essentially canceling mention of climate change throughout the federal government and its branches, and the Pentagon responding by quietly still responding to what they see as a real threat. Is there anything else you'd like to add here about the Obama to Trump transition that helps to really paint the picture of
00:14:08
Speaker
how the Pentagon views climate change and what it did despite attempts to suppress thought and action around climate change? During the Obama administration, as I say, the Department of Defense acknowledged the reality of climate change, number one. Number two, said it posed a threat to U.S. national security and
00:14:32
Speaker
as a result, said that the Department of Defense had an obligation to reduce its contribution to climate change, to reduce its emissions, and made all kinds of
00:14:48
Speaker
pledges that it was going to reduce its consumption of fossil fuels, increase its reliance on renewable energy, begin constructing solar arrays. A lot of very ambitious goals were announced in the Obama period.
00:15:07
Speaker
And all of this was supposed to stop when Trump came into office because he said, we're not going to do any of this anymore. In fact, the Pentagon continued to proceed with a lot of these endeavors, which were to mitigate climate change. But again, using different terminology that this was about base reliance, self-reliance, resiliency and so on, not mentioning climate change.
00:15:37
Speaker
But nonetheless, continued to proceed with efforts to actually mitigate their impact on climate. So is there any sense in which the Pentagon's view of climate change is unique? And could you also explain how it's important and relevant for climate change and also the outcomes related to climate change?
00:15:59
Speaker
Yes, I think the Pentagon's view of climate change I think is very distinctive and not well understood by the American public. And that's why I think it's so important. And that is that the Department of Defense sees climate change as the term they use is as a threat multiplier.
00:16:20
Speaker
They say, look, we look out at the world, and part of our job is to forecast ahead of time where are threats going to emerge to U.S. security around the world. That's our job, and to prepare for those threats.
00:16:36
Speaker
And we see that climate change is going to multiply threats in areas of the world that are already unstable, that are already suffering from scarce cities of resources, where populations are divided and where resources are scarce and contested.
00:17:00
Speaker
and that this is going to create a multitude of new challenges for the United States and its allies around the world. So this notion of a threat multiplier is very much a part of the Pentagon's
00:17:17
Speaker
understanding of climate change. What they mean by that is that societies are vulnerable in many ways, and especially societies that are divided along ethnic and religious and racial lines, as so many societies are. And if resources are scarce, housing, water, food, jobs, whatever,
00:17:45
Speaker
Climate change is going to exacerbate these divisions within societies, including American society for that matter. But it's going to exacerbate divisions around the world and it's going to create social breakdown and state collapse. And the consequence of state collapse could include increased pandemics.
00:18:10
Speaker
for example, and contribute to the spread of disease. It's going to lead to mass migrations, and mass migrations are going to become a growing problem for the U.S. This is evident in the influx of migrants on the America's southern border. Many of these people today are coming from Central America.
00:18:33
Speaker
and from an area that's suffering from extreme drought and where crop failure has become widespread and people can't earn an income and they're fleeing to the United States in desperation. Well, this is something the military has been studying and talking about for a long time.
00:18:53
Speaker
as a consequence of climate change, as an example of the ways in which climate change is going to multiply schisms in society
Military's Role in Humanitarian Crises
00:19:04
Speaker
and threats of all kinds that ultimately will endanger the United States, but are going to fall on their shoulders to cope with.
00:19:15
Speaker
and creating humanitarian disasters and migratory problems. And as I say, this is not what they view as their primary responsibility. They wanna prepare for high-tech warfare with China and Russia, and they see all of this as a tremendous distraction which will undermine their ability to defend the United States against its primary adversaries.
00:19:43
Speaker
So it's multiplying the threats and dangers to the United States on multiple levels, including, and we have to talk about this, threats to the homeland itself. I think one thing you do really well in your book is you give a lot of examples of natural disasters that have occurred recently, which will only increase with the existence of climate change.
00:20:07
Speaker
as well as areas which are already experiencing climate change. And you give lots of examples about how that increases stress in the region. Before we move on to those examples, I just want to more clearly lay out all of the ways in which climate change just makes everything worse, right? So there's the sense in which it stresses everything that is already stressed.
00:20:28
Speaker
Everything basically becomes more difficult and challenging. And so you mentioned things like mass migration, the increase of disease and pandemics, the increase of terrorism in destabilized regions. States may begin to collapse. There is the idea of threat multiplication. So everything that's already bad gets worse. There's a loss of food, water and shelter. There is an increase in natural disasters from more and more extreme weather.
00:20:57
Speaker
This all leads to more resource competition and also energy crises as rivers dry up dams stop working and the energy grid gets like taxed more and more due to the extreme weather. So is there anything else you'd like to add here in terms of the specific ways in which things get worse and worse from the factor of threat multiplication?
00:21:22
Speaker
You know, then you start getting kind of specific about particular places that could be affected. And the Pentagon would say, well, you know, this is first going to happen in the most vulnerable societies, poor countries, Central America, North Africa.
00:21:43
Speaker
places like that where society is already divided, poor, and the capacity to cope with disaster is very low. So climate change will come along, and conditions will deteriorate, and the state is unable to cope. And you have breakdown, and you have these migrations.
00:22:04
Speaker
But they also worry that as time goes on and climate change intensifies that a bigger and bigger or richer and richer and more important states will begin to disintegrate. And some of these states are very important to U.S. security, and some of them have nuclear weapons. And then you have really serious dangers.
00:22:30
Speaker
For example, they worry a great deal about Pakistan. Pakistan is a nuclear-armed country. It's also deeply divided along ethnic and religious lines, and it has multiple vulnerabilities to climate change.
00:22:49
Speaker
It goes between extremes of water scarcity, which will increase as the Himalayan glaciers disappear, but also we know that monsoons are likely to become more erratic and more destructive with more flooding.
00:23:06
Speaker
All of these pose great threats to the ability of Pakistan government and society to cope with all of its internal divisions, which are already severe to begin with. And what happens when Pakistan experiences state collapse and nuclear weapons begin to
00:23:31
Speaker
disappear into the hands of the Taliban or to forces close to the Taliban, then you have a level of worry and concern much greater than anything we've been talking about before. And this is something that the Pentagon has started to worry about and to develop contingency plans for.
00:23:52
Speaker
There are other examples of this level of potential threat arising from bigger and more powerful states disintegrating. Saudi Arabia is at risk. Nigeria is at risk.
00:24:08
Speaker
The Philippines, a major ally in the Pacific, is at extreme risk from rising waters and extreme storms. And I can continue, but from a strategic point of view, this starts getting very worrisome for the Department of Defense.
00:24:26
Speaker
Could you also paint a little bit of a picture of how climate change will exacerbate the conditions between Pakistan, India, and China, especially given that they're all nuclear weapons states?
Water Scarcity and Nuclear Tensions
00:24:39
Speaker
Absolutely. And this all goes back to water. Water scarcity has the greatest danger arising from climate change in many parts of the world. In the case of India, China, Pakistan, not to mention a whole host of other countries, depend very heavily on rivers that originate in the Himalayan mountains and draw a fair percentage of their
00:25:06
Speaker
water from the melting of the Himalayan glaciers. And these glaciers are disappearing at a very rapid rate and are expected to lose a very large percentage of their mass by the end of this century due to warming temperatures. And this means that these critical rivers
00:25:28
Speaker
that are shared by these countries, the Indus River shared by India and Pakistan, the Brahmaputra River shared by India and China. These rivers which provide the water for irrigation for hundreds of millions of people, if not billions of people, depend on these rivers. The Mekong is another.
00:25:53
Speaker
that as the water supply begins to diminish, this is going to exacerbate border disputes. All of these countries, India and China, India and Pakistan, have border and territorial disputes. They have very restive agricultural populations to start with. That water scarcity is going to be the tipping point that will produce massive
00:26:22
Speaker
local violence that will lead to conflict between these countries, all of them nuclear armed.
00:26:33
Speaker
So to paint a little bit more of a picture of these historical examples of states essentially failing to be able to respond to climate events and the kind of destructive force that was to society and to the status of humanitarian conditions and the increasing need for humanitarian operations, can you describe what happened in Tacloban, for example?
00:27:01
Speaker
as well as what is going on in the Nigerian region? So, Tacloban is a major city on the island of Leyte in the Philippines, and it was a direct hit, suffered a direct hit from Typhoon Haiyan in 2013. This was the most powerful typhoon to make landfall
00:27:26
Speaker
up until that point, an extremely powerful storm that created millions of homeless in the Philippines. Many people perished, but Tacloban was at the forefront of this, a city of several hundred thousand, many poor people living in low-lying areas at the forefront of this storm. The storm surge was
00:27:54
Speaker
10 or 20 feet high that just overwhelmed these low-lying shanty towns, flooded them, thousands of people died right away. The entire infrastructure of this city collapsed, was destroyed, hospitals, everything, food ran out, water ran out, and there was an element of despair and chaos.
00:28:17
Speaker
The Philippine government proved incapable of doing anything, and President Obama ordered the U.S. Pacific Command to provide emergency assistance, and it sent almost the entire U.S. Pacific fleet
00:28:33
Speaker
to Teklobin to provide emergency assistance on the scale of a major war. Aircraft carrier, dozens of warships, hundreds of planes, thousands of troops to provide emergency assistance. Now, it was a wonderful sign of US aid.
00:28:53
Speaker
There are a number of elements of this crisis that are worthy of mention. In addition to all of this, one was the fact that there was anti-government rioting because of the failure of the local authorities to provide assistance or to provide it only to wealthy people in the town. And this is so often a characteristic of these disasters.
00:29:19
Speaker
that assistance is not provided equitably. And the same thing was seen with Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. And this then becomes a new source of conflict.
00:29:34
Speaker
When a disaster occurs and you do not have equitable emergency response and some people are denied help and others are provided assistance, you're setting up
00:29:50
Speaker
You're setting the stage for future conflicts and anti-government violence, which is what happened in Tech-Loban. And the U.S. military had to intercede to calm things down. And this is something that has altered U.S. thinking about humanitarian assistance.
00:30:11
Speaker
because now they understand that it's not just going to be handing out food and water, it's also going to mean playing the role of a government, local government, in providing police assistance and mediating disputes and providing law and order, not just in foreign countries, but in the United States itself.
00:30:33
Speaker
This proved to be the case in Houston with Hurricane Harvey in 2017, and in Puerto Rico with Hurricane Maria, when local authorities simply disappeared or broke down, and the military had to step in
00:30:51
Speaker
and play the role of government, which comes back to what I've been saying all along. From the military's point of view, this is not what they were trained to do. This is not what they want to do. And they view this as a distraction from their primary military function.
00:31:11
Speaker
So, you know, here's the Pacific fleet engaging in this very complex emergency in the Philippines. And what if there were a crisis with China that would break out? The whole force would have been immobilized.
00:31:26
Speaker
at that time. And this is the kind of worry that they have that climate change is going to create these complex emergencies, they call them, or complex disasters that are going to require not just quick
00:31:43
Speaker
in an out kind of situation, but a permanent or semi-permanent involvement in a disaster area and to provide services for which the military is not adequately prepared. But they see that climate change increasingly will force them to play this kind of role and thereby distracting them from what they see as their more important mission.
00:32:10
Speaker
Right, so there's a sense of the military increasingly being deployed in areas to provide humanitarian assistance. It's obvious why that would be important and needed domestically in the United States and its territories. Can you explain why the military is incentivized or interested in providing global humanitarian assistance?
00:32:36
Speaker
This has always been part of American foreign policy, American diplomacy, winning friends, winning over friends and allies. It's partly to make the United States look good, particularly when other countries are not capable of doing that.
00:32:56
Speaker
We're the one country that has that kind of global naval capacity to go anywhere and do that sort of thing. So it's a little bit of matter of showing off our capacity. But it's also, in the case of the Philippines,
00:33:15
Speaker
The Philippines plays a strategic role in US planning for conflict in the Pacific. It is seen as a valuable ally in any future conflict with China.
00:33:30
Speaker
and therefore its stability matters to the United States and the cooperation of the Philippine government is considered important and access to bases in the Philippines.
00:33:45
Speaker
for example, is considered important to the US. So the fact that key allies of the US in the Pacific, in the Middle East, in Europe are at risk of collapsing due to climate change
00:34:01
Speaker
poses a threat to the whole strategic planning of the U.S., which is to fight wars over there in the forward area of operations off the coast of China or off of Russian territory. So we are very reliant on the stability and the capacity of key allies
00:34:25
Speaker
in these areas. So providing humanitarian assistance and disaster relief is a part of a larger strategy of reliance on key allies in strategic parts of the world. Can you also explain the conditions in Nigeria and how climate change has exacerbated those conditions and how this fits into the Pentagon's perspective and interest in the issue?
00:34:50
Speaker
So, Nigeria is another country that has strategic significance for the U.S., not perhaps on the same scale as, say, Pakistan or Japan, but still important. Nigeria is a leading oil producer, not as important as it once was, perhaps, but nonetheless important.
00:35:13
Speaker
But Nigeria is also a key player in peacekeeping operations throughout Africa. And because the U.S. doesn't want to play that role itself, it relies on Nigeria for peacekeeping troops in many parts of Africa. And Nigeria occupies a key base of territory
00:35:35
Speaker
in Central Africa, which is surrounded by countries which are much more fragile and are threatened by terrorist organizations. So, Nigeria's stability is very important in this larger picture. In fact, Nigeria itself is at risk from terrorist movements, especially Boko Haram and splinter groups.
00:36:05
Speaker
which continue to reign havoc in northern Nigeria. Despite years of effort by the Nigerian government to crush Boko Haram, it's still a powerful force. And partly, this is due to climate change. The Boko Haram operates in areas around Lake Chad
00:36:27
Speaker
which is now a small sliver of what it once was. It has greatly diminished in size because of global warming and water mismanagement. And so the farmers and fisher folk
00:36:43
Speaker
whose livelihood depended on Lake Chad has all been decimated. Many of them have become impoverished. The Nigerian government has proved inept and capable of providing for their needs. And many of these people have therefore fallen prey to the appeals of recruitment by Boko Haram, young men without jobs.
00:37:07
Speaker
So climate change is facilitating, is fueling the persistence of groups like Boko Haram and other terrorist groups in Nigeria. But that's only part of the picture. There's also growing conflict between pastoralists. These are herders, cattle herders.
00:37:30
Speaker
whose lands are being devastated by desertification in the Sahel region. The southern fringe of the Sahara is expanding with climate change and driving these pastoralists into areas occupied by—these are all Muslim, the pastoralists are primarily Muslims—
00:37:53
Speaker
They're moving into lands occupied by Christians, mainly Christian farmers, and there's been terrible violence in the past few years. Many hundreds of thousands of people displaced, again inept
00:38:09
Speaker
Nigerian response. And so I could go on. There's violence in the Nigerian Delta region, the Niger Delta area in the south, and in the area there are breakaway provinces. So Nigeria is at permanent risk of breaking apart.
00:38:30
Speaker
And the US provides a lot of military aid to Nigeria and provides training. So the US is involved in this country and faces a possibility of greater disequilibrium and greater US involvement.
00:38:49
Speaker
Right. So I think this does a really good job of painting the picture of this factor of threat multiplication from climate change. Right. So climate change makes getting food, water and shelter more difficult. There's more extreme weather, which makes those things more difficult, which increases stability and for places that are already
00:39:10
Speaker
not that stable, they get a lot more unstable, and then states begin to collapse, and you get terrorism, and then you get mass migration, and then there's more disease spreading, so you get conditions for increased pandemics. You know, whether it's in Nigeria or Pakistan and India or the Philippines or the United States and China and Russia, everything just keeps getting worse and worse and more difficult and challenging with climate change.
00:39:39
Speaker
So could you describe the ladder of escalation of climate change related issues for the military and how that fits into all this?
00:39:48
Speaker
Well, now this is an expression that I made up to try to put this in some kind of context, drawing on the ladder of escalation from the nuclear era when the military talked about the escalation of conflict from a skirmish to a small war, to a big war, to the first use of nuclear weapons to all out nuclear war. That was the ladder of escalation of the nuclear age.
00:40:17
Speaker
And what I see happening is something of a similar nature, where at present we're still dealing mainly with these threat multiplying conditions occurring in the smaller and weaker states of Africa.
00:40:37
Speaker
Chad, Niger, Sudan, and the Central American countries, Nicaragua and El Salvador, where
Conflict Escalation from Climate Change
00:40:49
Speaker
you see all of these conditions developing, but not posing a threat to the central core of the major powers.
00:41:00
Speaker
But as climate change advances, the military expects and US intelligence agencies expect, as I indicated, that larger, stronger, richer states will experience the same kinds of
00:41:19
Speaker
consequences and dangers and begin to experience this kind of state disintegration. So what we're seeing in places like Chad in Niger, which involves this skirmishing between insurgents, terrorists, and other factions in which the US is playing a remote role,
00:41:44
Speaker
to situations where Pakistan collapses, a Nigeria collapses, a Saudi Arabia collapses, would require a much greater involvement by American forces on a much larger scale. And that would be the next step up a ladder of escalation arising from climate change.
00:42:09
Speaker
And then you have the possibility, as I indicated, where nuclear-armed states would engage in conflict, would be drawn into conflict because of climate-related factors like the melting of the Himalayan glaciers, Indian-Pakistan going to war, or Indian-China going to war.
00:42:32
Speaker
Or we haven't discussed this, but another consequence of climate change is the melting of the Arctic. And this is leading to competition between the U.S. and Russia, in particular for control of that area.
00:42:48
Speaker
So, you go from disintegration of small states to disintegration of medium-sized states to conflict between nuclear-armed states and eventually to conceivable U.S. involvement in climate-related conflicts. That would be the latter of escalation as I see it.
00:43:09
Speaker
And on top of that, you would have multiple disasters happening simultaneously in the United States of America, which would require a massive U.S. military response. You can envision, and the military certainly worries about this,
00:43:29
Speaker
a time when US forces are fully immobilized and incapable of carrying out what they see as their primary defense tasks because they're divided. Half their forces are engaging in disaster relief in the United States, and another half are dealing with these multiple disasters in the rest of the world.
00:43:55
Speaker
So I have a few bullet points here that you could expand upon or correct about the ladder of escalation as you describe it, right? So at first, there's the humanitarian interventions where the military is running around to solve particular humanitarian disasters like in Tukloban. Then there's limited military operations to support allies. There's disruptions to supply chains and the increase of failed states.
00:44:25
Speaker
There's conflict over resources. There's internal climate catastrophes and complex catastrophes, which you just mentioned. And then there's what you call climate shockwaves. And finally, all hell breaking loose, where you have multiple failed states, tons of mass migration, a situation in which no state, no matter how powerful, is able to handle.
00:44:47
Speaker
Climate shockwave would be a situation where you have multiple extreme disasters occurring simultaneously in different parts of the world, leading to a breakdown in the supply chains that keep the world's economy afloat and keep food and energy supplies flowing around the world.
00:45:11
Speaker
And this is certainly a very real possibility. Scientists speak of clusters of extreme events, and we've begun to see that. We saw that in 2017 when Hurricane Harvey was followed immediately by Hurricane Irma.
00:45:33
Speaker
in Florida and then Hurricane Maria in the Caribbean and Puerto Rico. The U.S. military responded to each of those events, but had some difficulty moving emergency supplies, first from Houston to Florida and then to Puerto Rico. At the same time, the West
00:45:53
Speaker
of the U.S. was burning up. There were multiple forest fires out of control, and the military was also supplying emergency assistance to California, Washington State, and Oregon. That's an example of clusters of extreme events.
00:46:12
Speaker
Now, looking into the future, scientists are predicting that this could occur in several continents simultaneously. As a result, food supply chains would break down. And many parts of the world rely on imported grain supplies or other foodstuffs and imported energy. And in a situation like this, you could imagine
00:46:38
Speaker
a climate shockwave in which trade just collapses and entire states suffer from a major catastrophe, food catastrophes, leading to state collapse and all that we've been talking about. Can you describe what all hell-breaking loses?
00:46:58
Speaker
This is my expression for the all of the above scenario. You have these multiple disasters occurring, and one that we have not discussed at length is the threat to American bases.
00:47:14
Speaker
and how that would impact on the military. So you have these multiple disasters occurring that create a demand on the military to provide assistance. Domestically, like I say, many areas needing emergency assistance, and not just of the obvious sort of handing out water bottles, but as I say,
00:47:42
Speaker
complex emergencies where the military is being called in to provide law and order, to restore infrastructure, play the role of government. So you need large capacity organizations to step in.
00:47:58
Speaker
At the same time, it's being asked to do that in other parts of the world or to intervene in conflicts with nuclear-armed states happening simultaneously. But at the same time, its own bases have been immobilized by rising seas and flooding and fires. All of this is a very realistic scenario because parts of it have already occurred.
00:48:27
Speaker
All right, so let's make a little bit of a pivot here into something that you mentioned earlier, which is the melting of the Arctic.
Melting Arctic Ice & Global Tensions
00:48:35
Speaker
So I'm curious if you could explain the geopolitical situation that arises from the melting of the Arctic region that creates a new ocean that leads to Arctic shipping lanes, a new front to defend, and resource competition for fish, minerals, natural gas, and oil.
00:48:54
Speaker
Yes, indeed. In a way, the Arctic is how the military first got interested in climate change, especially the Navy, because the Navy never had much of an Arctic responsibility. It was covered with ice, so its ships couldn't go there.
00:49:12
Speaker
except for submarines on long-range patrols under the CIs, but Navy never had to worry about the Arctic. And then around 2009, the Department of the Navy created a climate change task force to address the consequences of a melting Arctic.
00:49:32
Speaker
sea ice and came to the view that, as you say, this is a new ocean that they would have to defend, that they'd never thought about before, for which they were not prepared. Their ships were not equipped to operate, for the most part, in the Arctic.
00:49:50
Speaker
So ever since then, the Arctic has become a major geopolitical concern of the United States. On multiple fronts, the melting of the ice cap makes it possible to extract resources from the area, oil and natural gas. And it turns out there's a lot of oil and natural gas buried.
00:50:14
Speaker
under the seabed of the Arctic. And oil and gas companies are very eager to exploit those untapped reserves. So the area, what was once considered worthless, is now a valuable geo-economic prize. And countries have exerted claims to the area, and some of these claims overlap.
00:50:43
Speaker
You have border disputes in the Arctic between Russia and the United States, Russia and Norway, Canada and Greenland, and so on. There are now border disputes because of the resources that are in these areas.
00:51:03
Speaker
Because of drilling occurring there, you now need to worry about spills and disasters occurring. So that creates a whole new level of naval and coast guard operations in the Arctic. This has also led to shipping lanes opening up into the region. And who controls those shipping lanes becomes a matter of interest.
00:51:31
Speaker
Russia is trying to develop what it calls the northern sea route from the Pacific to the Atlantic, going across its northern territory, across Siberia. And potentially, this could save two weeks of travel for container ships.
00:51:52
Speaker
moving from Rotterdam, say, to Shanghai could be commercially very important. Russia wants to control that route, but the US and other countries says it's not yours to control. So you have disputes over the sea routes.
00:52:10
Speaker
But then more important than any of the above is that Russia has militarized its portion of the Arctic, which is the largest portion. This has become a new frontier for U.S.-Russian military competition.
00:52:29
Speaker
And there's been a huge increase in military exercises, base construction. So now from the U.S. point of view, the Arctic is a new front in the future war with Russia, and they're training for this all the time. Could you explain how the Bering Strait fits in?
00:52:51
Speaker
The Bering Strait between the U.S. and Russia is a pretty narrow space, and that's the only way to get from the North Pacific into the Arctic region, whether you're going to northern Alaska and northern Canada or across
00:53:12
Speaker
from China and Japan across the northern sea route to Europe. So this becomes a strategic passageway, the way Gibraltar has been in the past, and both the US and Russia are fortifying.
00:53:29
Speaker
that passageway. And there's constant tussling going on there. It doesn't get reported much, but every other week or so, Russia will send up its warplanes right to the edge of US airspace.
00:53:46
Speaker
in that region, or the U.S. will send its planes into the edge of Russian airspace to test their reflexes and their naval maneuvers happening all the time. So this has become seen as an important strategic place on the global chessboard. How does climate change affect the Bering Strait?
00:54:09
Speaker
Well, it affects it in the sense that it's become the entry point to the Arctic. And climate change has made the Arctic a place you want to go, that it wasn't before. So one point that you made in your book that I'd like to highlight is that the Arctic is seen as a main place for conflict between the great powers in the coming years. Is that correct?
00:54:35
Speaker
Yes. So for the U.S. and Russia, it's important. Here we would focus more on the Barents Sea, the area above Norway. And it helps, of course, to have a map in your mind. But Russia shares a border with Norway.
00:54:54
Speaker
and it's extreme north. And that part of Russia is the Kola Peninsula, and it's where the city of Murmansk is located. And that's the headquarters of Russia's Northern Fleet, and where it keeps its nuclear missile submarines are based there.
00:55:18
Speaker
That's one of Russia's few ways of access into the Atlantic Ocean from its own territory, from its major naval port at Murmansk. So the waters adjacent to northern Norway and Russia on the other side
00:55:37
Speaker
have become a very important strategic military location. And the U.S. has started building military bases with Norway in that area, close to the Russian border. We've now stationed B-1 bombers in that area. So it is seen as a
00:55:59
Speaker
likely first area of conflict in the event of a war between the US and Russia is going to occur at that spot. Climate change figures into this because Russia views its Arctic region as critical economically as well as strategically and is building up its military forces there.
00:56:24
Speaker
And therefore, from a US NATO point of view, it's a more strategically important region. But to ask about China, and China has become very interested in the Arctic as a source of raw materials, but also as a strategic passageway.
00:56:43
Speaker
from its east coast to Europe, for the reason I indicated, if once the ice cap melts, they'll be able to ship goods to Europe in much shorter space of time and bring goods back if they can go through the Arctic.
00:57:03
Speaker
China also is very interested in drilling for energy and for minerals. There are a lot of valuable minerals believed to be in Greenland.
00:57:18
Speaker
And you can't get to those now because Greenland is covered with ice. But as that ice melts, which it's doing at a rapid rate, the ground is becoming exposed and mining activities have begun there for
00:57:35
Speaker
things like uranium and rare earths and other valuable minerals. And China is very deeply interested in mining there. And this has led to diplomatic maneuverings. Then Donald Trump once talked about buying Greenland to geopolitical competition between the US and China over Greenland and this area.
00:58:02
Speaker
Are there any ongoing proposals for how to resolve territorial disputes in the Arctic? Well, the short answer is no.
00:58:11
Speaker
this talk, there was something called the Arctic Council. This is an organization of the states that occupy territory in the Arctic region. And it has some very positive environmental agendas and has had some
00:58:32
Speaker
success in addressing non geopolitical issues, but it has not been given the authority to address territorial disputes that members have resisted that. It's not a forum that would provide for that. There is a mechanism
00:58:54
Speaker
under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea that allows for adjudication of offshore territorial disputes. And it's possible that that could be a forum for discussion, but mostly these disputes have remained unresolved.
00:59:15
Speaker
I don't know much about this. Does that have something to do with like you have X many miles from your seashelf or like something having to do with like the tectonic plates or ocean something?
00:59:28
Speaker
Yes. So under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, you're allowed a 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zone off your coastline. Any coastal country can claim 200 nautical miles. But you're also allowed an extra 150 miles
00:59:52
Speaker
If you can prove scientifically that your outer continental shelf extends beyond 200 nautical miles, then you can extend your EEZ another 150 nautical miles out to 350 nautical miles.
01:00:11
Speaker
And the Northern Arctic has islands and territories that have allowed contending states to claim overlapping EEZs on this basis. And Russia has claimed vast areas of the Arctic as part of its outer continental shelf. But the great imperial power of Denmark
01:00:40
Speaker
which, territorially, is one of the largest imperial powers on Earth because it owns Greenland. And Greenland also has an extended outer continental shelf that overlaps with Russia's
01:00:56
Speaker
as does Canada's. You have to picture the looking down, not on the kind of wall maps we had of the world in our classrooms that make the Arctic look huge. But from a global map, everything comes closer together up there. And so these extended EEZs overlap. And so Greenland and Canada and Russia
01:01:25
Speaker
are all claiming the North Pole. Okay, so I think that paints really well the picture of the already existing and conflict there and how it will likely only get worse in terms of the amount of conflict
01:01:40
Speaker
It'd be great if we could focus a bit on nuclear weapons risk and climate change in particular. So I'm curious if you could explain the DOD's concerns of improving China and a nuclear North Korea and India and Pakistan and other nuclear states in this evolving situation of increasing territorial disputes due to climate change.
01:02:04
Speaker
From a nuclear war perspective, the two greatest dangers, I think, the disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers.
01:02:14
Speaker
sparking a war between India and China that would go nuclear, or one between India and Pakistan that would go nuclear. So that's one climate-related risk of nuclear escalation. The other is in the Arctic. And here, I think the danger is
01:02:37
Speaker
the fact that Russia has turned the Arctic into a major stronghold for its nuclear weapons capabilities. It stations a large share of its nuclear retaliatory warheads on submarines and other forces that are based in the Arctic.
01:03:00
Speaker
And so in the event of a conflict between the US and Russia, this could very well take place in the Arctic region and trigger the use of nuclear weapons as a consequence. I think we've done a really good job of showing all of the bad things that happen as climate change gets worse. So the Pentagon has perspective on everything that we've covered here. Is that correct?
01:03:31
Speaker
Yes. So how does the Pentagon intend to address the issue of climate change and how it affects its operations? So the Pentagon has multiple responses to this, and this began as early as 2010.
01:03:48
Speaker
the Quadrennial Defense Review of 2010. This is every four-year strategic blueprint released by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense. And that year was the first one that, number one, identified climate change as a national security threat. And
01:04:10
Speaker
spelled out the responses that the military should make. And there were three parts to that. One part is, I guess you would call it hardening US bases to the impacts of climate change, increasing resiliency and seawalls to protect low-lying bases, but, you know, otherwise enhancing the survivability of US bases in the face of climate change. That's one response.
01:04:40
Speaker
A second response is in mitigating the department's own contributions to climate change by reducing its reliance on fossil fuels. And I could talk what specifically they're doing in that area. And the third is, and I think this is very interesting, they said that
01:05:06
Speaker
that because climate change is a global problem, this was specific, climate change is a global problem, affects our allies and friends, and therefore we should work with our allies and with the military forces of our allies and friends to do the same things we're doing at home to do in their countries as well. That is to build resilience, to prepare for climate change, to reduce impacts,
01:05:35
Speaker
so that this would be a global cooperative effort, military to military, which has gotten very little attention, I think, from the media and from Congress and elsewhere, but a very important part of American foreign policy with respect to climate change.
01:05:56
Speaker
So there's hardening our own bases and systems. I believe in your book you mentioned, for example, turning bases into operational islands such that their energy and material needs are disconnected from supply lines. And the second was reducing the greenhouse emissions of the military, and the third is helping allies with such efforts.
01:06:19
Speaker
So I'm curious if you could describe a bit more the first and the second of these, the hardening of our own systems and bases and becoming more green. Because, I mean, it is interesting and at least a little bit surprising that the military is trying to become green in order to improve combat readiness through independence of foreign and domestic fuel needs and sources. So could you explain a little bit more this, for example, the drive to create a green fleet in the Navy?
01:06:49
Speaker
Sure. Now, this began during the Obama administration and then went semi underground during the Trump administration. So the information we have is mainly pre-Trump under
01:07:07
Speaker
President Biden, climate change has been elevated to a national security threat. As per an executive order, he issued shortly after taking office. And our new secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, has issued a complimentary statement that climate change is a Department of Defense concern. So activities that were prohibited
01:07:35
Speaker
the Trump administration will now be revived. So we will now hear a lot more about this in the months ahead. But there is a four-year blackout of information on what was being done. But during the Obama administration, the Department of Defense was ordered
01:07:57
Speaker
to work on adaptation and mitigation both as part of its responsibilities. The adaptation affected particularly bases in low-lying coastal areas. And there are a lot of U.S. bases, for historic reasons, are located along the east coast of the U.S. That's where they start out.
01:08:22
Speaker
The most important of them is the Norfolk Naval Station in Virginia, the most important naval base in the United States. It's at sea level, and it's on basically reclaimed swamplands, and it's subsiding into the ocean at the same time sea level is rising.
01:08:44
Speaker
But there are many other bases along the East Coast and Florida and in the Gulf Coast that are at equal risk. And so part of what the military is doing is to build seawalls to protect them against sea surges.
01:09:03
Speaker
moving critical equipment from areas that are in high flood prone areas to areas that are at higher elevation, adopting codes. Any new buildings built on these bases have to be hardened against hurricanes.
01:09:21
Speaker
and sensitive electronic equipment has to be put in the higher stories so that if they are flooded, they won't be damaged. So there's a lot of very concrete measures that have to do with base construction.
01:09:39
Speaker
that have been undertaken to enhance the resilience of bases in response to extreme storms and flooding. So that's one aspect of this. Mitigation aspect is to reduce reliance on fossil fuels and to convert as wherever possible vehicles, air, ground, and sea vehicles to use alternative fuels.
01:10:09
Speaker
So the Navy, the Army, the Air Force are converting their non-tactical vehicle fleets. They all have huge numbers of ordinary sedans and vans and trucks. Increasingly, these will be hybrids or electric vehicles. And the Air Force is experimenting with alternative fuels produced by LG.
01:10:35
Speaker
and the Navy has experimented with alternative fuels derived from agricultural products and so on. So there's a lot of experimentation going on. A lot of some of the biggest solar arrays in the U.S. are on U.S. military bases or constructed at the behest of U.S. military bases by private energy companies.
01:11:05
Speaker
So, those are some of the activities that are underway. So, in addition to threatening US military bases and the bases of our allies, climate change will also affect the safety and security of, for example, biosafety level four labs.
01:11:26
Speaker
and also nuclear power plants. I'm curious how you view the risks of climate change affecting crucial infrastructure, should it fail, could create global catastrophe, for example, from nuclear power plants melting down or pathogens being released from biosafety labs that fail under the stresses of climate change.
01:11:51
Speaker
I have not seen the literature on the bio labs in the Pentagon literature. What they do worry about is the fragility of the US energy
01:12:07
Speaker
infrastructure in particular, in part because they depend on the same energy infrastructure as we do for their energy needs, for electricity transmission pipelines and the like, to supply their bases and their other facilities.
01:12:27
Speaker
And they're very aware that U.S. energy infrastructure is exceedingly vulnerable to climate change. Either a lot of it, a very large part of our infrastructure is on the East Coast and the West Coast, very close to sea level, very exposed to storm damage.
01:12:50
Speaker
and a lot of it is just fragile. So a clearer example of that is Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico when the electric system collapsed entirely and the Army Corps of Engineers had to come in and were there for almost an entire year rebuilding
01:13:09
Speaker
the energy infrastructure of Puerto Rico. They've had to do this in other places as well. So they're very worried that climate change disasters, multiple disasters, will knock out the power in the U.S., causing major cascading failures.
01:13:33
Speaker
So, when energy fails, then petrochemical facilities fail. And that's what happened in Houston, in Hurricane Harvey. The power failure went out, and these petrochemical facilities, which Houston has many of, failed. And toxic chemicals spilled out. Also, the sewer system collapsed.
01:13:57
Speaker
So you have with cascading failures, producing toxic threat. And the military had to issue toxic protective clothing to its personnel in doing rescue operations because the water in flooded areas of Houston was poisonous. It's the cascading effects that they worry about. This happened in New York City with Hurricane Sandy.
01:14:25
Speaker
in 2012, where power went out and gas stations couldn't operate and hospitals and nursing homes couldn't function.
01:14:38
Speaker
Well, I'm going on here, but you get a sense of the interrelationship between these critical elements of infrastructure. Fires are another aspect of this, as we know from California. A lot of US bases in California are at risk from fires and the transmission lines that carry the energy.
01:15:04
Speaker
I was going to mention the colonial pipeline disaster, which was a cyber attack, not climate related, but that exposes the degree to which our energy infrastructure is fragile. Yeah, I mean, if it rains or snows just enough, you know, we've all experienced losing power for six hours or more. The energy grid seems very fragile, even to relatively normal weather.
01:15:35
Speaker
Yes, but with climate change and these multiple simultaneous disasters where the whole systems break down. Do you see lethal autonomous weapons as fitting into the risks of escalation in a world stressed by climate change?
01:15:56
Speaker
Well, I see lethal autonomous weapons as a major issue and problem, which I've written about and I worry about a great deal. Now, what is their relationship to climate change? I couldn't say. I think the military in general is facing the world.
01:16:18
Speaker
in which they feel that humans are increasingly unable to cope with the demands of time compression and decision making and the complexity of the environment in which decision makers have to operate.
01:16:40
Speaker
And that's partly technological. It's partly just the complexity of the world that we've been discussing. So there's an ever increasing sense among the military that commanders have to be provided with computer assisted decision making.
01:17:03
Speaker
and autonomous operations because they can't process the amount of data that's coming into them simultaneously. This is behind not just autonomous weapons systems, but autonomous weapons systems decision-making.
01:17:24
Speaker
The new plans for how the Army, Navy, and Air Force will operate will be fewer human decision makers and more machine information processors and decision makers in which humans will be given a menu of possible choices.
01:17:47
Speaker
but they will strike this set of targets or that set of targets, but not stop and think about this and maybe we should de-escalate. They're gonna be militarized options. So some sense of lethal autonomous weapons is potentially exacerbating or catalyzing the speed at which the ladder of escalation is moved through.
01:18:15
Speaker
No question about it. Many factors are contributing to that. The speed of weaponry, the introduction of hypersonic missiles, which cuts down flight time from 30 minutes to five minutes.
01:18:30
Speaker
The fact that wars are being conducted in what they call multiple domains simultaneously, cyberspace, air, sea, and ground, that no commander can know what's happening in all of those domains and make decisions. So you have to have
01:18:51
Speaker
They want to create a super brain called the Joint All-Domain Command and Control System, the JAD-C2 system, which will collect data from sensors all over the planet.
01:19:09
Speaker
and compress it into simplified assessments of what's happening, and then tell commanders, you know, here are your choices, one, two, and three, and you have five seconds to choose. And if not, we'll pick the best one, and we'll be linked directly to the fireworks and to launch weapons. This is what the future will look like.
01:19:37
Speaker
And they're testing this now. It's called Project Convergence. So how do you see all of this affecting the risks of human extinction, existential risks?
01:19:51
Speaker
I'm deeply concerned about this inclination to rely more on machines to make decisions of life and death for the planet. I think everybody should be worried about this. And I don't think enough attention is being paid to these dangers of automating life and death decision making. But this is moving ahead very rapidly. And I think it does pose enormous risks.
01:20:19
Speaker
The reason that I'm so worried is that I think the computer-assisted decision-making will have a bias towards military actions.
01:20:33
Speaker
You know, humans are imperfect, and sometimes we make mistakes. Sometimes we get angry, and we go in the direction of being more violent and brutal. There's no question about that. But we also have a capacity to say, stop, wait a minute. There's something wrong here. And maybe we should think twice and hold back.
01:21:00
Speaker
And that saved us on a number of occasions from nuclear extinction. I recommend the book Gambling with Armageddon by Martin Sherwin, a new account of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a day by day, hour by hour account, in which it was clear that the US and Russia came very close, very extremely close to starting a nuclear war.
01:21:27
Speaker
in 1962. And somebody said, wait a minute, let's just think about this. Let's not rush into this. Let's give it another 24 hours to see if we can come up with a solution. And Adlai Stevenson apparently played a key role in this. I fear that the machines we designed are not going to have that kind of thinking
01:21:54
Speaker
built into them, that kind of hesitancy, that second thinking. I think the machines are going to be designed. The algorithms that inhabit them are going to reflect the most aggressive possible outcomes. And that's why I fear that we move closer to human extinction in a crisis.
01:22:20
Speaker
than before, and because the time of decision-making is going to be so compressed that humans are going to have very little chance to think about this. So how do you view the interplay of climate change and autonomous weapons as affecting existential risk?
01:22:43
Speaker
Climate change is just going to make everything on the planet more stressful. It's going to create a lot of stress, a lot of catastrophes occurring simultaneously, creating a lot of
01:22:58
Speaker
risk events happening that people are going to have to be dealing with, and they're going to create a lot of hard, difficult choices. Let's say you're the president, you're the commander in chief, and you have multiple hurricanes striking and fires striking the United States. That's hardly
01:23:22
Speaker
an unlikely outcome at the same time that there's a crisis with China and Russia occurring.
01:23:32
Speaker
you know, where war would be a possible outcome. You know, there's a naval clash at sea in the South China Sea or something happening on the Ukraine border. And meanwhile, Nigeria is breaking apart and India and Pakistan are at the verge of war. These are very likely situations in another 10 or 20 years if climate change proceeds the way it is.
01:23:58
Speaker
So you're just the complexity of the environment, the stress that people will be under, the decisions they're going to have to make swiftly between do we save Miami or do we save Tokyo? Do we save Los Angeles or do we save New York or do we save London? We only have so many resources.
01:24:26
Speaker
In these conditions, I think the inclination is going to be to rely more on machines to make decisions and to carry out actions. And that, I think, has inherent natures in it. Do you and the Pentagon have a timeline for how much and how fast is the instability from climate change coming?
01:24:49
Speaker
This is a progression. I mean, we're on that path. So there's no point at which you could say we've reached that
Current Climate Conditions & Future Projections
01:24:57
Speaker
level. It's just an ever increasing level of stress. How do you see the world in five or 10 years given the path that we're currently on?
01:25:07
Speaker
I'm pessimistic about this. And the reason I'm pessimistic is because if you go back and read the very first reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC,
01:25:23
Speaker
their very first reports, and they would give a series of projections based on their estimates of the pace of greenhouse gas emissions. If they go this high, then you have these projections. If they go higher, then these projections
01:25:44
Speaker
out to 2030, 2040, 2050, we've all seen these charts. So if you go back to the first ones, basically, we're living in 2021, what they said were the worst case projections for 2040 to 2050, by and large. So what I'm saying is we're moving into the danger zone much, much faster than the most
01:26:12
Speaker
worst-case scenarios that scientists were talking about 10 years ago and 20 years ago. And if that's the case, then we should be very, very worried about the pace at which this is occurring, because we're off the charts now.
01:26:29
Speaker
from those earlier predictions of how rapidly sea level rise was occurring, desertification was occurring, heat waves. We're living in a 2050 world now. So where are we going to be in 2030? We're going to be in a 2075 world. And that world was a pretty damn scary world.
01:26:56
Speaker
All right, so I'm mindful of the time here, so just a few more questions about messaging would be nice. Do you think that tying existential risks to national security issues would benefit the movement towards reducing existential risks, given that climate change is elevated in some sense by the DOD taking it seriously on account of national security?
01:27:20
Speaker
So, let me explain why I wrote this book. This is very much a product of the Trump era, but I think it's still true today that you have a country that's divided between environmentalists
01:27:36
Speaker
and climate deniers. And this divide has prevented forward movement in Congress to pass legislation that will make a significant difference in this country. And I believe this has to come from national level, the kind of changes we need, the massive investments
01:27:58
Speaker
in renewables and charging stations for electric vehicles. All these things require national leadership. And right now that's impossible because of the fundamental divide between the Democrats and Republicans or denialists, environmentalists, however you want to put it. Some of my friends in the environmental community, dear friends, think if we could only get across the message that things are getting worse,
01:28:28
Speaker
that those deniers will finally wake up and change their views. I don't think that's going to happen. I think appeal, you know, more scientific evidence about climate change is not going to win over more people. We've tried that. We've done everything we can to make the scientific evidence known.
01:28:50
Speaker
I believe that the military perspective that this is a threat to the national security of the United States of America. Are you a patriotic American or not? Do you care about the security of this country or not? This is not a matter of environmentalism or anti-environmentalism. This is about the national security of this country.
01:29:14
Speaker
Where do you stand on that? This is a third approach that could possibly win over some segment of that population that until now has resisted action on climate change. That's not going to listen to an environmentalist or green argument. There is evidence that this approach is making a difference.
01:29:37
Speaker
Republicans who won't even talk about the causes of climate change, but who acknowledge that their communities are at risk.
01:29:49
Speaker
or the country is at risk on a national security basis and therefore are willing to invest in some of the changes that are necessary for that reason. So I do believe that making this argument could win over enough of that resistant population to make it possible to actually achieve forward momentum.
01:30:18
Speaker
Do you think that relating climate change to migration issues is helpful for messaging? I'm not sure because I think people who are opposed to migration don't care what the cause is. But I do think that it might make it feed into the argument that I was just making.
01:30:43
Speaker
that our security would be better off by emphasizing climate change and therefore taking steps to reduce the pressures that lead climate migrants to migrate. The military certainly takes that view. So it could be helpful. I think it's a difficult topic.
01:31:08
Speaker
All right, so given everything we've discussed here today, how would you characterize and summarize the Pentagon's interest view and action on climate change and why that matters?
01:31:23
Speaker
So, now we have a new test because, as I've indicated, we had a blackout period of four years during the Trump administration when all of this was hidden and couldn't be discussed. So, we don't know how much was accomplished. Now, this is an explicit priority for the Department of Defense.
01:31:46
Speaker
the defense budget and other documents say that this is a priority for the department and the armed forces, and they are required to take steps to adapt to climate change and to mitigate their role in climate change. So we have to see
01:32:08
Speaker
how much actually is accomplished in this new period before really you can make any definitive assessment. But I think that you can see that the language adopted by the Biden administration and Lloyd Austin at the Department of Defense is so much stronger and more vigorous than what the Pentagon was saying in the Obama administration.
01:32:38
Speaker
So, even though there was a four-year blackout period, there was a learning curve going on. And what they're saying today is much more advanced in the sense of recognizing the severity of the risk posed by climate change and the necessity of making this a priority.
01:33:00
Speaker
All right, so as we wrap up, are there any final words or anything you'd like to share that you feel is left unsaid or any parting words for the audience?
01:33:11
Speaker
As I started out, we mustn't forget that if you asked anybody in the military what their job is, they're gonna come back to China, number one. So we shouldn't forget that, defending against China. It's only after you peel away the layers of how they're gonna operate in a climate-altered world that all of these other concerns start spilling out. But it's not gonna be the first thing that they're likely to say.
01:33:40
Speaker
I think that has to be clear based on my conversations. But there is a real awareness that, in fact, climate change is going to have an immense impact on the operations of the military in the years ahead, and that its impact is going to grow exponentially.
01:34:01
Speaker
All right, well thank you very much for coming on, Michael, and for sharing all of this with us. I really appreciated your book, and I recommend others check it out as well. It's all hell breaking loose. I think it does a really good job of showing the ways in which the world is gonna get worse through climate change. There's a lot of really great examples in there, so also the audio book has a really great narrator, which I very much liked. So yeah, thank you very much for coming on. If people want to
01:34:28
Speaker
Check or follow you out on social media where and how can they do that? Oh, I met Michael claire.com Do you also have a place for you where you list publications? That site at that site. Okay. All right, and it's and it's klare Michael claire klare All right. Thank you very much Michael
01:34:53
Speaker
Thanks for joining us. If you found this podcast interesting or useful, consider sharing it on social media with friends and subscribing on your preferred podcasting platform. We'll be back again soon with another episode in the FLI podcast.