Despite President Weaknstupid's Tantrums, Senior DOD Officers Continue Climate Prep & Analysis

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Shortly after assuming the presidency in 2017, Donald Trump rescinded Executive Order 13653, “Preparing the United States for the Impacts of Climate Change,” a measure that had been signed by President Barack Obama in late 2013. The Obama order, steeped in the science of climate change, instructed all federal agencies to identify global warming’s likely impacts on their future operations and to take such action as deemed necessary to “enhance climate preparedness and resilience.” In rescinding that order, Trump asserted that economic competitiveness—involving, among other things, the unbridled exploitation of America’s oil, coal, and natural gas reserves—outweighed environmental protection as a national priority. All federal agencies were instructed to abandon their efforts to enhance climate preparedness and to abolish any rules or regulations adopted in accordance with Executive Order 13653. Most government agencies, now headed by Trump appointees, heeded the president’s ruling. One major organization, however, carried on largely as before: the U.S. Department of Defense.

In accordance with the 2013 Obama directive, the Department of Defense (DoD) had taken significant steps to mitigate its contributions to global warming, such as installing solar panels on military installations and acquiring electric vehicles for its noncombat transport fleet. More important, the Pentagon leadership, in a January 2016 directive, had called on the military services to assess “the effects of climate change on the DoD mission” and act where necessary to overcome “any risks that develop as a result of climate change.” All those endeavors, presumably, were to be suspended following President Trump’s 2017 decree. But while discussion of climate change has indeed largely disappeared from the Pentagon’s public statements, its internal efforts to address the effects of global warming have not stopped. Instead, a close look at Pentagon reports and initiatives reveals that many senior officers are convinced that climate change is real, is accelerating, and has direct and deleterious implications for American national security.

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Senior commanders are well aware that there is an intense national debate over climate change and that some politicians—including the president and most of his cabinet—doubt the reality or imminence of planetary warming. But they have also seen evidence of warming for themselves (especially if they’ve served in drought-stricken areas of the Middle East and Asia, as a significant majority of them have done), and know that scientific evidence overwhelmingly confirms the climate change prognosis. Even more important, military officers are practical people and careful managers of risk. While they can never know for sure when and where the next security threat will arise, they must prepare themselves for any plausible contingency, and devastating climate change forecasts fall in this category. Even if the science of global warming still has a margin of uncertainty, they will say, it is close enough to being certain that the armed services must account for it in their future planning and take whatever steps they can to mitigate its harmful consequences.

There is, therefore, a direct clash between current White House doctrine on climate change and the Pentagon’s determination to overcome climate-related threats to military preparedness. A vivid illustration of this ongoing confrontation comes from the DoD’s efforts to assess the danger that climate change poses to its domestic installations. Although many of America’s combat-ready forces are deployed in or near potential hotspots abroad, the Pentagon relies on stateside bases to train and supply those forward-deployed units—so any threat to the operational utility of domestic facilities would endanger critical military operations. Military bases are launch platforms, and you “can’t fight a war unless you’ve got a place to leave from,” said General Gerald Galloway, formerly a senior officer at the Army Corps of Engineers.

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https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-surprising-ally-in-fighting-global-warming-the-pentagon

[Snackshack]

1. The DoD

Knows climate change is going to be a threat to National Security and are doing what they can to prepare.

The cynical part of me thinks republicans actually do believe in climate change and that it is going to have disastrous consequences globally but they don’t care. They figure by the time it really gets bad and wars are fought for water they will be long dead and gone so they are trying to wring as much profit as can be had out of keeping things the way they are.