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| Sherri Goodman, a former deputy under secretary of defence for environmental security in the US, says Australia lies in "disaster alley". Darbs Darby (Andrew Darby) |
Increasing tensions between the United States and Russia over Syria in recent days may have many implications but they also have many causes, including the impact of climate change on food and energy security around the world.
Sherri Goodman, a former deputy under secretary of defence for environmental security in the US, says the US military now regards climate change as one of the biggest long-term security threats and is building it into strategic considerations and logistics planning.
As the biggest user of oil and gas in the US, the aggressive shift of the US military to more renewable forms of energy is playing a huge role in the reorientation of the US economy to using less fossil fuel, she says.
Climate change-induced drought has been linked to many of the uprisings that have broken out across Africa and the Middle East in recent years, including the Arab Spring and the conflict in Syria as food pressures have made populations increasingly desperate.
But Ms Goodman points out that access to renewable energy – and less fossil fuel use – also has huge implications for national security.
Additional peril
Reliance on fossil fuels, she notes, invariably requires having to transport them. The more you have to transport fuels, the more costly the risks.
"It means putting ourselves at additional peril," she notes.
And the role of Middle East oil in determining the US geopolitical strategy is an obvious example of this.
Ms Goodman says challenges for the US military include the vulnerability of military assets themselves, such as naval bases that are at risk from rising sea levels and storm surges, as well as the fact strategic planning requires preparation for more global instability through crop failure or forced migration within and across borders, and spending more time and effort on disaster relief.
" The way it's been managed in the defence budget is that oil and gas is taken as an additional, huge cost on top of the normal spend," she says.
"They'd much rather that that money was available for equipment and personnel so that's become an incentive to innovate," she said.
Broader use of renewables
That can involve anything from solar-powered batteries for soldiers or micro grids at forward positions to broader use of renewables in defence establishments.
The US military has dedicated programs to try to deal with this growing strategic risk by investing in energy research, development and demonstration programs, and new technologies.
Ms Goodman says that, as in Australia, the climate change debate in the US is still "overly politicised, despite the science being abundantly clear".
However, she says climate deniers have shifted from denying climate change to arguing about how fast it is happening, thus introducing uncertainty into what to do about it.
But, she says, from the military's perspective, there is no opportunity to wait, likening it to being prepared for a threat of terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, or North Korea's nuclear capacity.
"You don't wait until you have 100 per cent certainty you are going to be attacked," she said.
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