What Obama means when he calls climate change a national security threat

David Roberts · Friday, May 22, 2015, 9:22 am
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Yesterday, President Obama gave a speech to graduating cadets at the US Coast Guard Academy in which he said that climate change "constitutes a serious threat to global security [and] an immediate risk to our national security."
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"Even as we meet threats like terrorism," he said, "we cannot, and we must not, ignore a peril that can affect generations."
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This is not the first time the federal government has characterized climate change as a security threat. The fact sheet distributed by the administration yesterday quotes reports going back to 2008. And as Philip Bump writes in the Washington Post, the rhetorical effort to link climate to security goes all the way back to Bill Clinton.
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Each time it comes up, large swaths of the media treat it as a bold new argument, which is probably a good sign that despite all the efforts, it's still not a natural, instinctive connection for most people. It sounds novel.
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Still, Obama's speech was the clearest articulation of the argument to date. So what should we make of the claim? Does climate change threaten our national security? What does that even mean, exactly?
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It's complicated. I've been thinking about this on and off for several years now, and I've come to four conclusions. (A top five list would have been more satisfying, but it turns out I only know four things.)
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1) Climate change is a threat; whether it's a "national security threat" is a matter of semantics
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2) The US military will mostly deal with climate change preparation and response (a.k.a. "adaptation")
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Obama's primary message was that all branches of the military, including the Coast Guard, need to prepare for a warmer world. Climate change will make the world, especially poor and low-lying parts of the world, more volatile, putting new strains on military resources.
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3) Prevention (a.k.a. "mitigation") is an ineffective national security tool
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The tricky pivot in Obama's speech — and in the climate-as-national-security message generally — is from preparation and response to prevention (or "mitigation," as it's opaquely known).

That climate impacts will generate sociopolitical unrest makes sense; that the military will be called on to respond to unrest makes sense; that it should prepare in advance for that task makes sense. The more difficult case to make is that the military ought to be involved in reducing its own emissions — not just responding to climate impacts, but also helping prevent (some of) them.
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4) However! Mitigation can be a form of preparation, because fossil-dependence is a vulnerability.
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So is climate change a national security threat? Well, a hotter world means more disruptions, which means more burden on the military. And dependence on oil means reduced operational effectiveness and vulnerability to unpredictable price swings. So whether or not the climate-as-security meme takes off, or has any effect on domestic politics, it is already thoroughly ingrained in the military itself, and will only become more salient in coming years, regardless of whether political debate changes. The military, unlike Congress, does not have the luxury of treating reality like a sideshow. .
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