9. WEAPON OF MASS DESTRUCTION
NAVAL STATION NORFOLK is home to the US Navy’s Atlantic fleet, an awesome collection of military power that is in a terrible way the crowning glory of our civilization. When I visited the base, the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt was in port, a 1,000-foot-long floating war machine that was central to US military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The TR, as it’s referred to on the base, was bustling with activity—cranes loaded equipment onto the deck, sailors rushed up and down the gangplanks. Security was tight everywhere. While I was out on Pier 7, one of the base’s new double-decker concrete piers that is so big it feels like a shopping mall parking lot, I wandered over to have a close look at USS Gravely, a guided missile destroyer that has spent a lot of hours patrolling in the Persian Gulf. Armed men on the deck watched me warily—even my official escort seemed jittery (“I think we should step back a bit,” he said, grabbing my arm). Navy helicopters hovered overhead, and there was a constant hum of activity as 75,000 sailors and civilians who work on the base went about the daily business of keeping the ships spit-shined and ready for deployment at any moment.
You can’t spend ten minutes on the base without feeling the deep sense of history here. The Battle of Hampton Roads, a famous naval showdown between two ironclad Civil War ships, occurred just offshore. The base was a key departure point during World War II for thousands of sailors, many of whom never returned. Their ghosts still haunt the place. This is a world born of war, where everyone’s aunt or uncle has a story to tell about a night in a port in Brisbane or Barcelona or about the way their ears rang the first time they heard a cannon firing from the deck of a ship. And it’s a world that will soon vanish beneath the ocean. “Norfolk is the biggest navy base in the world, and it’s going to have to be relocated,” former vice president Al Gore told me. “It’s just a question of when.”
Naval Station Norfolk, the largest navy base in the United States, is highly vulnerable to sea-level rise. (Photo courtesy of US Navy)
Naval Station Norfolk is at risk because of a number of factors, including the subsidence of the land the base is built on and the slowdown of the Gulf Stream current, which brushes up against the coast here (as on the rest of the mid-Atlantic coast, sea levels are rising in Norfolk roughly twice as fast as the global average). All it takes is a rainstorm and a big tide, and the Atlantic invades the base—roads are submerged, entry gates impassable. When I visited the base during a nor’easter one December, there was water everywhere. It splashed over my boots as I stood at the edge of the base, looking over the gray water of Willoughby Bay. On Craney Island, the base’s main refueling depot, I saw military vehicles up to their axles in seawater. It pooled in a long, flat grassy area near Admirals’ Row, where naval commanders live in magnificent houses built for the 1907 Jamestown Exposition, which was held on the grounds here. There is no high ground on the base, nowhere to retreat to. It feels like a swamp that has been dredged and paved over—and that’s pretty much what it is.
Norfolk—and the smaller cities nearby, sometimes known collectively as Hampton Roads—is the heartland of the US military. It’s just an hour’s drive from the Pentagon. There are twenty-nine other military bases, shipyards, and installations in the Hampton Roads area, and most of them are in just as much trouble. At nearby Langley Air Force Base, home to several fighter wings and headquarters of the Air Combat Command, base commanders keep thirty thousand sandbags ready to stack around buildings and the runways so they remain usable at high tide. At Dam Neck, another navy base, they stack old Christmas trees on the beach to keep the shoreline from eroding. At NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility, where satellites are launched into orbit, plans are already in motion to move the launchpads back from the beach. “Military readiness is already being impacted by sea-level rise, and it’s just going to get worse,” Virginia senator Tim Kaine told me. How much worse it’s going to get, and how fast, Kaine would not say, in part because he doesn’t want to start a stampede out of the region, and in part because no one knows for sure.
For now, the strategy is just to buy time. Since the mid-1990s, the navy has spent about $250 million to build four new double-decker piers to withstand the rising water. It would cost another $500 million or so to elevate the remaining piers at the base, but that would do nothing to save the many roads and buildings and runways on the base, all of which are critical infrastructure and all of which are in danger. But a base like Norfolk is not just barracks, piers, and ships. It is the hub of an entire ecosystem that has grown up around it during the last century—fuel suppliers and electrical lines and railroad tracks and repair shops and reasonably priced housing stock and decent schools for the children of the men and women who are stationed there. You can’t just move all this to some random spot on the coast of New Hampshire. “You could move some of the ships to other bases or build new smaller bases in more protected places,” said Joe Bouchard, a former commander of Naval Station Norfolk. “But the costs would be enormous. We’re talking hundreds of billions of dollars.”
A few months after my initial visit to the base, I returned with Secretary of State John Kerry. Kerry was visiting the base to help celebrate the 250th anniversary of the US Marine Corps aboard the USS San Antonio, a state-of-the-art amphibious landing ship designed to deliver up to 800 marines ashore via landing craft and helicopters. Kerry said a few words at a ceremony on the lower decks, ate some birthday cake with Marine Corps officers, then headed up to the bridge of the ship to speak to the troops on the ship’s PA system.
From the bridge, Kerry had a commanding view of the base—aircraft carriers to the left, battleships to the right, a panorama of military power. After Kerry made his remarks to the troops, he got an informal briefing from navy officials about the base’s vulnerability to sea-level rise. Already, roads connecting the base to the city of Norfolk flood with major rainstorms, they told him. At high tide, they continued, water surges over the seawalls, threatening key infrastructure and inundating buildings. Kerry, dressed in a sharp blue suit and pink-orange tie, asked the naval officers about the life expectancy of the base. “Twenty to fifty years,” Captain J. Pat Rios told him.
There was a slight but perceptible pause among the naval officers and State Department officials on the bridge. It was an extraordinary moment in the annals of American military history: a US naval officer had just told the secretary of state that this enormous naval base, home to six aircraft carriers and key to operations in Europe and the Middle East, would be essentially inoperable in as little as twenty years. Yes, they could shore up the seawalls for a while. Yes, they could raise roads. But without the massive influx of billions of dollars to fortify and elevate the city of Norfolk, as well as the roads and railroads that connect it to the surrounding region, the base was in big trouble.
Kerry asked a few follow up questions about what was being done now to buy more time, but he hardly seemed perturbed. Part of the reason for that may have been that this daylong tour of the Norfolk naval base was a brief diversion from his more immediate concerns, which was trying to stop the bloodshed in Syria and figure out a way to counter Russian president Vladimir Putin’s rising influence in the region. But a larger part of the reason was that the troubles at the naval base were hardly news to Kerry. He had been talking about the national security implications of climate change for years. But now, reality was starting to catch up with him.
The scale of the military assets that are at risk due to our rapidly changing climate is mind-boggling. The Pentagon manages a global real estate portfolio that includes over 555,000 facilities and 28 million acres of land—virtually all of it will be impacted by climate change in some way. And it’s not just active bases and military installations that are in trouble. The headquarters of the US Southern Command, which is in charge of military operations in South and Central America as well as the Caribbean, is located in a low-lying area near Miami International Airport that is already vulnerable to flooding. The United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, is perched right on the edge of Chesapeake Bay and is often inundated at high tide.
On the East Coast, at least four key military bases are at risk from sea-level rise and storm surges, including Eglin Air Force Base, the largest air force base in the world, which is on the Florida Panhandle. Up in Alaska, the problems are thawing permafrost and coastal erosion that is accelerating with higher tides. The air force’s early-warning radar installations, which help the United States keep a close watch on anything lobbed our way from North Korea or Russia, have been hit particularly hard by coastal erosion. At one radar installation, forty feet of shoreline has been lost, endangering the reliability of the radar.
In some places, these impacts are little more than expensive nuisances. But in others, the future of entire bases is in question. And many of these bases are virtually irreplaceable because of their geography and strategic location. The missile base in the Marshall Islands that I mentioned in the previous chapter is one example. Another is the US naval base on Diego Garcia, a small coral atoll in the Indian Ocean, another strategic military asset that is already threatened by rising seas. The base, which was built during the Cold War, gave the US military a footing from which to counter Soviet influence in the region, as well as to protect shipping lanes out of the Middle East. The base has become a critical logistics hub for sending supplies to joint forces in the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and southern Europe. It also houses Air Force Satellite Control Network equipment used to control the global GPS system. The ships and equipment can be moved easily enough, but giving up a toehold in a vital but flammable part of the world is not something the military likes to do. “To the navy, presence matters,” retired admiral David Titley, who now heads the Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk at Pennsylvania State University, told me. But the atoll is so low-lying that, like the nearby Maldives, it is sure to vanish unless the navy wants to spend billions of dollars turning it into a fortress in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
The Pentagon has spent several years studying its 704 coastal installations and sites to determine which bases are most at risk. Eventually some tough decisions will have to be made about which ones to close, which ones to relocate, which ones to protect. But nobody in Congress—neither Democrats nor Republicans—wants to talk about it. The first indication of these decisions will likely be revealed in the next meeting of the Base Closure and Realignment Commission, which is supposed to occur in 2019—but may well be postponed. “In BRAC, all of the decisions are based on the military value of the military installation that you have,” John Conger, the assistant secretary of defense who is responsible for BRAC, told me in 2015. “Will climate change affect the military value of the installation? Well, sure it will. How can it not if I have an increased flood risk at any particular location? So it affects the military value. The question is, does it dominate the equation? And I don’t think it does—yet.”
In Norfolk, the problems are not only geographical—they are also political. Just as there are climate change hotspots, there are also climate denial hotspots—and Virginia is one of them. Several years ago, former state attorney general Ken Cuccinelli launched a witch-hunt against noted climate scientist Michael Mann, subpoenaing documents and private emails in an attempt to discredit his work. The Republican-dominated Virginia legislature has effectively banned the discussion of climate change—one legislator called sea-level rise “a left-wing term.” Instead, the politically acceptable phrase in Virginia is “recurrent flooding.” Governor Terry McAuliffe, the former head of the Democratic National Committee and fundraiser for President Bill Clinton who was elected in 2014, offered mostly tepid opposition to Virginia’s climate deniers, supporting clean energy while at the same time arguing for more fracking and offshore drilling in the state. To his credit, however, McAuliffe was one of the first governors to push back after President Trump abandoned rules to cut CO2 pollution from power plants, ordering state air regulators to propose a plan by the end of 2017 to scale back CO2 pollution from the utility sector and increase renewable energy investments throughout the state. “The threat of climate change is real,” Governor McAuliffe said when he announced the order.
In Virginia, much of the head-in-the-sand attitude toward climate change can be traced to the political power of the fossil fuel industry, especially Big Coal. Dominion Energy, the state’s biggest electric power company, is also one of the biggest coal burners in America. In fact, 95 percent of the power used on the base is from Dominion, which means that US Navy operations in Norfolk are largely dependent on coal and natural gas. For the sinking base, it’s a kind of fossil-fuel-assisted suicide.
The most immediate problem Norfolk faces is keeping the roads open. One study by the Virginia Institute of Marine Science identified more than five hundred miles of flood-vulnerable roads in Norfolk, Virginia Beach, and the Chesapeake region. “It’s the number one problem we have,” said Captain Pat Rios, who was in charge of navy facilities in the mid-Atlantic region. “If people can’t get back and forth to work on the base because the roads are flooded out, we have a big problem.” But the navy also has a big problem because the roads in Norfolk are not its responsibility—they are the state’s responsibility. And because a large number of the men and women in the Virginia General Assembly who hold the purse strings don’t believe that climate change is a big problem, they don’t want to spend much money fixing it. “They find roads to fix in other parts of the state,” said Joe Bouchard, the former commander of the base.
By far the most important pieces of infrastructure on the base itself, however, are the piers. They are the critical interface between land and sea, highly engineered concrete decks that serve as safe moorings for ships as well as access platforms for service crews. At Norfolk, most of them are as wide as a two-lane highway and about 250 feet long. In the late 1990s, navy engineers realized that the thirteen World War II–era piers at the base were reaching the end of their life-spans. In addition, because they had been built at a time when nobody gave a thought to sea-level rise, the piers were relatively low to the water. And because the sea was rising, they were getting lower every year, which made maintenance difficult. At high tide, the utilities that ran along the underside of the pier deck—electrical, steam, phone, Internet—were often immersed in water, rendering the pier unusable. To make a repair, a crew had to go out in a small boat at low tide and bob around beneath the pier—a slow and dangerous endeavor. “It was not a nuisance problem. It was not a minor operational issue,” said Bouchard. “Sea-level rise was interfering with the combat readiness of the Atlantic fleet.”
In the late 1990s, the navy began replacing the piers. Each one cost about $60 million—a lot of money, but practically a rounding error in the $500-billion annual Defense Department budget. So far, four new piers have been built, which are higher, stronger, and better-designed than the old piers. Bouchard, who was the commander while the first new piers were built, said, “They were built with sea-level rise in mind.”
But out on the base, nobody wants to talk directly about spending money to deal with sea-level rise, mostly because they are worried about drawing scrutiny from climate deniers in Congress who are happy to redline any expenditure with the word “climate” in it. Instead, many people in the military end up talking about climate in much the way eighth graders talk about sex—with code words and winks and suggestive language.
“We didn’t raise the piers because of climate change,” Captain Pat Rios told me during my visit to the base in November. He didn’t quite wink, but almost.
“Then why did you raise them?” I ask.
“Because we needed new piers. And as long as we were building new piers, it didn’t cost much more to build them higher.”
“But isn’t sea-level rise why you built them higher?”
“That was one factor, yes. But the main thing is, we had to build new piers anyway.”
This is how conversations about climate change often go with people in the military these days. They know better than to talk about it directly and forcefully, lest they anger the elected officials who fund their projects and who believe that climate change is not a problem and that we shouldn’t be spending much time or money preparing for it, especially when there are terrorists to fight.
But building new piers, no matter how high off the water they are, is not going to save the base in Norfolk. No matter how much money the Pentagon spends on new piers and seawalls, it won’t matter if people can’t get to the base because the roads are underwater and nobody wants to live in the area because they’re constantly flooded out and the value of their homes is spiraling down, taking with it the region’s tax base, impacting everything from funding for public schools to trash pickup schedules. All of the base’s critical infrastructure—water, sewage, electricity, phones—comes from off-base. “To save the base, you have to save the whole region,” said Bouchard.
Climate change is not an issue the US military can afford to ignore. Drought contributed to the rising food prices that triggered the Arab Spring revolt in Egypt in 2011; it may have helped trigger the civil war in Syria. In northern Nigeria, a region destabilized by extreme cycles of drought and flooding, Boko Haram is terrorizing villages and killing thousands of Nigerians. Wildfires in the western United States are taxing the National Guard, forcing the air force to deploy planes to help out. And increasingly intense and frequent typhoons and hurricanes are pushing the military to get involved in more and more rescue and relief operations, stretching their budgets and interfering with their war-fighting capabilities.
In the decades to come, all this is likely to get worse. Regions like the Arctic, which the US military has basically ignored since the end of the Cold War, are likely to become major flash points in the territorial disputes and resource wars of the future. Within the next decade, as the ice melts away, more tourists will arrive, drilling for gas and oil will increase, new shipping routes will open. The US military will be called upon to protect American interests in a new and unfamiliar world—and one that they are poorly equipped to operate in. In the not-so-distant future, the Bering Strait—the fifty-mile-wide gap between Russia and the United States off the coast of Alaska—could become a strategic choke point in global trade like the Strait of Malacca in Asia or the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf. Rear Admiral Daniel Abel of the US Coast Guard, who is in charge of operations in Alaska, is well aware of the challenges he faces: “If you didn’t know, thirteen percent of the undiscovered petroleum is up there, thirty percent of the undiscovered natural gas, over a trillion dollars of minerals are up there,” he said recently. “The best way I’ve heard it explained is: imagine if you have the Panama Canal and Saudi Arabia’s worth of energy show up at the same place in your area of responsibility. How would you embrace that?”
You can already see glimpses of a militarized future in the Arctic. In September of 2014, six Russian fighters were detected near Alaska; when US and Canadian fighters intercepted the Russian jets about fifty-five miles off the coast, still outside American airspace, the Russians turned around and headed home, but it was a close encounter—and one that happens about ten times a year. In November of 2015, a Russian sub in the Barents Sea near Greenland test-fired a Bulava intercontinental missile—the Bulava is Russia’s latest and deadliest nuclear weapon. The missile has a range of about five thousand miles and can be loaded with up to ten nuclear warheads, each of which can be individually maneuvered. In this case, the test missile was pointed back toward Russia. But a Bulava launched from a sub in the Arctic could easily reach Boston, New York, or Washington, DC.
These provocations were seen by some Pentagon planners as more than old Cold War game-playing. In their view, Putin was sending a not-very-subtle message that he thinks of the Arctic the way Americans once thought of the West—a vast, uncivilized landscape of resources that will belong to whoever stakes the first claim. In the last few years, the Russian military has built a series of new bases in the Arctic, has developed new ports in the region, is upgrading its already-impressive fleet of icebreakers (six of them nuclear-powered), and is constructing a new class of Arctic patrol vessels armed with cruise missiles. In 2007, during a year of sudden and dramatic melting of summer sea ice in the Arctic, Russian soldiers in a minisub dove ten thousand feet beneath the North Pole and planted a Russian flag in the seabed, marking it as their turf. “This isn’t the fifteenth century. You can’t go around the world and just plant flags” to claim territory, Canada’s minister of foreign affairs, Peter MacKay, said dismissively. But in Putin’s world, you can do exactly that. Especially if you have a bunch of subs with Bulava missiles.
Nobody knows what Putin’s intentions are in the Arctic (including, most likely, Putin himself). Some analysts suggest that Putin’s approval ratings in Russia depend on his willingness to poke the West, and that the Arctic is a good place to do it. Michael Klare, author of Resource Wars, a book about the coming conflicts over dwindling fossil fuel reserves, also sees the Arctic as essential to Putin’s future. “He can’t continue to dominate gas and oil sales in Europe without developing the Arctic,” Klare argued. “The pull of geopolitics is very strong this way.” Al Gore has a contrarian view. “Falling oil prices have hurt Putin domestically, and it means he doesn’t have the revenues to fund a big Arctic exploration,” Gore told me. “Depending on the price of oil, and how fast renewables ramp up, there is a real chance that we might not see development in the Arctic.” But regardless of what happens with the oil, the strategic value of controlling—or at least projecting power in—the Arctic is unlikely to fade. As the ice retreats, there will be vast reserves of minerals to unearth (when I was in Greenland recently, it was nearly impossible to rent a helicopter—they were all booked by mining companies scouting potential mine sites), as well as shipping lanes to protect. “Its strategic value only grows,” said Klare.
Whatever happens up there, it will be a big deal for the navy. “The melting ice is opening a new ocean,” said Admiral Gary Roughead, who was US chief of naval operations from 2007 to 2011. “It’s a once-in-a-millennium event.”
Since climate change and the rising waters emerged as major risks more than thirty years ago, the fight over what to do about it has been framed mostly in economic terms. Climate deniers argue that shifting to clean energy will destroy our economy; no, climate activists argue, it will save our economy. If we limit carbon pollution and the Chinese don’t, will that give them a competitive advantage? Once in a while, the moral imperative of preserving the planet for future generations is touched on. But in his 2015 State of the Union address, President Obama put climate change into an explicitly military context: “The Pentagon says that climate change poses immediate risks to our national security,” Obama said. “We should act like it.”
On one level, that was shrewd politics, a way of talking about climate change to people who don’t care about extinction rates among reptiles or food prices in eastern Africa. But it’s also a way of boxing in all the deniers in Congress who have blocked action on climate change—many of whom, it turns out, are big supporters of the military.
During the Obama administration, the Senate Armed Services Committee was made up of characters like Oklahoma senator James Inhofe, Texas senator Ted Cruz, and former Alabama senator (now attorney general) Jeff Sessions, all of whom were fierce believers in the idea that the seven billion human beings living on our planet couldn’t possibly have an impact on the Earth’s climate. Ditto in the House Armed Services Committee, which was now chaired by Representative Mac Thornberry of Texas, who argued in a 2011 op-ed that prayer is a better response to heat waves and drought than cutting carbon pollution.
Within the Pentagon, though, the national security implications of climate change are nothing new. In 2003, Andrew Marshall, head of the Department of Defense’s Office of Net Assessment, the department’s in-house think tank, commissioned a report from futurists Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall about the consequences of abrupt climate change. Marshall, who is sometimes jokingly referred to within the Pentagon as Yoda, has been a mentor to former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and many others. The report, titled “An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States Security,” warned that the threat to global stability posed by rapid climate change vastly eclipses that of terrorism. “Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,” the report concluded. The physical mechanism that drives the abrupt changes described in the report—the rapid shutdown of the North Atlantic ocean circulation system—is no longer an immediate concern. But the larger point—that our national security is deeply tied to the stability of the climate—is more robust than ever. In 2014, the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review, the agency’s main public document describing the current doctrine of the US military, went so far as to draw a direct link between the effects of climate change—drought, rising seas, more extreme weather—and terrorism. “These effects are threat multipliers that will aggravate stressors abroad, such as poverty, environmental degradation, political instability and social tensions—conditions that can enable terrorist activity and other forms of violence,” the review said.
Within the upper ranks of the Trump administration, the link between climate change and conflict is well known. In unpublished written testimony provided to the Senate Armed Services Committee after his confirmation hearing in January 2017, Secretary of Defense James Mattis said it was important for the military to consider how changes like open-water routes in the thawing Arctic and drought in global trouble spots pose challenges for troops and defense planners. He also underscored that this is a real-time issue, not some distant what-if. “Climate change is impacting stability in areas of the world where our troops are operating today,” Mattis said in written answers to questions posed by Democratic members of the committee. “It is appropriate for the Combatant Commands to incorporate drivers of instability that impact the security environment in their areas into their planning.”
Once upon a time, before climate change became taboo for most Republicans (and some Democrats), it was possible to have an open and straightforward discussion about the subject. Even Senator John McCain, now firmly in the denial camp, didn’t hesitate to draw the connection between climate change and national security. “If the scientists are right and temperatures continue to rise,” he said on the Senate floor in 2007, “we could face environmental, economic, and national security consequences far beyond our ability to imagine.”
But after the rise of the Tea Party movement in 2009, which was backed by Koch Industries, the fossil fuel empire run by GOP funders David and Charles Koch, such talk vanished. Instead, Tea Party Republicans worked hard to undermine any connection between climate and national security. Case in point: in 2009, CIA director Leon Panetta quietly started the CIA Center on Climate Change and National Security. It was a straightforward attempt by the intelligence community to gather a better understanding of how climate change is reshaping the world. Among other things, the center funded a major study of the relationship between climate change and social stress under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences, which is the most respected scientific agency in America. Some Republicans in Congress didn’t like it, especially John Barrasso of Wyoming, a Big Coal state. Barrasso, who became chairman of the powerful Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works after the 2016 election, has been a tireless foe of anything that might impinge on what he sees as our God-given right to burn as much coal as we want. In 2011, he introduced legislation not only to stop the EPA from regulating carbon pollution, but also to stop the agency from even studying what is going on with the climate.
When Barrasso learned about the CIA’s new climate center, he went after it. His jihad gathered momentum when Panetta was replaced as director of the agency by David Petraeus, whose central interest was in figuring out how best to use drones to kill terrorists. “We felt constant pressure to water down our conclusions,” said one of the coauthors of the National Academy of Sciences report. The day the report was released, the press conference was suddenly canceled and the report was buried. A few weeks later, the Center on Climate Change and National Security disappeared.
Climate deniers in Congress have learned to go after the Pentagon where it will feel it most: in the budget. In 2014, House Republicans tagged an amendment onto the Department of Defense appropriations bill that prohibited the Pentagon from spending any money implementing recommendations in the latest report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “The amendment had no effect on the Defense budget, since the IPCC’s recommendations don’t really apply to us,” one Pentagon insider told me. “But the intent was clear—this is going to be war.” Certainly what had been made clear was that any item in the budget that included the word “climate” was going to set off alarm bells. In 2016, the Republican-controlled House went even further, voting to bar the Department of Defense from spending money to evaluate how climate change would affect military training, combat, weapons purchases, and other needs. “When we distract our military with a radical climate change agenda, we detract from their main purpose of defending America from enemies” like Islamic State, said Representative Ken Buck, a Republican from Colorado who was one of the sponsors of the measure.
In today’s political climate, open discussion of the security risks of climate change is viewed as practically treasonous. In 2014, John Kerry, a decorated war hero, called climate change “perhaps the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction” and likened it to terrorism, epidemics, and poverty. McCain immediately slammed him, citing the 130,000 people killed in Syria, Iranian nukes, Palestinian-Israeli negotiations: “Hello? On what planet does [Kerry] reside?” Former Republican leader Newt Gingrich, who never served in the military, tweeted, “Does Kerry really believe global warming more dangerous than north Korean and Iranian nukes? More than Russian and Chinese nukes? Really?” And he followed it up with: “Every American who cares about national security must demand Kerry’s resignation. A delusional secretary of state is dangerous to our safety.”
The US military, of course, is not a polar bear rescue operation. “Their main job is to break things and kill people,” said Sharon Burke, a former assistant secretary of defense and now a senior advisor at New America. God knows there are plenty of ass-kicking generals who don’t care about climate change, scoffingly referring to it as “Mother Nature with a sword.” But the military also prides itself on its practical-mindedness. Military leaders embraced desegregation long before the rest of the nation, in part because they wanted the best people they could find, no matter what color. “It’s about the mission, not the politics,” John Conger, the assistant secretary of defense in charge of military installations, told me when we talked in his Pentagon office. “It’s our job to deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it could be.”
In the world as it is, evidence that climate change is an engine of conflict is clear. The best example is Syria. In 2015, an exhaustive study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that rising CO2 pollution had made the 2007–2010 drought in Syria twice as likely to occur, and that the four-year drought had a “catalytic effect” on political unrest in the area. Herders were forced off their land, seeking food and water elsewhere. More than 1.5 million rural people were displaced, causing a massive migration into urban areas, where they bumped up against an influx of Iraqi and Palestinian refugees. When researchers asked one displaced Syrian farmer whether she thought the drought had caused the civil war, she replied, “Of course. The drought and unemployment were important in pushing people toward revolution. When the drought happened, we could handle it for two years, and then we said, ‘It’s enough.’”
Many military commanders don’t need to read a scientific report to figure this out—they are seeing the impacts of climate change with their own eyes. Admiral Samuel Locklear, who was in charge of all US armed forces in the Pacific, is one of the most respected men in the US military—and the one with the toughest job, with both China and North Korea to watch over. But in 2013, when a journalist asked him what he believed was the biggest long-term security threat to the region, he didn’t talk about the nuclear fantasies of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un or a cyberwar with China—he talked about sea-level rise, and increasingly monstrous storms that could wipe out a small nation. The political and social upheaval we’re likely to see from our rapidly warming planet, Locklear said, “is probably the most likely thing that will cripple the security environment, probably more likely than the other scenarios we all often talk about.”
What made Locklear’s comments so compelling was that he is a decorated war fighter, not a wonk in the Pentagon office or a globe-trotting diplomat. He wasn’t reacting to a political push from the White House or repeating talking points from the secretary of defense. This was the man who was charged with the day-to-day responsibility of protecting US interests in the Pacific, which includes seven of the world’s ten largest standing armies, as well as five of the seven nations that have nuclear arms.
Not surprisingly, Locklear was summoned before the Senate Armed Services Committee, where James Inhofe asked him to “explain” his remarks. And he did, calmly and forcefully, schooling the senator in how steadily increasing populations in Asia would only put more people at risk from storms and other climate-related disasters. “Okay, let me interrupt you,” Inhofe said, realizing it was a losing battle. He quickly changed the subject.
What Locklear correctly foresees is that a world of climate-driven chaos is already upon us, and it’s only going to get worse. Where are the limits of American power? How many failed states can we prop up, how many natural disasters can we respond to? It’s one thing to plan for the invasion of Normandy Beach or the siege of Fallujah—it’s quite another to plan on being the rescue squad for the entire planet. We have already spent more than a trillion dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with no measurable success. How much more can we afford to do? “I think we have to make some strategic choices,” Admiral Gary Roughead told me. “Which parts of the world do we care about most? What are the strategic flash points? Do we want to be able to operate in the Arctic or not? What kind of world are we preparing for?”
After his tour of the Norfolk base, I joined Secretary Kerry on the flight back to Joint Base Andrews near Washington, DC. The plane, a government-issue refurbished 757 that he shared with other top Obama administration officials, was nowhere near as posh as Air Force One. In fact, Kerry’s compartment had a real Dr. Strangelove feel to it, with a metal desk bolted to the floor and an old (presumably very secure) desk phone. As we talked, Kerry took his coat off and picked at a bowl of fresh fruit, his voice hoarse after a long day. He looked exhausted, his face more drawn than usual—talking with him, it was hard not to feel the weight of the world.
We talked for a while about what we’d seen at the base, and about his hope for the Paris climate talks, which were coming up in a couple of weeks.
I told him that no matter how things turned out in Paris, it seemed to me that America still had a long way to go before it came to grips with the scale of the threat the world faces.
“We do have a long way to go, because we still have people in the United States Senate who even deny its existence,” he said bluntly. “How do you mobilize your government in a democracy when part of your democratic process is gridlocked and frozen and, in some cases, ignorant?”
That was putting it kindly. Even in his darkest nightmares, I doubt Kerry could have foreseen that, in just over a year, Rex Tillerson, the CEO of ExxonMobil, the oil giant that has spent decades denying, confusing, and underplaying the risks of climate change, would be sitting in his chair.
I pointed out to Kerry that, despite thirty years of climate conferences and talk about the need for clean energy, global CO2 levels are still climbing.
“Because we’re trying to turn around the largest oil tanker ever built.”
“Human civilization, you mean?”
“Yeah,” he said. He looked out the window at the gray clouds below. “And that is a very big challenge.”