Each month, Citizens’ Climate Lobby features a special guest expert on its international tele-meeting. In April, our speaker was Katherine Hammack, former Assistant Secretary of the Army for Installations, Energy, and the Environment. She was appointed by President Obama in 2010.
Hammack began with the question of why climate change is of interest to the military in the first place. For one thing, the primary function of the military being to ensure the national security of the United States, it has a major interest in assuring stability in other regions. Catastrophic flooding, wildfires, and water shortages can cause huge social stress in the areas where they occur. In particular, water shortages lead to food shortages, which bring about social unrest and mass migrations. Weak regimes may collapse, military conflicts may ensue, and migrations cause further conflict in the areas being migrated into. Climate change is increasingly a stress multiplier.
Moreover, climatic factors affect the ability of the military itself to function. Hammack points to phenomena like vehicles stuck in flooded areas, troops being unable to train in fire- and drought- ravaged areas, installations sinking in thawing tundra, and other scenarios widely recognized to have increased in frequency in recent years.
She acknowledges that in the current environment, the words “climate change” are often a conversation stopper when dealing with elected officials. Accordingly, the military refocuses the conversation to emphasize concepts of “sustainability” and “resiliency.” Everyone seems to understand and support the idea of increasing mission effectiveness through resiliency.
Governments may be compared to a four-legged stool, where “resiliency” is upheld by energy, climate change mitigation, economics, and political stability, says Hammack. Each of these interrelated factors must be adequate to support a stable regime.
Stepping away from the military discussion for a moment, Hammack pointed to California, the world's sixth largest economy, to illustrate that you can have both population growth and economic growth at the same time as you are taking steps to mitigate the effects of climate change. The latter doesn't appear to have negatively impacted the economy; in fact there is increasing evidence that it has actually improved GDP. This finding matches that of our own 2014 REMI study.
She also spoke a little about the Global Reporting Initiative, which requires corporations to report sustainability statistics back to stockholders, and is having the effect of actually improving bottom lines across the board. The Rockefeller Foundation is now helping apply this concept to cities, focusing on 100 “sustainable cities” nationwide. All of this is being accomplished using the word “resilience” instead of “climate change.”
Hammack played a big role in the Army's implementation of its “Net Zero” policy, which lays out strategies for managing water, energy, and waste, saving money in the process. “We want to use our land for training, not for landfill,” she says. Among other things, she points out that up to 40% of transported fuel was being used to generate electricity; with the increased application of solar and other technologies, much of this can now be applied strictly to transportation, and no one is objecting to all the money saved, or the improved speed of convoys.