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SUSTAINABLE NATIONAL SECURITY: CLIMATE ADAPTATION FOR THE RICH AND POWERFUL

The grave danger is to disown our neighbors. When we do so, we deny their humanity and our own humanity without realizing it . . .

—Pope Francis

In late April 2015, when Kevin Watson of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) spoke at the Defense, National Security, and Climate Change conference in Washington, D.C., he told the story of a climate refugee in a way that I had never heard before: from the perspective of the climate-security business.

The panel that Watson spoke on was titled “Geopolitics, Natural Resource Implications & Extreme Events.” Next to him sat two other panelists, Paul Wagner, an ecologist for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and John Englander, an independent consultant for Booz Allen Hamilton, the same top-tier security company that Edward Snowden was working for as a cover for his employment by the National Security Agency. Just before Watson arrived at the podium, Englander had told the audience of a hundred or so conference participants, all sitting at round tables with white tablecloths, “We are about to have catastrophic coastline change. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.”

To illustrate his own presentation, Watson projected images of the space shuttle and an F-35, a single-seat all-weather fighter aircraft manufactured by Lockheed Martin, a four-star sponsor of the conference. “All are dependent on special engineering alloys,” he said. Watson then highlighted the elements needed to make the alloys: chrome, columbium, and titanium that were extracted from mines in South Africa, the Congo, and Zambia. Watson said that the reason he was highlighting Africa was that it’s one area of the world expected to experience “significant climate change effects into the next century.”

Watson then projected images from the fourth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). One image showed Africa divided into five parts: West Africa, Central Africa, North Africa, East Africa, Southern Africa, with bullet points indicating potential climate hazards and disasters in each place. Desertification and droughts dominated many of the regions where the elements required for the alloys were mined. There would be severe impacts on water, on agriculture. “So all of these are going to stress the continent, stress the population,” he said.

Then Watson connected the climate crisis with migration. He said, “If these stressing factors result in increased migration, it will just increase the potential for instability and conflict” both inside and outside of the continent. This could impact the ability maintain local labor conditions necessary to move the elements “critical to the alloys we need to support the system.” In one sentence, Watson effectively insinuated how climate-driven migration crises directly threaten powerful U.S. military-corporate business interests.

To prove his point and underscore that it was already happening, he said: “All you have to do is look at the news every day and you see tragedies associated with illegal migration out of the African Mediterranean, boats full of refugees that are sinking and so forth.”

As Watson spoke, news was still breaking about a rickety three-story boat that had capsized off the Libyan coast while carrying more than 850 people. There were only 28 survivors, one of them a 20-year-old man from Gambia named Ibrahim Mbalo who made a death-defying escape from the sinking ship. As should be anticipated, the predictions for climate disruption in Mbalo’s home country are dire, a place of increasing windstorms, floods, droughts, and sea-level rise that could inundate 8 percent of its land area.¹

Watson was speaking during what was to become the deadliest month of 2015, in a year that would register 3,771 known immigration-related deaths in the Mediterranean Sea alone. This was also the year when the extent of people on the move, and the danger and tragedy of their situation, finally dawned on the world. This was the year when the image of Aylan Kurdi, a three-year-old Syrian boy found face down on a Turkish beach after crossing the Aegean Sea, was widely circulated. At one point 2,000 people per day were attempting the voyage on rubber dinghies. According to the International Organization on Migration, there were more than 18 deaths per 1,000 travelers.²

Although it sounded as though Watson, who spoke with a soft voice, may have personally felt sympathy for the people killed crossing borders and their mourning loved ones, he focused instead on migration as a threat, how it increased conflict. “Just last week there were incidents of violence in Southern Africa,” he said, “because the local residents were concerned that migrants were taking economic opportunities away. . . . Migration definitely creates friction internally and externally.”

As Watson spoke, I noticed that most in the audience had a blank expression. There were government officials, Washington insiders, private industry reps, and representatives from the Army, Navy, and Marines. There were chief scientists from private companies and senior analysts. There were people from the Department of Energy. Watson’s emphasis on the connection between global warming, immigration, and conflict was accepted almost without question. Perception of the migrant threat now goes much deeper than the usual nativist intolerance; driven by escalating climate crises, it is now perceived by corporate America as a threat to a much broader socioeconomic political system and the military financed to protect and perpetuate it.

It might seem counterintuitive that a national security establishment known for its deep-seated conservatism would embrace the notion that human-induced environmental crises are increasingly shaping the future of civilization. This view was shared by at least one attendee in the audience, who spoke up at the end of a later panel titled “Nexus of Water, Energy and Food Impacts on National Security.” He said with full confidence that the panelists were ignoring the “elephant in the room.” The military, he said, was entrenched in climate denial. Awkward looks shot across the room, as if the man had missed the memo. But he was just repeating a commonly held perspective found outside the conference, the dominant narrative that the U.S. government is still debating the science of whether or not catastrophic global warming is real, caused by humans, preventable or not, and that in the meantime we should just keep using cheap fossil fuels and living it up.

This was even more pronounced as President Donald Trump took office. On the very day he was inaugurated on January 20, 2017, the Trump administration’s quiet deletion of all climate change information from the president’s website recalls the Reagan administration’s removal of solar panels from the White House. With Trump, all signs point to a radical shift from Obama-era policies around climate change. Just the appointments of renowned climate skeptic Scott Pruitt and former Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson augur a hotter world and a revved-up fossil fuel economy. Slated to head the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of State, respectively, both arrive at their positions with vested interests.

However, behind the scenes the military and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will continue to prepare for the future dislocations of people, global instabilities, and threats to U.S. political and economic interests due to climate destabilization. Indeed, Defense Secretary James “Mad Dog” Mattis, according to Politico, may “turn out to be the greenest person in Donald Trump’s cabinet.”³ And DHS secretary John Kelly, in charge of policing U.S. borders, is also a climate security hawk. On top of that, the Trump administration already works under the the climate security doctrine’s core assumption, that migration is a threat.

Two questions I wanted to address by going to the conference were how did business as usual continue in the United States as climate change came to be identified as a top national security threat, and how did acknowledgment of this threat impact the border enforcement and homeland security regime? As I sat in meetings and workshops for two full days, it became quite clear that while military analysts were superb risk assessors who regularly do threat projections well into the future, their findings were not being used to ensure that the necessary changes would be made to prevent large-scale ecological crisis. Instead, as the world became shaken to its core with potential catastrophe, the security apparatus worked hard to keep things the same in terms of economic, political, and social centers of power.

Indeed, the massive adjustments were like a climate adaptation program for the rich and powerful. Those enriched by the politics of fossil fuel, money, and weapons seemed to want solutions, first and foremost, for how best to keep a world of more and more impoverished people either working for them or out of sight altogether. As environmental destabilization wields tremendous pressures on these people to survive, investments pour into weapons and surveillance systems as a way of perpetuating the current economic-political order (even as the order attempts to “green” itself).

To understand how ingrained the climate security nexus is—in the context of fringe, yet powerful, climate denialism in some Washington circles—it is best to turn to Brigadier General Stephen Cheney—a panelist at the same conference as Watson. In response to the man who earlier accused the military of climate denial, Cheney said, “The lance corporal in the forward operating base doesn’t really care much about the wind or the sun or the drought. He wants his bullets and he wants his food and he wants his water. The mid-level guys and gals—the majors—go to West Point, and the lieutenant colonels go to the War College, and they all are learning about climate change and understand the impacts . . . and how it’s driving international conflict.”

And it is generals like Cheney himself, the higher-ups who implement policy and strategy, who most directly impact climate security. In January 2016, the U.S. Department of Defense issued Directive 4715.21: “Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience.” According to Foreign Policy, Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work signed “one of the potentially most significant, if little-noticed, orders in recent Pentagon history. The directive told every corner of the Pentagon, including the office of the secretary of defense, the joint chiefs of staff, and all the combatant commands around the world, to put climate change front and center in their strategic planning.”⁴ And now, with “Mad Dog” Mattis at the helm of the DOD, this not-widely-known yet game-changing directive has not been, and is unlikely to be, removed—even as the Trump adminstration attempts, including via a marathon of executive orders, to roll back Obama’s legacy on climate.

Climate change, according to analysts Caitlin Werrel and Francesco Fermia of the organization Climate and Security, has reached a level of strategic significance that “can no longer be ignored.”⁵

THE OVERWHELMING WINNER

“I want to explain up front I’m a Marine,” said Brigadier General Stephen Cheney as soon as he stepped up to podium. “Thirty years of experience. Marines like pictures. They don’t like PowerPoint. So I’m going to show a couple of pictures up here. And we like to talk about war fighting.” On his right a slide flashed on the screen that said “Hot Spots: The Middle East.” To his left, up on a stage, his fellow panel participants sat at a table from which hung a banner that read “Defense, National Security, Climate Change Symposium.” Cheney, who was CEO of the American Security Project, a nonpartisan national security think tank formed in 2005 by then-senator John Kerry, said, “I’m going to walk around the world a little bit. Talk about conflict and climate change.”

Cheney’s gruff, confident voice fit the portrait of a soldier who had spent years on distant battlefields. “No surprise to anyone here: extreme weather presents a direct threat to U.S. homeland security. Around the world this has a tremendous effect on our forces and our allies. And definitely our enemies.”

Everyone in the audience seemed intent on Cheney’s words. He came across as a straight shooter. At one point during his talk, a younger man from Lockheed Martin, the Fortune 500 military manufacturer that was on the “cutting edge” of climate change, spilled coffee all over himself and the white tablecloth on the round table where he sat with four colleagues. Lockheed Martin had long ago leaped into the middle of the climate battlefield. In 2015, its CEO, Marilyn Hewsom, after winning an award for business management, said that the company “will continue its endeavor to create an environment-friendly world by combating the security and stability threats generated through climate change.” Also, as the Washington Post reported, the 112,000-employee corporation known for unleashing “cataclysmic fury on America’s enemies,” was partnering with a small Hawaii fish farm so that, according to the farm’s chief, Neil Sims, they can grow fish with “literally no imprint in the ocean.” The massive border surveillance market has not eluded Lockheed Martin either; in 2013 it was recognized as one of the top 15 companies to profit from “border security” based on multimillion-dollar contracts for aircraft and data processing products.

Nobody noticed when the coffee spilled, except for a server dressed in a white shirt and black pants who beelined to the table to clean up the mess.

Meanwhile, Brigadier General Cheney was speaking at the podium about how an unprecedented drought from 2006 to 2010 had helped fuel the current conflict in Syria. He talked about Nigeria, Lake Chad, migration caused by water scarcity, and the Boko Haram terrorist group that formed in the region. And right when the coffee hit the white tablecloth, Cheney was talking about what he called the “poster child” of climate and conflict—Bangladesh. He talked about the 2,000-mile iron wall along the Indo-Bangladeshi divide, and said that Indian border guards have “shoot to kill” orders. Indeed, from 2001 to 2011 the Indian border forces killed 1,000 people, turning these borderlands into, according to Brad Adams in The Guardian, “South Asian killing fields.”⁶

Cheney said that current studies project that 5 million Bangladeshis will be displaced due to sea-level rise, but according to generals he has talked to, it may be more like 20 or 30 million people. When the young man from Lockheed Martin bolted for the bathroom, I couldn’t help but notice the stark and racialized divide between the servers and the conference participants. Although I couldn’t say for sure, it occurred to me that many of the servers at the conference, like the man who was scrubbing away the coffee, might have been from Bangladesh, Nigeria, Turkey, Tunisia, or from any one of the very climate-stressed places that Cheney was talking about right before my eyes. It was entirely possible, if not probable, that climate refugees, the very people that countries were building walls to stop, that Donald Trump travel policies were designed to ban, places where Lockheed Martin was unleashing its “cataclysmic fury,” were also at the conference serving coffee to the mostly white, middle-to upper-class conference participants.

“There is no doubt,” Cheney said as the young Lockheed Martin employee returned to his seat, “that climate change is going to increase the demands on military personnel. You’re going to see more humanitarian interventions, more peacekeeping, and certainly more conflicts.”

“Our military is preparing for climate change,” Cheney said; it is a “stressor,” a “threat multiplier,” an “accelerant of instability.” At first the words themselves were difficult to understand. Yet they were part of the growing vocabulary of military generals and Washington officials that named emerging aspects of the current ecological crisis. And there were other surprising twists to older concepts. For example, I had never heard the expression “military environmental industrial complex.” This came not from an activist, but from the executive director of the energy company Constellation, John Dukes, during a session called “Defense and Energy.”

When U.S. Navy Captain Jim Goudreau first used the term “sustainable national security,” my immediate assumption was that he was referring to the U.S. military and Homeland Security’s goal to reduce their massive level of greenhouse gas pollution, including the U.S. Army’s goal to get to net zero emissions (quite a spectacular one given that the Department of Defense was the largest greenhouse gas emitter in the United States, by far) and Custom and Border Protection’s goal to reduce emissions by 28 percent.

But there were much deeper implications, I soon saw, to Goudreau’s use of the term.

“When people typically hear the word sustainable, they automatically jump to an assumption that it’s hugging a tree, it’s saving the world, [but] it’s more than the environmental piece. It’s an absolutely legitimate and important piece from the environmental perspective, but there’s an economic perspective to sustainability, there’s a political perspective to sustainability, there’s a cultural aspect to sustainability—we have to approach all of those.”

And sustainability’s most important piece, Goudreau explained, is military-tactical. As he said it, I couldn’t help but think of the countless surveillance towers dotting the Sonoran desert in the U.S. borderlands, powered by solar panels. Sustainable, renewable energy resources would not only cut down on emissions, Goudreau said, it would make the military “more lethal.”

“We’ve always designed our systems to achieve victory. Not by small margins. But to crush the enemy . . . I never want to be in a close fight. I don’t want it to be an even fight. I want to be,” Goudreau stressed, “the overwhelming winner.” Sustainable national security no longer seemed so pretty.

It was the same point that U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis famously made when he was commanding troops in Iraq during the Bush era: “Unleash us from the tether of fossil fuel.”⁷ Mattis’s wish has been coming true: Between 2011 and 2015 military renewable-energy projects tripled to 1,390, producing an amount of power that could supply electricity to 286,000 average U.S. homes. This has continued: on February 3, 2017 SunPower landed a $96 million contract with the Trump administration to power the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California until 2043. Indeed, the Department of Defense will “forge ahead under the new administration with a decade-long effort to convert its fuel-hungry operations to renewable power,”⁸ senior military officials told Reuters in March 2017.

“We know for a fact,” Cheney continued with momentum back at the podium in Washington, “that [climate change] is already driving internal and cross-border migration. We know that it is opening new missions and responsibilities for the military. Just look at the Arctic and the potential up there. We know that it is going to destabilize unstable states and societies.”

If there are problems anywhere, Cheney said, environmental crisis is going to exacerbate them.

“There will be more demand for already existing missions such as peacekeeping, conflict prevention, war fighting. . . . It will heighten tension between states. And it is going to draw us into wars that we don’t want to be in.

“Fortunately, if there is any good news to this story it’s that the military is really good at risk management and preparing. . . . So the U.S. military plans for the worst, plans for the most likely, and then hopes it is over-prepared.” Thus, in an age to be defined by decreasing amounts of clean water, breathable air, and food-producing land, the United States, with the help of companies like Lockheed Martin, aims to be the well-armed, well-fortified, “overwhelming winner.”

“IT WILL AFFECT EVERYTHING YOU DO IN YOUR CAREERS”

On a beautiful, breezy day in May 2015, President Barack Obama stepped up to the podium to give a commencement speech at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut. It was the first time a U.S. president emphasized climate change in a keynote speech. Before Obama got to the crux of his message, in which he would stress that “climate change refugees”⁹ would become a significant part of the Coast Guard’s future, he spoke to the cadets of the importance of guarding U.S. territorial borders and interests—underscoring an important yet often overlooked point about his presidency: the continued expansion in policies and practices of an already historic U.S. border enforcement and deportation regime. Obama stated that the Coast Guard will start patrolling in faraway places such as the Caribbean and Central America, in the Middle East alongside the U.S. Navy, and in the Asian Pacific. Obama said that the new patrol missions were meant “to help partners train their own coast guards,” and “to uphold maritime security and freedom of navigation in waters vital to our global economy.”¹⁰

Obama spoke about upgrades to Coast Guard fleets such as Fast Response and National Security cutters, “the most advanced in history.” These cutters were a part of a $25 billion program to replace much of the Coast Guard’s equipment, known ominously as the Integrated Deep Water System Program.

“And even as we meet threats like terrorism,” Obama said shifting to his main point, “we cannot and we must not ignore a peril that can affect generations.”

It was quite a remarkable moment. The president of a country that did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol—the 1997 treaty in which countries pledged to reduce greenhouse emissions—was about to lecture Coast Guard cadets about the perils of climate change.

“Our analysts in the intelligence community know that climate change is happening. Our military leaders, generals, admirals—active duty and retired—know that it’s happening. Our Homeland Security professionals know that it’s happening and our Coast Guard know that it’s happening.

“The science,” the president said, “is indisputable.”

Obama told the cadets that the heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was higher than it has been in 800,000 years. He said that 14 of the hottest 15 years ever recorded have already happened this century. He told the cadets that NASA reported that the ice in the Arctic was breaking up faster than expected and the world’s glaciers were melting, pouring water into the oceans.

“Cadets,” Obama said, “a threat of a changing climate cuts to the very core of your service. You’ve been drawn to the water. Like a poet who wrote, ‘The heart of the great ocean sends a thrilling pulse through me,’ you know the beauty of the sea. You also know its unforgiving power. Here at the academy, climate change, understanding the science and consequences is part of the curriculum, and rightly so. Because it will affect everything you do in your careers.

“You,” Obama said, “are part of the first generation of officers who begin their service in a world where the effects of climate change are so clearly upon us. It will shape how every one of our services plan, operate, train, equip, protect their infrastructure, their capabilities, today and for the long term.”

Obama addressed the future of conflict and instability. He talked about rising seas swallowing portions of Bangladesh and Pacific Islands. He talked about similar “vulnerable coasts” in the Caribbean and Central America. When he talked about people forced from their homes I imagined, for a moment, that he was talking about that father and son on that Marinduque coast.

Obama’s clear articulation of climate security doctrine, however, didn’t come out of the blue. More than 20 years before he spoke to the cadets, The Atlantic published an article titled “The Coming Anarchy: How Scarcity, Crime, Overpopulation, Tribalism, and Disease Are Rapidly Destroying the Social Fabric of Our Planet,” by Robert Kaplan. Usually a single article, especially with such a loaded mouthful of a title, wouldn’t be worth discussing as a historic event, but The Coming Anarchy was immensely influential to the policy that led up to the Obama administration’s 2010 assessment that climate change posed a direct threat to national security. Obama’s speech was a sign that Kaplan’s 1994 article had finally arrived in the foreground of U.S. foreign policy, even in the context of possible Trump-generated speed bumps.

Kaplan predicted that the environment would be the “national security issue of the 21st century.”¹¹ At one point in the piece, he described an apocalyptic future from the vantage point of his taxi window in West Africa, a world where “hordes” of young men with “restless, scanning eyes” surrounded his taxi and put their hands on the window asking for tips. “They were loose molecules in a very unstable social fluid, a fluid that was clearly on the verge of igniting.” According to Kaplan, this was the mixture of environmental degradation and migration: people moving from untenable rural areas, afflicted with drought, to the cities, where “they join other migrants and slip gradually into the criminal process.”¹² He was describing in 1994 the same “climate refugees” that Watson was talking about at the 2015 climate security conference.

Kaplan’s writing, a bizarre mixture of rancid Malthusian nativism and cutting-edge forecast of ecological collapse, anticipated much of today’s militaristic climate doctrine.

“The political and strategic impacts of surging populations, spreading disease, deforestation and soil erosion, water depletion, air pollution, and possibly, rising sea levels in critical, overcrowded regions like the Nile Delta and Bangladesh—developments that will prompt mass migrations and, in turn, incite group conflicts—will be the core foreign policy challenge from which most others will ultimately emanate.”¹³

In their book Violent Environments, Nancy Lee Peluso and Michael Watts note that the speed in which policy makers and their advisers took up the security diagnosis from The Coming Anarchy was “astonishing.”¹⁴ Shortly after it was published, the undersecretary of state, Tim Wirth, faxed a copy of the article to every U.S. embassy across the globe. President Bill Clinton lauded Kaplan and Thomas Homer-Dixon, the environmental conflict scholar whom Kaplan featured in the article, as “the beacons for a new sensitivity to environmental security.”¹⁵ Vice President Al Gore championed it as a model for the sort of green thinking that “he assiduously sought to promote during the 1990s,” according to Peluso and Watts. The U.S. government created a senior post for Global Environmental Affairs and an environmental program, because “it was critical to its defense mission.” In 1994, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said, “We believe that environmental degradation is not simply an irritation but a real threat to our national security.”¹⁶

Describing these earlier models of environmental conflict, writer Betsy Hartmann points out that the “degradation narrative has proved particularly popular in Western policy circles because it kills a number of birds with one stone: it blames poverty on population pressure, and not, for example, on lack of land reform or off-farm employment opportunities; it blames peasants for land degradation, obscuring the role of commercial agriculture and extractive industries and it targets migration both as an environmental and security threat.”¹⁷

That same year that Kaplan’s prescient article was published, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was using rust-colored landing mats from the Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars to build the first border wall in Nogales, Arizona, as a part of Operation Safeguard. This was part of a series of operations—such as Hold-the-Line in El Paso, Gatekeeper in San Diego, Rio Grande in Brownsville—that would remake the entire U.S. enforcement regime under a strategy called “Prevention Through Deterrence.” Government officials called for a “strengthening of our enforcement efforts along the border,”¹⁸ anticipating the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement on immigration from Mexico, among other things.

In 1995, the U.S. Border Patrol even created mock mass-migration scenarios in Arizona where agents erected cyclone fence corrals into which they “herded”¹⁹ people for emergency processing, then loaded them onto bus convoys that transported them to mass detention centers. The fake border enforcement scenarios included a makeshift border patrol camp with five olive green army tents, portable toilets, and water tanks that were bathed in floodlights—a drab futuristic lanscape that predicted free trade regime upheavals and perhaps, ultimately, ecological crises or even, in some places, collapse. Here Kaplan’s dire predictions were already beginning to meet a Trump-era border zone.

From this moment on, over the next 20-plus years, the dynamics of both climate change and border militarization would increase exponentially.

When mass migration surged after NAFTA, people trudged through the vast borderlands deserts often with not enough water, not enough food, and no medical aid for the incessant hazards of the journey, ranging from dehydration to heat stroke to rattlesnake bites. By closing off traditional crossing points with a concentration of agents, technologies, and walls, the strategy funneled prospective border-crossers to places that were so dangerous, isolated, and “mortal,”²⁰ as the first “Prevention Through Deterrence” documents put it, that people would not dare to cross. This could be the Arizona desert, the Mona Strait, or, in Europe’s case, the Mediterranean Sea. This border policing strategy, in which the desert, the river, and the sea itself become metaphorical hostile agents, was still in place when Donald Trump took office in January 2017.

In the book The Land of Open Graves, anthropologist Jason De León wrote that with the “Prevention Through Deterrence” strategy, border zones became “spaces of exception—physical and political locations where an individual’s rights and protections can be stripped away upon entrance.”

“Having your body consumed by wild animals,” he wrote of conditions on the U.S.-Mexico border, “is but one of the many ‘exceptional’ things that can happen in the Sonoran desert as a result of federal immigration policies.”²¹

De León further explained that the U.S. borderlands have become “a remote deathscape where American necropolitics are pecked onto the bones of those we deem excludable.”²²

Indeed, the remains of more than 6,000 people have been recovered in the U.S. borderlands since the federal government implemented these policies in the mid-1990s. Scholar Mary Pat Brady described this as “a kind of passive capital punishment,” in which “immigrants have been effectively blamed for their own deaths.”²³ According to the report “Fatal Journeys,”²⁴ 40,000 people have perished crossing borders worldwide between the years 2000 and 2014. The International Organization on Migration, which issued the report, says there are probably many more uncounted.

Given the predicted increases of people displaced by environmental destabilization, we can only predict in turn that increasing numbers will brave hot deserts and hostile seas, circumventing the places where surveillance is constant. The changing climate, subsequent upheavals, and fortified borders are on course to geopolitically remake the globe in profound ways. “While there are examples of militarized borders in past eras—for example, the Eastern Bloc countries during the Cold War—most political borders have never been militarized,” geographer Reece Jones wrote in the book Border Walls: Security and the War on Terror in the United States, India, and Israel. “Even the simple idea of using mutually agreed-upon borders to divide separate states is a relatively recent development.”²⁵

Now the militarized fringes of countries—with the injected xenophobia exemplified by the Donald Trump rise to power, or the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union known as Brexit, will result in the the 21st century being defined by the refugee meeting the razor-wire wall guarded by the guy with the big gun.

While the Obama administration is given much credit for the institutionalization of global warming with the U.S. government and national security apparatus, it was the George W. Bush administration, after nearly eight years of climate change denial, that in its waning days laid the foundation for today’s climate security doctrine, as crudely outlined by Kaplan. Right when money was flooding into the newly formed Department of Homeland Security and its border apparatus, in the exact period between 2006 and 2008 when the U.S. Border Patrol was in the largest hiring surge in its history—adding 6,000 new agents to its ranks—and just when bulldozers were cutting through pristine landscape to erect 650 miles of walls and barriers along the U.S. international boundary with Mexico under the Secure Fence Act of 2006, six new major unclassified documents came out of the military and intelligence communities. Their warning was that climate shifts would threaten U.S. national security and this time the reports had the backing of generals such as Stephen Cheney. There was the CNA Military Advisory Board report titled “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change,”²⁶ the United States Joint Forces Command report “The Joint Operating Environment, Trends and Challenges for the Future Joint Force Through 2030,” the National Intelligence Council’s “National Intelligence Assessment (NIA) on the National Security of Climate Change to 2030,” and the Department of Defense’s “National Defense Strategy” to name some of them.²⁷ Following the lead of The Coming Anarchy and the Bill Clinton administration, Bush was setting the stage for Obama.

When Obama told Coast Guard cadets about the rising possibility of climate refugees, he did not say what he meant by “they will have to respond.” One might think that he meant rescue operations. However, every other year the Coast Guard, other Homeland Security agencies such as Customs and Border Protection, and the U.S. military participate in a mass-migration simulation in the Caribbean, similar to the one done in Nogales in 1995, known as “Integrated Advance.” This is part of Operation Vigilant Sentry, a mass-migration contingency plan that involves the “interdiction, screening, processing, detention, and repatriation” of people. In other words, mass detention and deportation are now rehearsed like war games on the high, rising seas south of Florida. As the 2014 addendum to the DHS Climate Adaptation Plan states: “A mass migration plan has been developed, and a plan for increased operations planning of mass migration is under development.”²⁸ It was as if the border fortress described by Schwartz and Randall in the 2003 Pentagon assessment An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications For U.S. National Security was coming into being, the unthinkable already here. This was where the doctrines of Obama and Trump meet in the climate destablilization era: a machine of arrests, expulsions, and banishment from the United States.

DONALD TRUMP

The immediate U.S. response to one of the most devastating natural disasters to hit the Western Hemisphere in the 21st century would have been befitting of U.S. President Donald Trump. Much like the scenarios fully practiced during Integrated Advance trainings, not only did 16 U.S. Coast Guard cutters prowl Haitian waters waiting to interdict anyone leaving the country, but the private prison company Geo Group set up a temporary detention center in Guantánamo Bay while Haitians were still digging themselves out of the rubble. The earthquake killed about 230,000 people and displaced more than a million. The message from U.S. Homeland Security was clear, and even broadcast over the country in the Kreyol language by a U.S. Air Force bomber: If you leave, you will be arrested and returned. “Please: If any Haitians are watching, there may be an impulse to leave the island and to come here,” Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano pleaded, “Please do not have us divert our necessary rescue and relief efforts that are going into Haiti by trying to leave at this point.”

When President Donald Trump took office, at his disposal was the most massive border enforcement apparatus in United States history, built on turbocharge for more than 20 years, even able to act with startling efficiency to faraway disasters such as in Haiti. At his disposal were more U.S. Border Patrol agents than ever before in U.S. history, approximately 21,000, a five-fold increase from 1994 numbers. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), at more than 60,000 agents had become the largest federal law enforcement agency in the country. Including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the 2017 border and immigration enforcement budget was $20 billion, a significant jump from early 1990s annual budgets (from the Immigration and Naturalization Service), which hovered around $1.5 billion. Such was the enforcement arsenal before Trump ever set foot in the White House. And at Trump’s disposal were the relationships with untold thousands of local and state police through many collaboration programs with ICE and CBP, such as Operation Stonegarden and 287(g) agreements—accords between DHS and local police jurisdiction that deputized police officers as immigration agents—to name just two.

At his disposal was the capacity to extend the U.S. border to the shores of Haiti, to the Mexican divide with Guatemala, and to the Iraq border with Iran. On top of this, Trump promises to build a more chilling and ramped-up border and immigration control apparatus, capturing, whether he admits it or not, people coming from environmental catastrophes.

Indeed, Trump’s climate change skepticism is well known. On November 6, 2012, he sent out a tweet that read “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”²⁹ On January 25, 2014, the president tweeted “NBC News just called it the great freeze—coldest weather in years. Is our country still spending money on the GLOBAL WARMING HOAX?”³⁰ On January 29 of that same day he tweeted “Give me clean, beautiful and healthy air—not the same old climate change (global warming) bullshit! I am tired of hearing this nonsense.”³¹ On January 6, 2014, Trump called climate change a “hoax” on Fox & Friends, and on September 24, 2015, he said, “I don’t believe in climate change”³² on CNN’s New Day.

Finally, as part of his presidential campaign he said that he would “cancel the Paris Climate Agreement and stop all payments of U.S. tax dollars to U.N. global warming programs.”³³ And in June 2017, he did exactly that, removing the United States from what some consider the most important international agreement ever signed, to the complete dismay of many people not only in the United States, but across the globe.

In mid-November 2016, a week after the election, the Climate and Security Advisory Group delivered to the president-elect a book of recommendations. This group was composed of 43 U.S.-based military, national security, homeland security, and intelligence experts, which included former commanders of the U.S. Pacific and Central Command and the former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan for national security—the same sorts of people who were at the “National Security, Defense, and Climate Change” conference discussed earlier in this chapter. The document stressed that the new administration needed to build off the “progress already made”³⁴ by both the Barack Obama and George W. Bush administrations around climate change and national security.

When I contacted the American Security Project’s Andrew Holland, the senior fellow on Energy and Climate, to get his take on Trump’s intentions with climate, especially regarding the extensively reported “hoax” comment, Holland responded (cautiously): “There’s a lot of different moving pieces in a government: the President isn’t everything! What the SecDef has to say is important—as apparently is what the President’s daughter has to say!” Indeed, former Exxon Mobile CEO Rex Tillerson stated in January after taking charge of the U.S. Department of State: “I think it’s important that the United States maintain its seat at the table on the conversations around how to address threats of climate change, which do require a global response.”³⁵ Even Trump himself has said and done wildly contradictory things, such as asking officials in County Clare, Ireland, to approve construction of a sea wall to protect his golf resort from global warming, and meeting with climate advocate Al Gore. Also at this meeting was Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, who said that she wanted to “make climate change . . . one of her signature issues.”³⁶

In March 2017, Trump signed an executive order that sought to eliminate a number of Obama-era policy iniatives—such as the Clean Power Plan and the September 2016 presidential memorandum on climate change and national security. Little more than a month later, the U.S. intelligence community issued a “Worldwide Threat Assessment”³⁷ in which climate change is identified as a prominent national security threat. The Assessment, as presented by the Director of National Intelligence Daniel R. Coats to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, repeats the climate security doctrine almost verbatim: global warming is “raising the likelihood of instability and conflict around the world.”³⁸ The report stated that “this warming is projected to fuel more intense and frequent extreme weather events ” and that countries with large coastal populations would be the most vulnerable, especially those in “Asia and Africa.”

When I asked Stephen Cheney at the 2015 conference about how climate change would directly affect the U.S. southern border he told me that in fact the night before, in Las Vegas, he had had dinner with the commander of Southern Command, General John Kelly. Of course, he had no idea at the time of Kelly’s future as Homeland Security secretary. What Cheney said was “We did talk border security and what’s driving immigration and there is no doubt that climate change is having an impact there as well. As it gets hotter, as the catastrophic events become more frequent, it’s having an impact on how they grow their agriculture in the Latin American countries, and employment is becoming a problem, and it’s driving people up north. So he’s seeing that problem.”

Indeed, Cheney said in a November 2016 interview not only that Secretary of Defense Mattis “get[s] climate change”³⁹ but that John Kelly did as well. “I know both of them understand it. I’ve talked to them about it… They know, they get it.”⁴⁰ In the same article Cheney said that he knew of not one top general, with access to the White House or Secretary of Defense who did not understand the climate situation, though he did admit that maybe there was somebody out there.

So it should be no surprise that then-commander John Kelly’s Southern Command was in charge of the simulation “Integrated Advance,” especially with so many future environmental projections of mass migrations from the Caribbean. In 2015, some of the more than 500 members of the Joint Task Force of military and Homeland Security agents disguised themselves as people attempting to breach U.S. borders and boarded rickety boats going north. From a distance, the boats rocking on the waves almost seemed authentic, with only the orange life jackets giving them away. Soldiers also played the role of journalists and media outlets that peppered command with questions, including challenging and critical ones. They practiced setting up positions in Guantánamo Bay where camouflaged soldiers sat behind laptops and looked at live feeds to strategize in real time.

“A migrant operation is one of our most likely missions at Army South so we have to be prepared,”⁴¹ said Major General Joseph P. DiSalvo. Using cameras from the private company FLIR (who has been given, over the years, extensive contracts with Customs and Border Protection) the same rocking, rickety boats showed up on the screens in the fake command post. Large, red-striped Coast Guard cutters patrolled the area, dwarfing the simulated boats moving north. “The main purpose of the exercise is to develop working relationships among different U.S agencies and departments to deter illegal mass migration.”⁴²

Even though President Obama said the words “climate change refugee,” there was no legal framework, either in the United States, or internationally, that would give refugee status to a person fleeing a climate-induced event. The Coast Guard was subordinate to the Department of Homeland Security and its tripartite war on terrorists, drug traffickers, and immigrants.

Under the current U.S. border militarization regime, which will clearly be ramped up with the Trump administration, migrants are occasionally rescued and perhaps even given bits of humanitarian assistance, but these efforts are secondary to, and always followed by, interdiction, arrest, incarceration, and deportation.

CLIMATE ADAPTATION FOR THE RICH AND POWERFUL

South Carolina Congressman Jeff Duncan is getting frustrated. Three U.S. Homeland Security officials sit before him with stoic faces. They have been testifying for close to an hour in a hearing titled “Examining DHS’s Misplaced Focus on Climate Change.”⁴³ The South Carolina congressman scrutinizes the bureaucrats as if he can’t believe he’s sitting in the room dealing with this shit. This happens only weeks after 21-year-old Dylann Roof entered the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Duncan’s state of South Carolina and killed nine people during a prayer service with the intent to incite a “race war.” But he doesn’t mention this.

Duncan, who wears a pressed white shirt with a light purple tie, looks at the DHS men intently. “Can you guys tell me why the Earth was warmer during the medieval times?”⁴⁴

The Homeland Security men shuffle in their seats uncomfortably. Behind them is the audience at the hearing. In front are the members of the committee. The pause is awkward. Deputy Assistant Robert Kolasky, from the Office of Infrastructure Protection, finally makes a gesture that he’ll take a stab at it. When Kolasky gave his testimony earlier, he could’ve been renowned climate journalist Naomi Klein when he quoted the 2014 U.S. Global Change Research Program’s Third National Climate Assessment, which reported that the United States “will experience an increase in frequency and intensity of hurricanes, massive flooding, excessively high temperatures, wildfires, severe downpours, severe droughts, storm surge, sea-level rise throughout the 21st century.”⁴⁵

Kolasky also told the committee that “extreme weather strains our resources, serves as a threat multiplier that aggravates stressors both at home and destabilizes the lifeline sectors on which we rely. Higher temperatures and more intense storms can cause damage or disruptions that result in cascading effects across our communities.”⁴⁶ In other words, following the lead of the world’s most respected climate scientists, the Department of Homeland Security projects that civilization as we know it will be difficult to maintain. The intelligence community knows that the sea is rising and will engulf entire swaths of territory, it understands the surges brought by hurricanes and the ensuing flooding, it anticipates the coming crises of wildfires and water scarcity.

However, to Duncan’s question about the medieval period, Kolasky says, “I don’t think any of us can speak to that.”

“The Earth was warmer,” Duncan interrupts. “Grapes grew higher on the mountains. The Earth was warmer. You’re not going to refute that,” Duncan says, extending his hand toward Kolasky, “I hope.”

“I think that we got threats of ISIS, we got cartels shooting at helicopters, we got unaccompanied children coming into this country, we’ve got illegal aliens murdering beautiful, innocent lives in San Francisco, we’ve got a woman who had her head blown off in Los Angeles by someone,” Duncan says, sounding similar to Donald Trump.

“There are events after events going around the world that are true threats to the United States. Folks that want to do great harm to Christians, that want to do great harm to us. They come to this country to end the American way of life. [And] for whatever reason, we are spending our hard-earned dollars on climate science and this belief that it is one of the biggest threats to national security.”⁴⁷

In a measured, placating tone, Thomas Smith from the DHS Office of Policy Strategy, Plans, Analysis, and Risk explains to Duncan that U.S. authorities will continue to target the very types of people that Duncan mentioned. Homeland Security is not about studying climate science, he explains, it’s about understanding the shifting global climate as a “threat multiplier”⁴⁸—there’s that phrase again.

The term “threat multiplier” first appeared in the 2004 United Nations report “Threats, Challenges, and Change” but didn’t enter the common security lexicon until 2007. According to researcher Ben Hayes, “just as emphasis on the ‘war on terror’ was receding . . . influential security actors in Europe and the U.S. began to outline foreign policy options for addressing climate change as a security threat.”⁴⁹

The term “threat multiplier” hits a deeper chord, because the “threat” referred to much more than just severe weather, and gets back to Watson’s point at the beginning of this chapter. More dangerous than climate disruption was the climate migrant. More dangerous than the drought were the people who can’t farm because of the drought. More dangerous than the hurricane were the people displaced by the storm. The climate refugee was a threat to the very war planes required to enforce the financial and political order where 1 percent of the population wielded more economic power than the rest of the world combined.

At the global policy level, there are two principal responses to climate change: mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Adaptation “seeks to lower the risks” posed by changing conditions. Climate adaptation could mean a wide range of things: building protections against sea-level rise, improving quality of road surfaces to withstand hotter temperatures, rationing water, farmers planting different crops, businesses buying flood insurance. Through USAID, the United States has invested $400 million for worldwide climate adaptation programs, and in 2015 Secretary of State John Kerry committed the U.S. to double that amount. Often workshops focus on food security, health, humanitarian assistance, and water management, what the agency calls “key climate-sensitive sectors.”⁵⁰ These State Department programs are on the chopping block in the Trump administration, and predicted to be slashed or gutted.

The climate “adaptation” plan that is rarely mentioned, but which drones silently over the globe, is the militarized security apparatus that is preparing to enforce “order”—including, in many ways, the suicidal fossil-fuel economy of today—even as it accelerates ecological crisis. Given that all environmental security assessments factor in the massive displacement of people, border militarization becomes one key component, among many others, to maintain the status quo.

Instead of, say, a sea wall’s resistance to physical storms, a border wall envisions a sort of resistance on the part of the rich and powerful against the people whose homes and liveliehoods were destroyed by those storms.

As David Ciplet, co-author of Power in a Warming World, points out, there are choices regarding how money is spent. “Hundreds of billions of dollars each year subsidize fossil fuel industries globally—the main cause of climate change—and nearly $2 trillion are spent on the military.”⁵¹ And, of course, the military, even as it greens its own technology, provides the business-as-usual security for the fossil fuel industries.

Thomas Smith is one of the principal authors of the 2014 Homeland Security Quadrennial Review, the main public doctrine that explains the DHS mission and now recognizes climate change as a central threat. Smith said earlier that experts in the Office of Policy Strategy did a number of activities to understand the threats and hazards facing the United States, and “the strategic environment we operate in.” This collection of analyses was known as the Homeland Security Strategic Environment Assessment. It looks at risks, threats, and trends during a given time frame, in this case, the 2015–2019 window, and collectively identifies “natural disasters, pandemics, and climate change as key drivers of change to the homeland security strategic environment.”⁵² In the Quadrennial Review, Smith says, these associated trends continue to present “a major area of homeland security risk,” and he specifically mentions that “more frequent severe droughts and tropical storms, especially in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean could increase population movements, both legal and illegal, toward or across the U.S. border,”⁵³ a tame version of the threat forecasts issued by officials worldwide.

To Duncan, Smith says: “We describe that climate change can aggravate stressors such as poverty, such as food insecurity, such as causing population migration. For vulnerable populations with weak government institutions it may enable terrorism to take hold.”⁵⁴

The congressman from South Carolina is definitely not the only one fooled into thinking that discussions in Washington about climate change are limited to science and to laws regulating carbon emissions and debates about whether or not it exists. In the strategy rooms of Washington, a climate adaptation program for the rich and powerful is being created, and the walls and weapons to protect their systems of profit and politics as long as possible. The real threat is the inability to obtain alloying agents needed to make more fighter jets.