Book Talk: The U.S. Military’s Environmental Awakening

Lindsay: How did the military wake up to climate change? Can the threats of a changing climate push leaders towards dialogue, peace, and cooperation? Today, I’ll talk with Sherri Goodman, a leading expert in climate change and security, about her new book, Threat Multiplier: Climate, Military Leadership and the Fight for Global Security. Sherri was the first deputy undersecretary of defense for environmental security, and today she’s a senior fellow at the Wilson Center, and secretary general of the International Military Council on Climate & Security.

Today, we’ll talk about her book, how her career has helped to expand the military’s focus on climate issues, and what she’s learned along the way about politics, public service, and the business of changing things.

Sherri, thanks for being with us on Talking Policy. Welcome to the podcast.

Sherri: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Lindsay: So the average person like me might think about climate activists as one type of person: sort of a tree-hugging, Birkenstock-wearing kind of person. And we might think about a member of the military as being a very different kind of person; someone who’s thinking about war and bombs and bullets, and not so much pesky things like the environment.

Your new book, Threat Multiplier: Climate, Military Leadership and the Fight for Global Security obliterates that distinction. In your book, you talk about how over the span of about 30 years, climate and the environment went from being a second- or third-tier issue for the military, to today being really a core issue that is deeply connected to issues of military mission and readiness, and that that has been true across administrations from both political parties.

So to start off, what do you think has been the key to the military’s environmental awakening?

Sherri: Thank you very much, Lindsay. Well, in the first era, in the 1990s, it was essentially America’s environmental laws that directed the military to clean up military bases, as well as to protect endangered species and other natural resources. And so driven, at first, by legal requirements—that then really shifted, I would say, in the climate era, which we’ve been in for the last 15 to 20 years.

And now we understand climate change as a core security requirement. It’s not only a legal requirement. It’s really the shaping context for all that we do in international and global security today, because the natural system is disrupted by the greenhouse gas emissions we’ve put into the atmosphere.

That’s why we have hotter temperatures, warmer waters, increased fires and floods, more intense hurricanes and storms. And security has always been all about stability. And now we have not only disrupted human systems—which, that’s what war and conflict is all about, disruption in the human systems. Now we have disrupted natural systems, earth systems. And so it’s that combination and that collision that’s put us at this greater risk today.

Lindsay: For listeners who aren’t familiar with thinking about the military and military bases, how do climate change impacts, things like heat and flooding, affect the military’s ability to do what they have to do to protect the country?

Sherri: It’s all about managing the risk. Whatever threat you face, it’s about managing the risk. In the Cold War we talked about the nuclear threat as being a low probability, but very high consequence event, which was worth investing billions of America’s GDP to defend and deter.

Today, climate perils are a high risk and high probability event. Think of sea-level rise, and flooding, and more intense storms, and prolonged drought, and permafrost thaw and melt, and fires. Those all affect the military in all the ways it operates.

Our coastal bases are much more subject to flooding, but they still have to operate, you still have to get your ships in and deploy your forces. Fires, now we find that our military is responding about 10 times as frequently, just in the last five years, to fighting fires supporting our emergency first responders. So there are more missions that are being driven by climate risks. Our military is deploying in hotter temperatures. So, now there are more black flag days, when troops can’t train because the temperatures might be over 90 to 95 degrees combined with humidity, the wet bulb temperature. So our military at every level of training, operations, and deployment is affected by the changing climate.

Lindsay: You said that the military has gone from laggard to leader in climate and environment response.

What are some of the things that the military, the Department of Defense is doing? What does that leadership look like?

Sherri: Well, it starts with a commitment to integrate understanding of climate and climate literacy throughout the Department of Defense. So there’s a major campaign on climate literacy at every level of command.

There’s also climate risks factored into war games, which is how we plan for the activities and how the military is going to deploy all around the world. It’s how we ensure our military bases are resilient. So it’s about either raising piers, building seawalls, using natural infrastructure, ensuring that our military bases are resilient to the climate risks.

And it’s also about decarbonizing how we use energy. The military is a large energy user, [and] is responsible for ensuring that it’s using that energy efficiently and also reducing its emissions. The military has a goal to be net zero in electricity by 2035, and net zero totally by 2050. It is now deploying microgrids at most major military bases. Those microgrids will allow it both to have energy security, by not being subject to the broader electric grid infrastructure and being able to use more distributed energy resources, and to decarbonize, by being able to put renewable and clean energy sources onto that microgrid. And so we have the first net zero energy bases in the U.S. right now, Marine Corps Base, Albany, Georgia Logistics Base is now net zero, and we have the second base, which is in California.

Lindsay: Which one?

Sherri: It’s Los Alamitos.

Lindsay: That’s incredible. So a lot of innovation actually happening on military bases in terms of the move towards renewables and microgrids.

Sherri: A lot of innovation. And a lot of this innovation, Lindsay, started 15 years ago when our forces were deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we learned the hard way that trucking fuel to the front to fight those wars was putting soldiers and Marines at risk from deadly attacks by improvised explosive devices (IEDs).

In those conflicts, eight out of 10 of the convoys were for fuel and water. So finding ways to reduce that logistics burden was very, very important. Secretary of Defense Mattis, then-General Mattis, called for “unleashing us from the tether of fuel,” and that launched an era of military energy innovation, not only to decarbonize, which is important, but also to ensure that we were being effective with our fuel use. In prior years, it [had] just been assumed you’re going to use fossil fuels. But if fossil fuels are going to subject you to deadly IED attacks, how about reducing their need by having renewables to power remote bases, whether it’s wind or solar, or better batteries, or hydrogen fuels, or just improving the efficiency of the weapon systems, which we now find today, just improving your efficiency, even in existing fuels, can reduce your fuel burden. So it’s about more fight, less fuel.

Lindsay: Throughout your career, a common military response to “greening” was that addressing the environment or climate change could adversely impact the military’s ability to respond to threats. And the private sector makes a very similar argument, that focus on transitioning to renewable energy or other environmental protections will hurt economic performance.

How do you respond to that? And do we have to choose between one or the other: greening or military readiness, or greening or economic growth?

Sherri: Well, I like to say we have to walk and chew gum. We have to be able to do both. It’s not an either/or choice.

We speak today about China being the pacing threat for military force posture. In other words, what types and kinds of weapon systems and how we should deploy to counter potential Chinese aggression, in the Indo Pacific region or elsewhere around the world. I say, in addition to that, we have to understand that pacing threat happens in the shaping context of climate. Because everywhere we operate or deploy in the maritime environment of the Pacific, where you have higher sea states now, and warmer waters, and stronger typhoons. All of that is going to affect how a conflict will unfold, so you can’t ignore it. You have to understand it, and then you have to be able to operate in and through it.

You have to reduce your carbon footprint where you can but most importantly, you have to understand how to operate in that shaping context of a changing climate.

Lindsay: When we think about the military, we think about war and peace. So let’s talk about that for a minute. Violent conflict has escalated over the past decade. To what extent do you think climate change contributes to, or complicates wars, whether it’s in Yemen or Syria or Ukraine or Sudan or elsewhere? How do climate and war interact?

Sherri: Well, we know that across much of the drought-stricken regions of the Middle East and North Africa, from Syria to Somalia, that the prolonged droughts in those two countries has fueled further conflict and unrest in the following ways: Farmers and herders that previously had lived peaceably in a region could no longer continue to support both their livelihoods as water sources dried up with prolonged drought. And so people began to move with their families towards the urban areas, and that in itself, without the jobs to support people in the areas, combined with the political instability already inherent in places like Syria and Somalia, then becomes a petri dish for terrorism: the male youth without jobs become attractive recruits for the terrorist organizations.

And we’ve seen this now play out multiple times over the last several decades. So the climate-fueled drought leading to food and water insecurity is fueling today’s conflicts. And we have to account for that in how we think about matters of war and peace. How do you create a sustainable peace? A sustainable peace today can only be had when you also have resilient food and water sources.

Lindsay: You said in another interview that you’ve done about your book, that although the military has to be ready for war, the military doesn’t want war, it wants peace. One of the things that you hear is that climate change may, as a crisis, be an opportunity for dialogue between adversaries such as China and the U.S.

To what extent do you think that the crisis of climate change, can it facilitate dialogue? Peace? And is it, actually, or is this still kind of in the theoretical “ideas” stages? Is it helping to create dialogue where there isn’t dialogue?

Sherri: The greatest of our military leaders have wanted to ensure that we can live in peace and have peaceful outcomes, and will do everything to avoid sending soldier, sailor, airman, and marine, our young men and women, into combat. Think of George Marshall, who was a great general, but really his greatest legacy was the Marshall Plan, which was all about peace and recovery in Europe after the war.

And I think of a descendant, really of his, a general that I had a great privilege of working with, General Gordon Sullivan, who was Army Chief of Staff at the end of the Cold War, and also a great leader on climate, became the first chairman of the CNA Military Advisory Board that I founded and said, you know, “We can’t wait for 100 percent certainty. If we do, we know something bad will happen on the battlefield.” And that was by way of explaining how to understand climate risk in the context of military operations and planning.

So how can climate be a source of cooperation and peacebuilding? Well, take the example of EcoPeace Middle East, a group of Palestinian, Jordanian, and Israeli leaders that came together after the Oslo Accords in the 1990s to really work on water sharing and cooperation among those three entities. And while they alone cannot solve the wider conflicts and the tragedies that we see in the region now today, they have been successful in building water sharing and water cooperation arrangements among those three entities. And there’s promise that when we should ever get to a day after in that region, that some of their proposals, for example, the Blue Green Deal, which would have Jordan provide solar energy to Israel and Israel provide further water into Jordan, could be a source of cooperation and sustainability in that region. There have been other proposals with respect to Gaza and the West Bank as well.

So I do think that climate considerations and environmental considerations are at the very heart of peacebuilding in this era.

Lindsay: What about the U.S. and China? Do you think addressing climate change is an avenue to bring them to the table?

Sherri: Well, with China, it’s very clear that they are our major peer competitor but also the only country that really seeks to upend the international system and America’s leadership role in it, and conceives of a very different world order from one based on democratic values and human rights, and that in the long term is deeply threatening to our way of life.

Now, the U.S. and China both being the world’s major greenhouse gas emitters, we have to account for that as well. So essentially, with China, we’re going to cooperate and compete at the same time. We have to be able to do both, like I said, you have to walk and chew gum.

We do have to cooperate with China in the sense that both nations should support and agree to ambitious objectives for reducing our greenhouse gas emissions, such as the Paris targets, and subsequent targets to follow on from the global climate agreements. But how we achieve those targets is going to be a matter of economic competition among the nations and the race for the clean energy future.

China gets that. China is leading in many dimensions of the race for the clean energy future with its massive deployment of solar and renewable energy and electric vehicles. The U.S. has got to stay at the forefront of clean energy technology innovation and deployment, because that’s how we’re going to be competitive and sustainable in our own future and around the world.

Lindsay: You mentioned that part of the growing, simmering conflict or competition between China and the U.S., is unfolding in the economic sphere, and part of it is about different kind of systems and approaches and values. Between, you know, democracy and human rights on the one hand, and a different, authoritarian model on the other.

One of the things that we are working on here at IGCC, and one of the reasons that you’re here is to meet with our Future of Democracy group, who are together working with our Climate and Security group, which is led by Richard Matthew, your longtime colleague, to think about and ask the question: In what ways will climate change impacts challenge democracy? In what ways will they put pressure on democratic governance? Is it possible that climate change impacts will drive voters towards populist candidates or authoritarian candidates?

This is one of the questions that we are thinking a lot about here at IGCC, and I’m curious what you think about that sort of constellation of questions. Do we need to be worried about democracy?

Sherri: We do! Talking with you here, Lindsay, today on the day before the American presidential election and seeing the extent of mis- and disinformation occurring both in our own country, fueled by others who want to interfere in our election systems, and occurring around the world, also happening around climate change.

And the best example, the most vivid example we have right now is in the wake of Hurricane Helene and Milton, when mis- and disinformation was sowed within the communities most deeply affected, in North Carolina and elsewhere, to falsely claim that FEMA and other government officials were not coming to the aid of those so deeply harmed by those hurricanes.

So we see that disinformation affecting our voting systems. And so yes, climate and voting—and therefore, our democracy—are connected, here and in other places around the world.

Lindsay: One of the things that you point out in your book is that climate change wasn’t as partisan an issue decades ago as it has become today.

How did it get so partisan, and what is the pathway out of that?

Sherri: Well first of all, most things weren’t as polarized a quarter century ago as they are today, unfortunately. And when I joined the Senate Armed Services Committee staff, we worked very closely with our counterparts across the aisle. We did our markups together. The members were very close. That was just how we did the business of the committee.

That began to fray already in the 1990s, and then climate in particular has become polarized in our society today. It’s less so in defense and in the military, primarily because no member of Congress wants to lose their military base, and most of our military bases are in red states today. So every member of Congress wants their military base to be resilient against sea level rise, floods, droughts, whatever climate peril they experience. And they want to protect the troops. That is a universal sort of consideration.

So, you know, I’m modestly hopeful that efforts, like the Conservative Climate Caucus and others, can help provide bridges across the aisle and that as we think about our global security, we can unite around responding to the climate resilience and clean energy competitiveness we need to have to confront the enduring threat we face from China today. I don’t want to overstate that threat because it’s important nonetheless for our own society to get our house in order, but sometimes that itself can be unifying.

Lindsay: What are your priorities now? As you mentioned, we’re recording this interview on the eve of the U.S. presidential election. What do you hope the next presidential administration will focus on in terms of climate change and security?

Sherri: Well, we do, of course, face a very different choice in who becomes the next American president. Are we going to accelerate into our clean energy and climate future? Are we going to take some steps back, not be as present on the global stage? Those are choices Americans are facing right now.

At the same time, I hope that regardless of the outcome, there are these risks that can’t be ignored. And so, in a security context, and what our military is charged to do, which is to protect and defend America and ensure that we are clear-eyed about all the risks we are facing, I expect that much of that clear-eyed assessment and response will continue from our Defense Department regardless.

Lindsay: I want to ask you some slightly more personal questions. You were in your late twenties, in 1987, I think, when you joined the Senate Armed Services committee. You were one of the first women professional staff members of that committee.

You joined DOD, as Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Environmental Security, when you were, I think, 34. You’ve been doing this a long time, at very high levels, advising governments, working in government.

When I think about climate change and climate activists, I think of people who are working kind of on the outside looking in. And you mentioned bringing environmental voices to the Department of Defense and to the Pentagon who might say, “Well, I’ve sued the Pentagon, but I’ve never actually been to the Pentagon.”

And that’s how I think about climate activists, sort of holding, you know, signs of protest, but on the outside. But you have worked on the inside, you’ve had a seat at the table, and you have helped to bring about change slowly, incrementally, but with power, which I find really encouraging. I imagine it wasn’t always easy. What have you learned about public policy, the business of changing things, and politics?

Sherri: Well, thank you, Lindsay. Yes, I like to think of myself as someone who’s been a change agent from within.

I have worked for most of my life inside large institutions trying to reshape them from within. And I think that can often provide a more enduring sense of change and one that is longer lasting within societies. And how do you do that? Well, you have to understand how institutions work, what makes them change.

I learned early on on the Senate Armed Services Committee that being able to mark up the bills, draft the bills, write the language, what the members did was very powerful. When I came to the Pentagon, I realized how much power I had in the pen that I wielded on behalf of the members for whom I worked.

It was their decision to actually affect funding, programs, and a lot of activity within any federal agency and throughout America. So, I also have wanted to affect enduring change, and you do that by changing how institutions work and the culture within large institutions like the Pentagon, like the military, and that’s by creating relationships. And we often say you can’t surge trust, you have to build it. So I worked hard in my early career to earn the trust and develop the relationships with the senior leaders for whom I worked at the time, and who then over time became my peers. That in many ways fit with how my own career evolved, because as a woman early on in fields that had previously been all male, to actually succeed and get the respect and be able to advance, you had to work basically harder than everybody else, women know that. You had to be consistent and you had to show up. You had to figure out how to work with all types of people.

And so over the course of my career, I’ve tried to do that. To be a good listener, work with a range of people, and you learn how to manage up and down and in and out. You know, everything is a sort of a multi-level negotiation in terms of policy and practice. And one of the best pieces of advice I got when I was in the Department of Defense was to ensure that the changes we were trying to make would be enduring by putting it into directives. And it sounds kind of boring, but those are the things that actually stick. That’s what actually cannot be overturned, even when elections produce different results.

So it’s important to understand what are the enduring threads, and then also to build that culture. Now there’s a whole generation of people who work on climate and security throughout, not just the Department of Defense, but all federal agencies, and they work across diplomatic development, and defense and disaster, and in research and development, and in policymaking and in assessment. I mean, it’s really threaded throughout the fabric of society today in ways that actually affect how decisions are made. And that’s, to me, what you always want to get at. How are decisions made and how to make that sustainable and enduring.

Lindsay: You came of age during the Cold War and you have spoken about your parents, who were Holocaust refugees to the U.S. And I heard you, in another interview, talk about the concept of repairing the world as part of your identity and part of what drives you. I was really interested when I heard you use that phrase, because that suggests a deep commitment, and a persistent commitment.

And I’m curious when you decide to take on, as part of your vocation, as part of your career, really hard things, and you work in it for five years, for 10 years, and it’s still really hard. When you commit to taking on hard things that are likely to remain hard forever, but you have a commitment to repair the world. How do you stay true to that commitment when the world continues to need more and more repair? Like, how do you hold on to that?

Sherri: Such a good question. I think that faith drives a lot of that enduring commitment. As you said, my parents are Holocaust refugees who were born in Germany in the early 1930s and were among the fortunate few who were able to escape Nazi Germany. And growing up with that legacy, and always having in mind that never again could we let fascism and antisemitism be so prevalent. But also, in the Jewish faith, we talk about tikkun olam, which is about, repairing and giving back. So that is an enduring-across-generations type of commitment, which you might even say has biblical roots.

I think that it’s that sense that we’re all part of something larger. At the end of the day, you want to be able to look back and feel that you made a contribution to something larger than yourself.

Sometimes we say as parents, you know, the days are long, but the years are short, right? And so any one day, you know, with your small child can seem like interminable, right? But then when you look back and they’re grown up, you’re like, “Wow, it went by so quickly.” I sometimes feel that same way. You know, I felt many times when I was in the Pentagon that I was hitting my head against a brick wall trying to make various changes. I remember we were trying to create regional environmental coordinators at one point for the Department of Defense to better sync up what we’re doing environmentally with EPA and the environmental regulators, and I encountered quite a bit of resistance when we first introduced the concept and it took me several years to really figure out how to structure the concept and work with the military departments and the services to sort of put it together in a way that could be accepted, endorsed, and now they still exist today, 30 plus years later.

And so that type of institutional change, you know, you have to think about how it’s going to be enduring over time and then also have a belief in something larger than yourself.

Lindsay: Sherri Goodman, author of Threat Multiplier, thank you for being with us on Talking Policy.

Sherri: Thank you so much, Lindsay. It’s been a pleasure.

Lindsay: Thank you for listening to this episode of Talking Policy. Talking Policy is a production of the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. This episode was produced and edited by Tyler Ellison. To ensure you never miss an episode, subscribe to Talking Policy wherever you get your podcasts.