The Uncertain Future 

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Kai Ryssdal: Jake, we rolling? All right.

Hayley Hershman: You’re not as nervous this time around?

Kai Ryssdal: I don’t know. I don’t know. We’ll see. You know you’re a known quantity now, Hayley.

Hayley Hershman: Right, right.

Kai Ryssdal: We told you back in episode one that this season of How We Survive was gonna be a little bit different, and it has been. So at the end of all the reporting and traveling and talking to people, I found myself back in the studio with producers Hayley Hershman and Sophia Paliza-Carre.

Kai Ryssdal: This is where my responsibilities end, Hayley.

Hayley Hershman: Well, Kai Ryssdal, welcome back to the program. So great to see you again.

Kai Ryssdal: You’re too funny.

Hayley Hershman: Not gonna ask you anything you don’t know the answer to, so —

Kai Ryssdal: Oh no, you’re killing me.

Hayley Hershman: How does it feel —

Kai Ryssdal: You’re killing me.

Hayley Hershman: But in all seriousness, we’re wrapping up the season. How are you feeling?

Kai Ryssdal: I’m feeling good. I mean, we have gone all over the place trying to find the answer to these questions of of what it means for the American military and American national security as the planet gets hotter, and we haven’t answered all the questions, but I think all the questions we posed, we’ve shed some daylight on. So I’m feeling pretty good.

Sophia Paliza-Carre: Here’s one just to like, to set the table and see if you have an answer to this. But if you had to sum up your experience, Kai, with this season in one word, what would that be?

Kai Ryssdal: Oh, huh. There’s a little bit of nostalgia, right? I mean, I felt it when we were up at the 525th in Alaska. I certainly felt that on Kwaj and in the Pentagon, stuff that was familiar yet different changed over time. As I said, the first time we did this before episode one, right, the American military that, my service was a formative time in my life, and it’s weird to have gone back to it, what are we now, 35, 40 years later, you know. It was, I enjoyed the hell out of it. But it was, there was, it was a little, it was a little weird.

Hayley Hershman: I had wondered how you felt when we were up in Alaska, like flying around with the Coast Guard, or seeing the F-22s. I just had wondered how that must have felt for you.

Kai Ryssdal: It was, it was, look, it’s a, it can be really hard being in the military, but it’s also incredibly rewarding. You feel like most of the time, you’re doing something that has great worth, and you’re making a difference, right? You’re contributing to something that is bigger than yourself. I’ve always been proud of my service, but I never made too much of it publicly, because, unlike a lot of people, especially in the Iraq and Afghanistan period, I didn’t actually do anything, you know? I mean, I deployed, and I flew, and I did time at the Pentagon, but I didn’t, you know, I was, I’m a non-combat veteran. And and peacetime military is very different from what it’s been in the last 20 years. And I didn’t actually do anything.

Hayley Hershman: It doesn’t seem fair to say that you didn’t do anything.

Kai Ryssdal: I didn’t do what combat veterans do and and there’s been a slice of people who served in the military since September 11th, honestly, who have obviously paid a much higher price. And in comparison to that, I didn’t really do much.

Hayley Hershman: Doing all this reflecting and reporting —

Kai Ryssdal: Yeah, I’m loving it. Thank you so much. This is my favorite thing to do.

Hayley Hershman: Yeah, I can tell you feel really comfortable. Well, do you think that you’ve learned anything new about yourself through this process?

Kai Ryssdal: You can take the man out of the military, but you can’t take the military out of the man, which is flip, but that’s pretty close.

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This is gonna sound odd, but as much as I knew this season was gonna be personal, I didn’t expect it to get personal, and it’s a little uncomfortable, even though our tagline this time around was how the institution that shaped me is going to shape our climate future. But here’s the point. 30 years, how long it’s been since I got out of the Navy, is a long time, and while a lot of things in the military are the same, a lot of things are different.

Hayley Hershman: Was there anything that surprised you or like, anything that you thought you knew about climate change and the military, but during reporting, you realized you were wrong about?

Kai Ryssdal: In all honesty, I hadn’t realized the scope of the challenges, right? I mean, you know, I follow national security news as an interested observer for the last 35 years, but it hadn’t really occurred to me the scale of the challenge that the Pentagon faces, and now also the scale of the contribution that the American military makes to climate change as a threat, both to our own national security and to the planet’s survival, right? I mean, we’ve said it a zillion times biggest single institutional emitter of carbon in the world, all that. And so the hill that the Pentagon has to climb in reducing its carbon footprint is is a very steep one.

Sophia Paliza-Carre: I guess, if you can put it in question format Kai like, what questions are left?

Kai Ryssdal: So I think there are a couple of questions. The first one is, honestly, what happens after this election? Right? That’s a little bit of a cop out, but it’s a very real question, what happens with climate policy and national security after this election? Number two, where does climate change factor in the national security posture as it relates to traditional national security problems that we’ve had since the end of the second World War? Right? War in Europe, a rising Asia, China being more powerful, right? We are now no longer and haven’t been for some time, right, but we’re no longer in a in a bipolar world, and now with an empowered China and Russia doing who knows what, with climate change in the mix, it becomes all the more threatening and challenging.

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I’m Kai Ryssdal, and this is How We Survive, a podcast from Marketplace. It’s the official policy of the United States government that climate change is a threat to national security, and as we’ve reported, the American military itself is a key contributor to climate change. Taking you back to episode one again, the Pentagon is the single biggest institutional source of greenhouse gasses in the world, and they are trying to change that on the margins, but as we’ve seen on the ground this season, if an institution as big as the American military is going to change its climate footprint and make those changes stick, that’s going to be a heavy lift, which then leads to some questions. What should the American military’s role in the world be as climate change keeps on multiplying the threats? How much national defense do we need? And oh, by the way, this is an election year. This is episode six, The Uncertain Future. We’ve been able to talk about the Pentagon’s carbon footprint and its overall emissions, actually put a number to it, partly because of an academic named Neta Crawford.

Kai Ryssdal: How does one come upon this as a field of study?

Neta Crawford: Good question. You and I go back to the ’80s, I think.

Kai Ryssdal: We do indeed, sadly.

Neta Crawford: Yeah. My work began in the mid 1980s with a book on Soviet military aircraft.

Kai Ryssdal: She’s a political scientist and professor at the University of Oxford who got interested in trying to quantify the DOD’s carbon footprint, and then wrote a book called The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War, in which, among other things, she wonders whether the American military should fundamentally rethink its role in the world. Crawford says as a starting point, the military just doesn’t need to be as big as it is.

Neta Crawford: The DOD itself says they have 20% excess capacity at their bases. In other words, what we’ve got is we’ve got these bases, which we’ve had for decades, and what they do is they keep existing without a reevaluation in many cases of whether or not they’re necessary.

Kai Ryssdal: Excess bases, but also aircraft and too many readiness exercises.

Neta Crawford: Does the United States need to transport troops and equipment with large aircraft at the drop of a hat? Do they need to practice that? How much, we don’t even know actually, how much the multilateral and solo exercises of the United States are emitting. There is no transparency on that, but all of that involves the transportation, either by air or by sea, of forces around the world. The main thing, though, is what we have right now is a sort of incremental approach to shaving off some emissions at the margins. So they’re doing really good work, for instance, in changing the flight profiles of aircraft, or changing the way that they idle on the tarmac before they take off, but I think the more significant reductions will come with a streamlining of operations.

Kai Ryssdal: Let me back you up for a second. Is your point that that the military ought to train less and prepare less in order to cut its emissions?

Neta Crawford: What would happen if we rethought each of the missions, that is the Persian Gulf, the Pacific, Europe, would be a streamlining and efficiencies, and yes, some reductions in exercising and training.

Kai Ryssdal: Let me get you down to the granular, right.

A reminder here, I spent years in the Navy doing exactly those exercises in training on and off aircraft carriers.

Carrier aviation requires, and it’s long since been lost to memory, a certain number of carrier rested landings to maintain currency, some of which are day, some of which are night. We do less of those?

Neta Crawford: I understand that we, if the United States wants to maintain, you know, more than 10 aircraft carriers at sea at any one time, with dozens of ships and helicopters on board, capable of being deployed at a moment’s notice, used in a war zone, it needs to be ready. But what I’m suggesting is those numbers, the aircraft carriers, the number of aircraft, the flying hours, are driven by the mission. And I think we need to rethink the missions. This is not the Department of Defense’s purview. It is at the level of the National Security Council to rethink the missions, and they they’ve been rethought many times. For example, when Obama made the pivot to Asia, he was rethinking the mission, moving some forces from the Persian Gulf to the Pacific, but major revisioning hasn’t happened, and that’s what I’m calling for.

Kai Ryssdal: We talked about this with that sustainable jet fuel refinery in Brooklyn a couple of episodes ago, the one with vodka at 10 o’clock in the morning. The Pentagon reducing its carbon footprint is not about cutting emissions on the margins. It’s about much, much bigger change.

You’ve said in your book, you wrote this, you said the military is inadvertently, or perhaps deliberately, militarizing climate change, and you talk about that in reference to the Arctic. And I guess I wonder, since we’ve been up there looking around, what do you mean by that?

Neta Crawford: Well, the United States military has known since the late 1950s that when Arctic Sea ice melts, that that creates an opening for anyone who can get a ship there to patrol. They’ve been talking about this since then, that’s more than 60 years, and that’s all real, but we don’t have to fight about it. We can cooperate in the Arctic as we cooperate in the Mediterranean. We can develop rules about seabed mining or other resource extraction like oil or natural gas production. That’s the world we have to be in, the world of rules and international law.

Kai Ryssdal: The catch, of course, is that that’s not the world we’re in. And with all possible respect, I’m not sure it’s realistic, short term anyway, for us to get there.

Neta Crawford: No, we’re not in that world. We’re, in fact, going the opposite direction. And what we have to do is arrest, that is stop doing, what we’re doing. We have to arrest the direction that we’re in, and we have to change.

Kai Ryssdal: How big a challenge to all of those things that we’ve been talking about today do you think it is that that the military ethos, obviously, is salute and carry out the plan of the day, right? Give me an order and I’m going to get it done, but also just the innate American psyche of having a robust and forceful American military to have America be be the Colossus, right?

Neta Crawford: I think the military can not turn on a dime, but reorient and has reoriented itself historically. I don’t think that’s the major challenge. There’s lots of innovation there. The major challenges are a sense in the United States that there are real threats out there, and that the best way to respond to those threats is with force or be prepared to do so. And frankly, that’s one way to go. But we have other tools. We have diplomatic tools, economic tools, and the possibility of changing relationships through persuasion. So that’s an important element here, as well as what you mentioned, the United States’ desire to control outcomes everywhere all the time.

Kai Ryssdal: Doesn’t seem like that’s going to change, yeah?

Neta Crawford: Even if we don’t do anything, the United States is the preeminent military power. If we cut our military spending dramatically, the United States would still be preeminent. About 40% of all military spending is U.S. military spending. It spends more than its major adversaries combined. It has more capable forces. The United States is secure. The United States has about 750 overseas bases and installations. China has two. That’s our pacing threat. China has 400 nuclear weapons. The United States has thousands of nuclear weapons. The United States is secure. It’s really about right sizing the force to the world that we’re in, and then as the U.S. right sizes its force, it can make a difference in climate change, which will make it easier for the military to operate.

Kai Ryssdal: The big takeaway here from Neta Crawford is that the Department of Defense just doesn’t need to be as big as it is. We’ve got national defense to spare, but shaping the climate future of the American military depends almost entirely on who the commander in chief is, whether or not the national security and climate policy that President Biden put into place stays in place, whether or not decarbonizing stays a federal goal.

Page Fortna: You know, the U.S. will probably pull out of the Paris Agreement if Trump wins. I think at the level of international cooperation on climate, it would be hugely damaging. It wouldn’t kill the whole process, but it would be hugely damaging.

Kai Ryssdal: What’s at stake in November, coming up after the break.

BREAK

Kai Ryssdal: I separated from the Navy on a Friday in March of 1993. The following Monday, I started at the State Department in the Foreign Service, and by the time I got out of the Navy, I had done everything I joined the Navy to do: flying, deploying overseas, staff duty at the Pentagon, graduate school. It was time to do something else. That was a long time and four presidents ago, and it was long before climate change — global warming was the phrase back then — long before it was recognized as the strategic threat it is today. But as we sit here, three weeks out from a presidential election, with climate events becoming more and more common and the national security environment becoming less and less predictable, the politics of climate change seem important.

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First thing I want you to do is tell me exactly who you are and how you want to be identified.

Page Fortna: My name is Page Fortna, and I’m a professor at Columbia University where I teach international relations in the Political Science department. I’m also the director of the Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies.

Kai Ryssdal: When you have conversations with your peers who are actually in the national security establishment, whether it’s Department of Defense or the civilian side of the house, what’s the tenor and tone of the conversations you have about climate change as a national security threat?

Page Fortna: There are people who I’m talking to because they’re already interested in or talking about climate issues, and then they’re, you know, fully on board on like this is an important problem. But I often find we have people come speak at the Saltzman Institute from the security establishment, and, you know, often they’ll give their 30, 45-minute talk and not say a word about climate, and then if a student doesn’t, I’ll pipe up and ask a question about climate, and people seem to get it, but it’s not top of mind for a lot of people.

Kai Ryssdal: Let’s get into the practical here for a minute. We have done in this series some in depth field reporting on Kwajalein and up in Alaska, where they know climate change is a threat to to their mission and their way of life, but they they say, you know, we’re gonna figure it out. What do you make of that?

Page Fortna: I mean, you know, there’s this American, you know, can do spirit. We can technology our way out of anything —

Kai Ryssdal: That I think is literally what some of those guys said to me, actually.

Page Fortna: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think, you know, individual installations, I listened to your episodes so far over the last couple days, they’re, they were great.

Kai Ryssdal: Thank you.

Page Fortna: I learned a lot.

Kai Ryssdal: Unsolicited plug, by the way, let’s just get it in there. Completely unsolicited.

Page Fortna: Yeah, they, you know, I think an individual installation, yeah, you can move it inland. You can, you know, if it’s a sea level rise thing, you can prop it up. And if you think about just the gazillion little ways that climate change is going to affect things, including some of the ones that you reported on, but also things like sonar doesn’t work as well in warmer water. Bomb sniffing dogs don’t find explosives as effectively in hot weather. I mean these are individually little things, but when you think about them all adding up, it’s going to change every little thing about the military. And so that the scale of that, I think, is going to be hard to deal with. And then that’s just sort of adaptation of the U.S. military. But if we really have climate catastrophe, unmitigated climate change, there’s a threat multiplier, which I know you’ve talked about on the show, but there’s also just the direct threat to our homeland and everybody’s homeland, you know, think about the devastation that hurricane Helene has has devastated, or wildfires, or, you know, all of these things. If you look at those places, they look like a bomb hit them, right? And it’s the kind of destruction that we try to defend ourselves against when we’re thinking about enemies with militaries, but we can’t defend ourselves against climate with our nuclear weapons and our radar installations and all of those things. It’s coming anyway.

Kai Ryssdal: This is a question about the inertia of the national security establishment. Yes, they know climate change is a threat. Yes, they’re trying to do something, but it is a ponderous beast, and I wonder how realistic it is to expect a fundamental change in the way the United States manages its national security establishment in response to climate change. Do you think that’s possible?

Page Fortna: I think maybe it depends on what you set as the bar for success. You know, one thing we know about climate is that, as the cliche goes, you know, every tenth of a degree matters, right? So whether the U.S. military will be completely fossil fuel free at some, some point, probably not. There are going to be things that just can’t be transitioned away from fossil fuels. But you know, the military is an amazing technological innovator, has been throughout its history. And there are a lot of things that, you know, new whiz bang technology is going to be both good for the planet and good for the military. You know, the military is a huge beast, and it’s been kind of moved a few degrees, maybe more than a few degrees, towards green defense, or greening its operations —

Kai Ryssdal: That is, that is compass degrees, not temperature degrees, to be clear.

Page Fortna: Yes, yes, compass degrees, which will then relate into temperature degrees at some point or or, you know, hundredths of them, or something. So some of those changes are, you know, have been put in motion during the Biden administration, and some of them will continue because they’re smart for the military to do just anyway, even if the military didn’t care about the climate effects of them. But a lot of them will stop if Trump wins and, you know, there’s an administration where from the top, there’s no concern about this.

Kai Ryssdal: Let me drill down a little bit more. One assumes that that a President Harris would continue in the main, President Biden’s environmental and climate change policies as they affect national security. One assumes that President Trump, should he win a second term, would continue to do what he did in the first term, which is do things like pull out of the Paris climate treaty and not put climate change very high on his list, if at all, of national security issues. What’s the threat there?

Page Fortna: You know, the U.S. will probably pull out of the Paris agreement if Trump wins. I think at the level of international cooperation on climate, it would be hugely damaging. It wouldn’t kill the whole process, but it would be hugely damaging. On the other hand, if Harris wins, and we stay in and continue to be a leader on climate cooperation, then that just, you know, if you just think about sort of the effect that will have overall on U.S. emissions and world emissions, that helps us avoid the worst consequences of climate change, and then all of those knock on effects we were talking about before that will threaten U.S. security.

Kai Ryssdal: What’s the most important thing I haven’t asked you today, what’s the most important thing you want to say?

Page Fortna: I think one of the things that both international relations as a field and the security establishment is not thinking through well enough is what the future will look like under unmitigated climate change, or alternatively, a green future in which we’ve had a massive shift away from a fossil fuel economy. As social scientists, we tend to use the past to understand the future, but we know in this case that the future is not going to be like the past, and militaries do the same thing, right? Like, you know, they try to fight the last war, but what’s coming is really, really different from what we’ve had before, and it’s going to be really complicated to figure out how economic power, demographic power, military power, will be affected.

Kai Ryssdal: When I was in boot camp, officer candidate school, technically, there was a saying, the days go like weeks, but the weeks go like days. From the 5am wake up, from Gunnery Sergeant Holtry, United States Marine Corps, to Taps and lights out at 10pm, with military drill and marching and physical training and aerodynamics and navigation and all the other academics in between. Those were long days, but every time you turned around it seemed, another week had ticked by, and you were one week closer to getting commissioned and eventually getting your wings. It was orderly. There was a process, and here, at the end of six episodes of us reporting on how the institution that shaped me is going to shape our climate future, it occurs to me that things are really different now. I mean, I have no idea what officer candidate school is like these days, but big picture for the military itself, for the Department of Defense, climate change has changed the rules of the game. Actually, to paraphrase one of the many, many people we’ve talked to over the past year, climate change has literally changed the playing field itself. Melting ice in the Arctic, inundated islands in the Kwajalein Atoll. We’ve been there, and we’ve seen it. And so where I’m left at the end of this thing is realizing that for the military and the threat multiplier that climate change is, the decades we’re counting on to be able to adapt are going to go a lot faster than anybody realizes.

If you like what you hear, please do rate and review us. It helps other people find the pod, and I hope you enjoyed it. I’m Kai Ryssdal. Sophia Paliza-Carre and Katie Reuther produced this episode. They had help from Hayley Hershman. Caitlin Esch is our supervising senior producer. Nancy Farghalli edited. Scoring and sound design by Chris Julin, mixing by Brian Allison. Special thanks to our Marketplace colleagues Jon Gordon, Amy Scott, Daisy Palacios, Dan Ackerman, and Maria Hollenhorst. Bridget Bodnar is the Director of Podcasts. Francesca Levy is the Executive Director of Digital. Neal Scarbrough is the Vice President and General Manager of Marketplace. Our theme music is by Wonderly.