A Climate Bill is Good But Not Enough: Curb Emissions in the Department of Defense

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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.

We agree with President Biden’s January 2021 declaration at the start of his presidency that we need, “to combat the climate crisis [by implementing] a Government-wide approach that reduces climate pollution in every sector of the economy.” This must include the Defense Department.

While both the FY23 NDAA and last year's Climate Adaptation Plan (DOD-CAP) contain necessary provisions for protecting our military from the effects of climate change, neither include any significant provisions for protecting the rest of us by either reducing DOD greenhouse gas emissions or redirecting defense resources and personnel towards combating the most dire consequences of global warming. We ask you to amend the FY23 NDAA to include reducing DOD fossil fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions as urgent, essential steps.

Background

President Biden's January 2021 executive order on climate promised “to combat the climate crisis [by implementing] a Government-wide approach that reduces climate pollution in every sector of the economy.” Since before Biden took office, ISF has been consistently calling upon Congress to incorporate addressing the climate emergency as a major component of the National Defense Budget because global warming is the biggest national security threat we face. It is harming us right now, and it poses a greater and more urgent danger to us than Russian expansionism, Chinese geo-political ambitions, or foreign terrorists.

The national security programs controlled by the NDAA consume 60 percent of our federal discretionary budget. To evaluate the government's climate defense actions, it's helpful to categorize them into three levels:

Level 1: Protecting military bases and equipment

Level 1, the lowest level, is about preventing and repairing damage to the defense establishment from the climate emergency and preparing for future threats (defense jargon buzzwords: adaptation, resilience, hardening, mitigation, preservation, climate-ready). Some level 1 provisions are included in the NDAA-23 and DOD-CAP.

Level 2: Slowing the increase in greenhouse gases generated by the military

The US military pumps more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than any other institution on the planet. It consumes an enormous amount of electric power generated by burning fossil fuel. Most of its ships and all of its vehicles and planes are powered by gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel. Neither NDAA-23 nor DOD-CAP include any significant provisions for reducing the Pentagon's carbon footprint. They don’t even mention basic common-sense measures (many of which also reduce costs) such as the following:

Large-scale installation of solar panels on military installation rooftops and wind turbines on federal land, including military bases
Transitioning non-combat DOD vehicles to electric power and researching electric power for tanks, artillery, and other combat units
Reducing carbon emissions for ships, planes, generators, and other equipment

Level 3: Allocating defense resources to directly combat global warming.

Fighter jets can't shoot down Cat-5 hurricanes, new-generation nuclear weapons won't protect us from killer heat waves, improved battle tanks can't fight raging wildfires, and aircraft carriers won't stem rising sea levels. Therefore, a significant portion of our national security budget must be reoriented towards defending against catastrophic climate change by bolstering our defenses against global warming; reducing pollution of our air, land, and water; and removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Priorities could include the following:

Research cost-effective methods of removing and sequestering atmospheric greenhouse gases
Research into methods of increasing carbon intake/sequestration by the ocean biome such as phytoplankton
Massive “billion trees” reforestation program on federal lands
Formation of military units dedicated to suppressing the wildfires that release enormous amounts of greenhouse gases into the air

The FY23 NDAA and the DOD-CAP must be amended to include significant Level 2 and Level 3 climate-defense provisions.