Climate Defense Must Include the Pentagon

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Call Script

My name is __________. I am a constituent, and my zip code is _______. I am a member of Indivisible SF.

For President Biden:

Your EO on Climate of January 31, 2021, emphasized combating catastrophic climatic collapse with a whole-of-government approach, yet it omitted the Pentagon. Defense spending is a crucial component of our budget that should not be exempted from our national effort to reduce the existential threat of global warming.

For your Members of Congress:

Combating the existential threat of global warming needs to involve the total government—including the Pentagon! We need you to make sure that defense authorization and appropriation bills include climate defense, from simple measures like adding solar panels to all buildings on U.S. bases and electrifying all new non-combat vehicles to including global warming in all the Pentagon’s risk assessments and researching atmospheric greenhouse-gas reduction.

Background

In a reality-based government, which most Americans want, reducing the climate crisis would be a top priority in every section of the federal budget. Unfortunately, congressional Republicans have prioritized increasing their political power by undermining the Biden agenda; as always, they hide behind their favorite bogeymen, "deficits" and "inflation." Their wealthy donors have even recruited two Democrats, Senators Manchin and Sinema, to help them. And so the lofty aspirations of President Biden’s budget proposal are being steadily scaled back. Despite this, President Biden has done well so far, and our MoCs should insist on underscoring that success.

But while Republican bogeymen are paper tigers, the consequences of wasting even more time without addressing the climate crisis are very real. In 2018 the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that we had just twelve years to act to keep human-driven global warming below +1.5° C. We lost four of those years under the corrupt Trump regime. The IPCC’s 2021 report (linked below) is even more alarming.

There are many ways the Pentagon and our defense spending could respond more appropriately to the dangerously accelerating global warming that their own reports have identified as a major security risk to our country. We need them to act.

References

21st Century Defense Budget / National Defense Authorization Act

Tell our Members of Congress & President Biden: Fight for a Twenty-first Century Budget that Prioritizes the Climate Crisis | Indivisible SF, 4/12/22
Tell your Members of Congress & President Biden: we oppose the NDAA, Indivisible SF, 11/16/2021
Indivisible San Francisco pens an open legislative letter on NDAA to the members of relevant House and Senate Committees, Summary, 6/30/20
Cut the Military Budget and Address Our Real Needs in the NDAA, Indivisible SF, 6/30/2020
Formal Letter to Our MOCs re: Their Support for a Flawed NDAA, 1/28/2020

Pentagon/CIA Reports

Apocalyptic Pentagon report on global warming could spur action on Capitol Hill | Grist, Feb/ 2004
In October of 2009, the CIA established a new Center for the Study of Climate Change.
Pentagon planners in 2010 included climate change among the security threats identified in the Quadrennial Defense Review, the Congress-mandated report that updates Pentagon priorities every four years.

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