Original subtitles

Nuclear war could quite possibly

finish off civilization altogether.

Climate change left to run its own course

could also finish us off.

The existential issue

is whether we can foresee what needs to be done

and get it done in time to matter.

We are always in a race

between what our intelligence can do for us

and what our intelligence does to us.

Drought and food shortage...

A just-released report from the Pentagon...

climate change and the challenges it's creating for the military.

The latest report says global warming

is driving weather to new levels of extremes.

A growing threat to national security.

The predicted consequences of a warming world

are already with us.

Climate change and natural disasters

can cause humanitarian crises, population migrations.

Scarcity of water, food, and space

could lead to failed states, instability,

and potentially radicalization.

Senator, there's no question that environmental security

can have a dramatic affect on overall security

both in individual states and regionally.

Never before have so many people fled war and persecution.

This is climate change far beyond the melting ice caps.

Global climate change, while not new to history,

is new to the modern world.

It can significantly add to the challenges

of global instability:

Hunger, poverty, and conflict.

The effects of climate change

are far-reaching and unpredictable,

demanding our attention and strategic thinking.

The U.S. department of defense

is preparing to adapt to these 21st century challenges.

The intersection of climate change

and the security of nations

will become a defining reality in the years ahead.

We cannot ignore the costs of inaction

and we cannot leave these massive security concerns

to the next generation.

We are now in the age of consequences.

Think about it from a military perspective.

When I was leading paratroopers in Afghanistan,

if 98, 99% of my intelligence

told me that I was driving my platoon down a road

and that two miles down that road

there's an ambush waiting for me.

I don't get to say, "yeah, but there's that 1%"

that says that there's no ambush,

so to hell with the other 99%.

"We're gonna keep going down the road."

I mean, that's negligence on an unfathomable scale.

That's the debate we're having right now

with regard to climate.

The overwhelming consensus

is we are facing a massive risk.

Climate change is happening.

We've got to decide whether we're going to act on it or not.

And that choice has consequences.

Climate change impacts the basic resources

that are necessary for humans to survive

and for nations to continue.

As we see our resources stressed significantly,

we're gonna see some unprecedented changes

that we have to prepare for.

The risks of climate change

impact on every facet of life.

They impact on every facet of national security

and of international security.

That makes instability.

That makes conflict much more likely.

The first time I thought about climate change and violence

was in Afghanistan while researching opium Poppy

from which heroin is made.

Every time I interviewed farmers,

they said, "part of why we grow this crop"

is because it's drought-resistant."

Turns out Afghanistan

is going through the worst drought in living memory,

and Poppy uses one fifth the amount of water

that wheat uses.

The Karzai government were eradicating Poppy.

The Taliban, on the other hand,

said to the farmers,

"we will defend your right to grow this crop."

Even in that conflict which has this elaborate history,

there is a climate aspect.

It's always a question of how climate change

interacts with other pre-existing problems.

If you have an area that is already unstable

and then has the additional challenge of sea level rise,

extreme weather events,

water shortages or food shortages

or a disaster that makes people move,

then you can start seeing conflict situations.

It's all the underlying conditions.

Climate change is the stimulus or the catalyst

that can cause all of that to agitate and become conflict.

From my perspective as a former member

of the United States military

and 30 plus years of service in uniform,

climate change is what we call an accelerant to instability.

It is what's causing a lot of the conflict

or helping assist the conflict

that's going on around the world.

And you can see that on the front pages

of the paper virtually every day.

If you look around the world today,

we can already see conflict and climate in play

right under the headlines that we're reading.

The international red cross

is now designating Syria's deadly conflict

to be a full-blown civil war.

Think about relationships we don't often look at.

The civil war in Syria,

now going on for years,

hundreds of thousands dead,

the entire region is in chaos as a result.

A new study finds climate change exacerbated

the worst drought ever in modern Syria

as a consequence of human interference.

Professor Richard Seager

says that a three-year drought

played a huge role in pushing the Syrian people

into an all-out civil war.

This is the first study that quantitatively

draws a connection between climate change

and the onset of a conflict.

Syria began to experience

a serious multi-year drought

in the winter of 2006, 2007.

And that drought lasted for three consecutive years.

Farming families just cannot survive on the land

when a drought lasts that long.

As people try to feed their families and can't,

they've got to go somewhere.

The drought caused a large number

of young Syrian men in particular

to leave farmland and go to the cities.

Damascus, Aleppo,

one and a half plus million people had to move.

That has a major destabilizing impact

when people have to pick up and leave

whether it's because of conflict or resource scarcity.

As anyone can tell you,

a bunch of unemployed young men in a major city

is not a recipe for social stability.

Now Syria had already absorbed

about a million and a half refugees

from Iraq who were fleeing the civil war there.

Those numbers combined such

that the population of Syrian cities

grew by about 30% or more.

That rate of migration is absolutely catastrophic.

It drove food prices up,

it drove apartment prices up,

strained the health system,

all leading to the kinds of conditions of discontent

to the all-out civil war

that is still going on now.

When we analyzed all the precipitation data we could get,

we found that we just couldn't attribute

such a long and serious drought

to natural climate variability alone.

That particular drought was two to three times more likely

because of climate change.

We of course did not say

drought was the sole cause of the Syrian civil war.

It's the confluence of multiple causes coming in,

with climate being one of them.

Climate change is all about the water.

So we have climate change leading to rainfall variability.

We don't necessarily know when the water is gonna come.

We can't predict that we're gonna get

the same amount of water as we used to get,

and that is going to have a huge impact

on whether or not we can grow food.

So in the case of Syria,

we're talking about how climate change

impacts water resources,

how that impacts food resources,

and what that means for what people do for a living,

whether it's farm, herd animals,

or join a terrorist organization.

This is a city draped in black

and a city raging with anger.

This is Isis,

the Islamic state of Iraq and Syria.

As people moved into those cities in Syria,

they were unemployed, didn't have a source of food.

They needed to feed their families.

ISIL promised them both those things

despite the philosophy behind their organizations,

people want to survive first.

Isis was pre-existing in the region

and would have existed even there had not been a drought in Syria,

but once the Syrian society began to unravel,

every actor within that region

saw an opportunity to try to use the crisis

to advance their pre-existing agenda.

Isis has certainly taken advantage

of scarce water resources,

creating leverage over local populations.

Isis has just taken over a dam

near the key city of Ramadi,

shutting it down and preventing water

from reaching two key towns.

Their goal, to quote "kill people of thirst."

They're securing access to river towns.

They're securing access to water supplies,

and it's driving their strategy.

Water becomes an instrument of war

for these people who are looking to take over.

You control the water,

you control the livelihood of the people.

Climate change is gonna impact the amount of water.

It'll impact who controls the water.

That'll impact the instability.

The climate change that we're gonna be experiencing

over the next few years is way in excess

of what we've experienced up to now.

And I think the Syria case is a real wake-up

for what the consequences can be,

and this is really early on in this game.

It's in the U.S. national interest

to ensure that there's a stability globally.

Those are things that can come home to us.

You can always look at Syria

and say, "well, it's Isis,"

or, "well, it's Assad."

Yes, it is Isis. Yes, it's Assad.

But there's a backdrop which has to do with climate.

That's gonna happen over and over and over again.

Each time we'll have a different political or ideological story to tell,

each time it'll be true,

and each time the underlying factor will be climate.

When you talk about climate change,

it's a national security challenge

in the broadest possible sense,

in that these changing weather patterns over time

are going to affect the way we live.

They're going to affect our food supply,

our water supply, the heat of the environment we live in.

Security in the broadest sense

is about all the things that we care about day to day.

Are you safe? Can you feed your family?

Can your children go to school?

When you talk about climate change

as a national security challenge in the military sense,

you're talking about how does it affect

what the military has to do?

The missions it goes on,

or support here at home.

How does it affect what they need to be ready for in the future?

We all know that human activities

are changing the atmosphere

in unexpected and in unprecedented ways.

I first saw the effects on national security and national defense

in Somalia in the early '90s.

The essential nature of that conflict

was originally caused by drought

and a lack of food, simply stated,

and we began to see a major trend.

Climate change is one of the variables

that must be considered

when thinking about instability in the world.

I'd like to turn now to Sherri Goodman.

She served as deputy undersecretary of defense

for environmental security.

Like many of you probably now,

you want to work on the big issues of the day.

That's what I wanted to do,

so I was in the field of national security.

Nuclear weapons and arms control were the big challenges,

but it was actually during an era

when environmental issues began to be implemented

in places like the defense department.

At the turn of the century,

there began to be recognition

that there was a nexus between

what's happening in climate change

and national security.

We've seen this estimation of climate change

as a significant risk

since the early days of the George W. Bush administration.

The very first report from the department of defense was in 2003

and identified the potential national security implications

of abrupt climate change.

I was asked to take on this challenge directly

in about the 2006 time frame,

and so I gathered the nation's

leading retired military officers.

As a group, we are not your traditional environmentalists.

CNA's military advisory board

is a group of senior retired admirals and generals

from all five services that have changed the conversation.

The view of the military advisory board

is that we can't wait until we have absolute certainty.

If we wait, we might wait too long.

We released our initial report

"national security and the threat of climate change"

in 2007.

We realized that climate change

would be a threat multiplier for instability.

People become desperate because they have extreme weather

and the seas are rising

and there are floods in one area and droughts in another.

Fragile states become more unpredictable.

That was definitional.

When that study came out,

it really set a baseline for how to talk about this issue.

One of the key recommendations

of the CNA report

was to incorporate the consequences of climate change

into a national intelligence estimate.

In 2008, the idea that came out of that report

was climate change exacerbated

existing societal tensions.

Social tensions and economic costs

could lead to state or regional instability

threatening U.S. interest.

It could contribute to inter-

and more likely intrastate conflicts.

Climate change as a threat to national security

worked its way into the highest-level

strategic document produced by the department of defense.

The quadrennial defense review,

the Pentagon's bedrock strategic document,

has consistently identified climate change

as an accelerant of instability or conflict.

It was really the first time

that climate change was addressed at that level.

We now see this signed out by the secretaries of defense.

The climate change adaptation road map

identified climate change as posing immediate risks

to national security.

2014, we found that the risks of climate change

are continuing to accelerate

and that they are now a catalyst for conflict.

We've turned the corner,

and we really see that climate change

is one of the big issues of the 21st century.

I can remember once getting in a discussion

with a career civilian at the department of defense

who was expressing concern

about talking about climate change

and said we have to use language

that doesn't, you know, offend people,

that doesn't say this is really happening.

And I just looked at him and I said,

"that's incompatible with U.S. government policy,"

and I, you know, cited all these reports,

and said, "you need to look"

at what your own government is saying

"and work from that."

We're gonna begin by recognizing

where admiral David Titley

was a member of CNA military advisory board.

Whenever you're ready, please begin.

I'm here today not only representing

my views on security implications of climate change,

but on the collective wisdom of 16 admirals and generals.

Sir, our collective, bottom-line judgment

is that climate change is an accelerating risk

to our nation's future.

These serious impacts to our security

will only continue to increase

in both frequency and consequence.

Failure to think about how climate change

might impact our globally interconnected systems

and all elements of U.S. power and security

is frankly a failure of imagination.

There's a tendency to separate

thinking about domestic events from international events

as if that was a real barrier.

What we do in this country

has a strong impact on people elsewhere in the world

and vice versa.

So you really have to start looking

at reciprocal interactions between events

in different parts of the world.

When it comes to something like climate change,

you begin to worry about phenomena

that you weren't counting on

kicking in at some indeterminate level.

Russia is on fire.

More than 500 wildfires

raging across the drought-plagued country.

The heat wave has ravaged farm land

and destroyed crops over an area

the size of Portugal.

This disaster could destroy

one of the nation's biggest exports, wheat.

In 2010, there was a major drought

which led to heat waves

in Russia and Ukraine and in China,

which really devastated the wheat crop in those countries.

It's the worst drought in 200 years.

China's in a crisis,

but this is one for the world to watch.

Commodity traders have reacted

to the fires and drought

by pushing up the price of wheat

to a 23-month high.

China, Russia started buying

a lot of wheat on the global food market,

drove the prices up significantly.

Because food is traded globally,

food prices can be influenced

by what's going on all over the world.

If you are buying bread

in Damascus or in Cairo,

that grain has been traded on an international market,

so it is sensitive to climate fluctuations

from Kansas, the Southern Australia,

and in Uruguay and Argentina.

What happens globally matters.

Globalization is inherently unpredictable.

Since agricultural commodities

are all in one global market now,

what China does when it panic-buys

is it affects markets all over the world.

Large shocks on the global food supply

will always affect the most vulnerable people,

because when the prices are being determined internationally,

the food will go to those people who have the most money.

Inevitably, the poorer of the world

will be the ones who bear the brunt of any shortfall.

Now, Egypt is one of those countries

that's heavily dependent on the global food market.

With a population of more than 80 million,

the demand for daily bread is high.

It has made Egypt the world's largest importer of wheat.

In a number of areas around the country,

the price of wheat went up 300%.

In a country that has to import

more than half the wheat it needs,

flour has started to look like gold dust.

Russia stopped exporting wheat

to the middle east during that period.

Due to abnormally high temperatures and drought,

I believe it is reasonable to introduce

a temporary ban on grain and wheat product exports

from the territory of the Russian Federation.

When they cut that wheat off,

things became very unstable.

This is what popular uprising looks like.

Protesters demanding bread and freedom

and calling for government officials to step down.

If you either don't have food

or you have food but now you have to pay a whole lot more for it

and you don't have that disposable income,

it becomes a huge threat.

You're probably gonna do something about it.

These protests seem to be a kind of chain reaction

across the middle east.

For decades, anger has simmered throughout the Arab world...

anger over corrupt governments,

poverty, and a lack of freedom.

It's not just this very simple "if a, then b."

Climate change can be one of the causes

in kind of a chain of events scenario

like in the Arab spring

that exacerbates an already volatile political situation.

Central Cairo, a battlefield.

Bullets were flying around Tahrir square.

Protesters looted weapons

and turned them on police.

The sudden shocks of climate change

can lead to disruptions and collapses.

So you're gonna have fragile social systems

that just need one more shock

to tip them over the edge into a different configuration,

into social breakdown, into war.

We have had, for a couple of generations,

a sense that food is not part of politics.

This is short-term, I'm afraid.

The problems that we're having now

are unfortunately a small fore taste

of what can happen because of the interdependence

of climate, economics, and politics.

It's generally the case

that all societies seem to have trouble

thinking about the middle and the long-term future.

Since there is a history of catastrophe,

when we look at ourselves in the present day,

history is the only opportunity that we have for perspective.

When we look back into the historical record,

we actually see that the collapse of civilizations,

places like Angkor Wat,

where whole political systems crumbled,

those things seem to have occurred

right at the same time that really large-scale

global climatic changes were occurring.

The tong dynasty and the classic Maya civilization

collapsed at almost exactly the same time

on opposite sides of the pacific ocean.

There was this large-scale event

that led to systematic drying and warming

throughout both of these regions,

and two great civilizations fell.

There was a really coherent, vivid picture

about how human society around the world

and throughout time

has been interacting with the climate.

Anywhere we look, we see the same thing.

It's probably one of the most repeated findings

in the last several years in the field.

Past societies could observe crop failure,

but they didn't know how to explain it.

What gives us a chance is that we can observe

not only local symptoms of a problem like crop failure.

We can also observe the entire globe and draw conclusions.

The question is whether we decide we're gonna do that or not.

Today I want to speak to you

about the national security risks

posed by a changing climate.

Just last month, the administration issued

its 2015 national security strategy.

The strategy includes climate change

as one of eight top strategic risks

along with a catastrophic attack

on the United States soil

and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future,

has moved firmly into the present.

We saw this dramatically happen here

in the United States with super storm Sandy.

The storm surge went over a 12 1/2 foot wall

protecting a electrical system

and immediately plunged lower Manhattan into darkness.

Without electricity,

our transportation and health sectors

began to collapse.

We can see from events over the last few years

the increasing not only severity of natural disasters,

but the unpredictability of their consequences.

As our world becomes more interconnected,

as disasters happen in different and unpredictable ways,

they cause cascading impacts through our communities,

through our societies, through our infrastructure.

The potential for what we call cascading disasters

are much closer to home.

We're seeing in the west of the United States

unprecedented drought...

Which sparks forest fires.

At the same time, we might need to be responding

to increased activity in the arctic.

We might be seeing sea level rise in Florida

and on the east coast

interact with major storms that might become more intense.

And as we go forward as the climate changes,

we might see those things start to happen simultaneously.

Are we ready to deal with multiple disasters

at the same time within the United States?

That's an open question.

We've also got to think about

the security of our bases at home.

Norfolk, Virginia, is where the vast majority

of the U.S. Navy's Atlantic combat capability is based.

It's also at extreme risk of sea level rise.

The Hampton roads region of my state

is home to the largest naval installation in the world,

naval station Norfolk.

Studies show that the main Norfolk road

into the largest naval base in the world

by 2040 will be inundated by daily tides,

not even storm surges.

They're already raising the level of the piers.

At the level they're at, they're not gonna be able

to service the ships that are coming in.

This is our largest naval base in the world.

There's serious considerations here.

The welfare of Norfolk has global implications

because of the power that is projected

from that place around the world.

It's not just the case where you'll deploy these forces

in a particular conflict,

but you'll also have to deploy them

to respond to catastrophic weather events,

and the prime example that I use

is typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines.

We sent some 14,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen,

and marines in response to that catastrophic event.

We were the only country that's capable of doing that,

of deploying that amount of forces,

that amount of distance.

As the sea levels rise,

as the storm surges increase,

as the rain rates increase,

it then becomes a capacity issue.

How much of that can you do

before you start impacting other missions?

Every two weeks the U.S. military

now is getting a disaster response.

So those same sailors leave Norfolk, Virginia,

challenged by climate change, challenged by sea level rise,

sail halfway around the world,

respond to a series of disasters

that are related to extreme weather events

in the heavily populated pacific rim,

and on the way home they may steam through the middle east

where a civil war in Syria

and now in other parts of the region continues to rage,

that in many ways was accelerated by a drought

that was worse because of climate change.

So they're seeing the impacts of this

from the time they'd get on the boat and go on the deployment

to the time they get home.

We're gonna have to make an increasingly difficult series of choices.

We're already making those choices

about where to go and where to use resources,

when to respond and when not to.

80% of New Orleans underwater right now.

I said, "we was planning on leaving tomorrow if we could."

There's no question that communities

that have fewer resources are going to suffer more.

If you look in this country,

the effects are going to be uneven.

Some places are going to experience

more dramatic effects than others.

People trapped in buildings

that have come down around them.

They have made desperate calls to 911 asking for help,

asking for rescue, but the rescuers can't get out.

People are now living in parking garages.

Others picked up what they could

and moved to higher ground on the interstate,

refugees in their own home town.

We don't have transportation.

I mean, we living paycheck to paycheck.

It ain't like we're just able to get up and just leave.

Those people who ignored the evacuation orders

are simply going to have to wait and rescue themselves.

Thousands of evacuees

sought refuge inside the super dome,

only to be subjected to an unspeakable

breakdown of law and order.

What Katrina shows is that climate-related events

can create massive distress on a scale of a whole urban area

and that that massive distress

can involve the collapse of state structures.

You would never, never imagine

what you saw in the convention center in New Orleans.

They are just left behind.

There's nothing offered to them for the last four days.

They got children out here!

They got pregnant women out here!

They won't even bring water!

They won't bring food!

You gotta go steal water to drink to survive out here.

One can try to bracket that off

as some kind of exceptional event,

but in fact Katrina is a perfectly normal demonstration

of what actually happens.

Drop.

If the weather gets to the point

where it can break down city governments,

and let's say it happens

to two or three city governments at the same time

and federal authorities are not only unwilling

but unable to assist, then you get hurricane Katrina

on a national scale.

We want help! We want help!

We want help!

We've built society on this implicit assumption

of climate stability.

Within bounds, we know what we're gonna get.

We know when to plant.

We know about how much rain is gonna come.

Because we built our society on this climate stability

and that stability is changing,

all these things that we take for granted,

they're not just givens anymore.

Across the Sahel, the crops have failed.

Hunger is stalking tens of millions.

People are abandoning their livestock

and moving to wherever they can find water.

Relief workers fear if more help doesn't come soon,

millions will starve.

The Sahel is the semi-arid region

that stretches from the Atlantic ocean

all the way over to Ethiopia.

It's the transition zone between the Sahara

and the more humid, forested conditions

further south.

That is a very drought-prone region.

There's a lot of people making their livelihood off agriculture,

and whenever there are droughts,

it leads a lot of people to migrate.

The Sahel is already a major conflict zone,

both with Islamic militants and also nationalists.

This is the heart of the problem in many ways.

Climate change arrives in a world

that has already been destabilized.

Darfur, the world's worst humanitarian crisis.

More than 2 million people forced to flee their homes

in what's widely portrayed as an ethnic conflict.

But climatic changes may also be a factor.

This is a region where water's getting scarcer

and arable land shrinking,

pitting Arab nomadic grazers

against the predominantly black farmers.

A lot of the violence that is now accelerated by climate change

actually has its roots in these older, deeper conflicts.

The drought exacerbated

existing societal cleavages.

There it was Muslim and Christian.

It was the herders versus the agrarians.

In every case, climate change

acted as a threat multiplier.

The numbers from Darfur are staggering.

Since 2003, an estimated 400,000 people have been killed.

Another 2 1/2 million have been forced into refugee camps

in neighboring countries like Chad.

Drought and hunger have made communities vulnerable.

Coups and rebellions have made it unstable.

This fragile state is now threatened

by poverty and neglect.

Climate change unfolds on the landscape,

making their lives harder.

But the poverty that was originally there

makes the response to climate change worse.

A staggering 30 million people

are thought to survive on lake Chad's ecosystem.

But what was once of the world's largest lakes

has in just 40 years shrunk by 90%.

Lake Chad, where boko haram fighters

have launched recent attacks.

Water scarcity has caused migration and instability

which boko haram has been able to take advantage of.

Where there is already instability,

extremists thrive.

More than a million people

have been forced to flee from boko haram's wave of terror.

When you look at the modeling that's being done now

for north Africa,

we see significantly more drying.

We see significant precipitation decline

well beyond what it is now.

Africa's a place where

very large numbers of people need more land.

At the same time, something like half of the unused arable land

in the world is in Africa.

Is colonialism taking root in Africa once again?

Some of the countries on that continent

may be the poorest in the world,

but the lush farmlands are the envy

of richer nations with infertile soil.

We've already seen in the not-so-distant past

how China, when there's a drought,

will panic-buy agricultural commodities.

What if things were much worse?

What if that same country

thought that it doesn't just need to panic-buy,

it needs to buy or lease vast territories?

This is a scenario which could unfold gradually

without anyone really seeing it coming.

Slowly, slowly, slowly, China controls,

at least legally, an awful lot of territory

beyond its borders.

Whether one wants to moralize and call that a land grab,

you can get a situation where the local people

could have another idea.

If you're Chinese authorities,

you would rather have instability in Africa

than instability at home.

We take our lifestyle as being a fixed point

and then if anything's going to change,

it's gonna be something else,

preferably something far away.

In the United States, although we've done the most

to promote global warming,

we're gonna get hit by it after other people

are gonna be hit by it.

In advanced societies,

we're very vulnerable to confusing lifestyle

with life itself.

As the situation in Syria has deteriorated sharply,

Jordan's Za'atari camp for Syrian refugees

is now the size of a city.

After leaving the army I worked

with refugees on the ground in the middle east,

in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon,

having seen what happens when millions of people

uproot and leave a place,

the impact it has on them,

the impact it has on the country they've taken refuge in,

this has major consequences.

That on a massive scale where whole nations are on the move

may be what we're facing in certain climate scenarios.

The world is in the grips

of the worst refugee crisis

since the second world war.

The vast majority of those refugees

are hosted by some of the world's poorest countries.

This camp is just overwhelmed

by the amount of people coming here.

For the refugees, it's been a litany of killings,

kidnappings, hunger, and economic chaos.

The U.N.'S refugee agency

estimates the current total at almost 60 million.

Shockingly, half are children.

We don't have the resources

to support all the victims of conflict around the world.

We are no longer able to pick up the pieces.

The loss of livelihood

is definitely a human security risk.

In certain situations,

it can become an international security risk.

A desperate search for nearly 1,000 people feared dead

after a ship packed with migrants

capsized in the Mediterranean sea.

It is the latest in a string of deadly migrant boat sinkings.

Refugees fleeing Isis and other militants

trying desperately to cross into Europe.

Italy's coast guard and Navy

rescued 11,000 people from the Mediterranean

in the last week alone.

Europe is suffering a major migration crisis

because of the conflicts in Syria,

the wider middle east, and east Africa.

They've been arriving by the boatloads

on European shores daily.

Now the head of the U.N.'S refugee agency

is calling the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean

total chaos.

They're willing to risk their lives

and their family lives to get to Europe.

That's pretty desperate.

It's a refugee crisis

with no precedent in the European union's history.

As their numbers spiral along with the death count,

Europe is under acute pressure to act.

Tensions are at boiling point.

Macedonia closed its border.

Special forces fired stun grenades into the crowd.

The E.U.'S response has been criticized

as at best incoherent and at worst callous and inhumane.

We're gonna put in more fencing, more resources.

The politics of the armed lifeboat

refers to an acknowledgement

that, yes, there is a crisis,

but, no, we are not all in it together.

We have to keep the victims of this crisis out

so we can carry on as before on the other side of the wall.

What's alarming is the behavior of people

in extreme circumstances

taking the risks they do.

People in countries where instability was reigning,

they feel that they have no other choice.

With the continuing turmoil in the middle east,

the number of desperate people willing to risk everything

is expected to rise.

Okay?

When we really step back,

people are pretty much the same.

We want adequate food, adequate shelter,

safe water.

If you have large numbers of displaced people

and their needs are not being met,

then this becomes a potential for instability.

Who is a climate refugee and who is an economic refugee?

It's impossible to say.

The two things are bound up together.

Most climate refugees are not displaced

so clearly by climate change.

Rather it's a mix of forces

that drives them off the land.

Under international law,

there is no status of climate refugee.

Part of this is political.

Because if there were,

then it would compel nations

to accept climate migrants as asylees.

The longer that climate change goes on,

the more that we feel it,

the more that we experience it,

people are gonna wanna come north.

The only border which is real is the atmosphere.

Everything else is permeable.

Linear thinking says that if you have

a change of a certain magnitude in a system,

you can predict the change in its output.

Non-linearity says relatively small changes

can lead to very large and unpredictable circumstances

on the output side.

Let's suppose that the rate of which the climate is changing

is not linear but is on a curve

that's getting very steep.

Take the rate at which arctic ice is melting,

the rate at which the glaciers are retreating.

At the beginning of these processes,

you create a graph.

If I start measuring over time,

I keep on discovering things are happening faster

than you might expect.

And all of our old projections

turn out to be excessively conservative.

I worry about a discrepancy

between the rate at which

we set out to deal with these things

and the rate at which they are occurring.

What keeps me up at night

is a problem of compounding risk.

A good example is Bangladesh.

Bangladesh is probably the ground zero of climate change.

The impacts are going to be more severe

in Bangladesh than many other countries

where they have smaller population size.

In a climate scenario where sea level rise occurs,

especially if it occurs rapidly,

there's a real risk

that a large portion of the Bangladeshi population

is gonna have to move.

The sea level will continue to rise in the coming years,

because there is melting at a faster rate than ever.

If there is a one-meter sea level rise,

Bangladesh will lose about 20% of its land mass.

We are going to see a very large

climate refugee population.

Researchers have estimated the numbers

to be about 30 million.

This is a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions.

Where are these refugees going to go?

India has already unilaterally fenced Bangladesh

on all three sides.

A ten-foot, double-sided,

razor-wire-topped, what may be the world's first climate fence.

It's inspired by Israel's wall in the west bank,

and it's manned by 80,000 Indian guards.

Death can be the penalty for crossing it

or even going near it,

with hundreds of unarmed villagers killed

along what is now one of the most dangerous frontiers in the world.

There are other reasons for India to build that fence,

but probably the most pressing and strategic reason

is to forestall that climate migration.

No factor can be excluded

from the impacts of climate change.

We have got to see the consequences of the consequences.

We are going to see multiple stressors

coming at one point at one time.

Stress on the water sector, food sector,

physical infrastructure,

that could lead to a state collapse.

It will be a problem of the magnitude

that will destabilize not only Bangladesh,

but it will severely impact on international stability,

having consequences beyond imagination.

We don't now have the luxury, and we probably never will,

of sort of isolating one driver of a situation

and saying, "okay, let's solve for that driver."

We're always going to be dealing with a layer cake

of inter-connected problems.

So if you have a climate-change scenario

that's sufficient to raise the sea level in Bangladesh,

what is that temperature spike doing

to the Himalayan ice caps

that supply the annual water cycle

for most of the agricultural production

in the Asian-pacific region?

So now you've got potential drought and food scarcity

in one area that's intersecting

with flooding and massive refugee flows in the other area.

What's the political situation when it happens?

If India and China are continuing to have a border dispute

during this period of time,

that border dispute just got a lot more serious.

This is something that could place

massive stress on the international system.

It's these compounding risk factors,

these compounding dynamics

that I think ought to really concern us.

If you look at issues of water flow

from the Himalayan plateau,

there are countries that are on the receiving end

of those flows of water that are nuclear-armed.

If the supply of water becomes increasingly tight,

then if somebody decides to build a dam on their side,

that can look to somebody on the losing end

like an act of war.

The risk of any conflict in the modern world

is magnified by the fact

that at the end of a chain of escalation,

you might arrive at countries

that have weapons of mass destruction.

Our entire way of life is based on fossil fuels.

Everything that you use and touch in your daily life

in this highly-advanced economy

is moved to you using that single source.

There's absolutely a link

between the way we use energy and our security.

Oil is a globally-traded commodity.

Events around the world impact the supply

and the price here at home.

When Geo-political decisions are made,

the price can go down, the price can go up.

Many of our relationships with autocracies

have been based in part on assuring the supply

of fossil fuels.

We spend a tremendous amount of time

keeping that global supply flowing,

protecting it.

The threats are being ramped up

over a vital oil shipping route

which Iran is threatening to block.

The strait of Hormuz

links the oil-producing states

of Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia,

and the United Arab Emirates.

That's about 40% of the world's oil that's shipped.

It's a major artery.

We spend $85 billion a year

defending strategic choke points,

places like the straits of Harmuz near Iran

or the straits of Malacca

in the heavily-contested south China sea.

Real disruption would have

catastrophic consequences for our economy.

Energy and natural resources

creates the arena for conflict

and defining what the playing field will look like.

Climate change is in that mix of causes.

In some cases, it's changing the map itself.

Melting ice caps in the arctic

have ignited a military buildup.

The arctic circle is believed to contain 30%

of the world's undiscovered natural gas

and 15% of its oil.

As the ice melts, it opens up resources.

It opens up trade routes.

It opens up land claims

that could become more contentious.

Russia is making a very bold move,

planting its flag on the arctic sea floor.

Russia is holding military exercises

involving tens of thousands of troops.

It's disputed territory with the United States and Canada.

Many fear a 21st-century cold war in the frozen waters.

I'm honored to welcome three former secretaries of state.

We've started a project on the arctic.

There's a new ocean being created there.

That hasn't happened since the last ice age.

There are big melts all over the world taking place.

The climate's changing.

And there are consequences.

If you say there's no connection between security and climate,

or between oil and our national security,

if you served in these conflicts,

if you fought a war in the middle east,

if you fought in a burning oil field,

you might have a different view.

Convoy be advised,

border patrol vehicle on the left-hand side.

My first deployment, I was a young lieutenant

with an infantry unit in Iraq

south of Baghdad

in an area that was saturated

with improvised explosive devices.

It came to be known as the triangle of death.

That American military unit

on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan

has got to rely on a fuel supply

that comes a great distance

at risk and cost to reach them.

Every day, a logistics convoy

would have to leave Baghdad airport

and drive to our forward operating base.

We were taking the fuel from the previous day's delivery,

putting it in a bunch of Bradley fighting vehicles,

going out to escort the convoy in with that fuel,

using a lot of the fuel,

and then putting the next day's fuel

right in the Bradleys to do all over again.

We took this highly capable combat force

and turned it into, basically, a self-licking ice cream cone.

Is hit. Is down.

Almost every day,

that convoy was attacked.

Next, we're going to hear from Mr. Michael Breen,

who is the executive director

of the Truman national security project.

- Welcome, sir. - Thank you, Mr. chairman.

Chairman Marquis, ranking member Brasso,

thank you for the opportunity to testify today.

Although we find ourselves in a considerably better position

with regard to energy than that of several years ago,

the lack of diversified energy sources around the world

continues to create vulnerabilities

for the United States and our allies.

In addition, climate change makes our current energy system unsustainable,

creating cascading risks and impacts around the globe.

The U.S. should place greater emphasis

on efficiency along with the development of renewable sources,

and more resilient distributed energy systems.

The department of defense

is one of the largest customers in the world,

so when the department invests in technologies

that are still very immature,

they're taking a very long view

of what they're going to need in the future.

Those long-term investments do have a great benefit

often for the civilian economy.

If the military had settled on compass technology

as the perfect answer to navigation,

we never would have had GPS.

So to stay ahead of the curve,

we have to keep investing.

And one of the things I get asked in hearings

defending the budget is, "is this the right time

to be investing in stuff like alternative energy?"

And my response is, "we can't afford not to now."

Secretary of the Navy

Ray Mabus took part in signing a contract

for the largest biofuel purchase in government history.

In the next ten years, the air force academy

plans to generate all of their own electricity

through renewable sources.

I'm encouraged that the military is continuing to contribute

to the development of new technologies,

but I don't think we can be complacent about this.

Our military in the U.S.,

every military, is ultimately in the business

of preventing, hopefully, or prosecuting and winning wars,

and war is a destructive human activity.

Militaries are not gonna solve this for us.

An armored division is not gonna defeat climate change.

You don't wanna turn to your military

to solve what are really civil society problems.

That's a dangerous game.

They do need to understand how it all fits together,

because that's gonna affect what they need to be ready for,

but that doesn't mean it's their mission to fix it.

What keeps me up at night

is the possibility that we'll have a world

where the risks associated with climate change

are so dire and so potentially unmanageable

that governments start acting in ways

that are authoritarian.

That's a world that I don't wanna live in.

That's a world I don't want my children to live in.

And it's a world that we see in these scenarios

that the United States military produces.

We're at war with the most dangerous enemy

that has ever faced mankind

in his long climb from the swamp to the stars,

and it's been said if we lose that war

and in so doing lose this way of freedom of ours,

history will record with the greatest astonishment

that those who had the most to lose

did the least to prevent its happening.

We spent billions of dollars of our GDP during the cold war

to reduce the threat of nuclear attack,

which is low probability but very high consequence.

Now we face risks from climate change

that are arguably as severe and of higher probability,

and yet there is in some quarters

a reluctance to face up to the challenges

and build a resilient society.

Whether it's threats from nuclear weapons

or international terrorist organizations,

any percentage is unacceptable.

When you think about climate change

as a risk-management issue,

then all of the actions we need to take

are going to be on the table.

If we don't, then we're going to have to make

some very, very difficult choices.

Where can we make ourselves more resilient?

Where can we make ourselves more prepared?

Where can we act now in order to mitigate

the consequences of decisions

that were made since the industrial revolution?

There's a difficult truth we've gotta face here.

As we've seen rising awareness of the problem,

we've continued to accelerate our contribution.

Reversing that may be

the most difficult collective-action problem

we've ever faced.

I do think the biggest threat is climate change

and its national security aspects.

Our problem is that not everything can be handled militarily,

and that we also have a short attention span.

These are very long-term problems.

This is a whole of society issue.

We have to address it in all of our institutions.

That means all aspects of government.

It means the resources and the political will.

It is a matter of cooperating,

and if you look at these issues,

it will require American leadership

within a system that other countries play a part in.

We have to lead.

The industrialized countries,

we're the ones who are doing

the vast majority of the polluting here in the world.

We gotta step up to this.

Every aspect of national security is about managing risk.

Our politicians in my opinion

should take a lesson from the military.

They should start prudent action to reduce emissions.

Congress won't lead on this issue,

but they can be led.

That's why I continue to go around and talk about this issue.

We need to find policy solutions

that can deal with it.

One of the things that I find personally really distressing,

having worked for Republicans and democrats,

is that something that should be a point of convergence

has become so divisive.

This polarization has allowed us

to not really address what we really need to do.

Resilience and improving our ability to respond,

those are the least that we should be doing.

That's, in military parlance, the first line of defense.

One of the first things they ever taught me

as a combat leader

was choosing to do nothing is a choice.

Inaction is as much of a decision

as any other course of action,

and it carries those consequences.

It's a very dangerous thing

to decide that there is one and only one line of events

heading into the future

and one and only one best response for dealing with that.

When systems become invested in an old way of thinking,

there is a moment when those structures

start to break down.

The system resists the idea of change

to a certain point,

and then the weight of collective experience

says "something's not working here."

We need a change."

I don't think you get to that moment by slow degrees.

I think it occurs like an avalanche.

And there comes a moment when you have to know

when to change course.

Even as we spend all of our time talking

about what humans are capable of doing in a negative sense,

we don't know the limits of what we're capable of doing

in a positive sense.

We haven't found that either.

The general drift is in the wrong direction.

We have an awful lot of things that we should be afraid of.

The window of action is closing.

But there wouldn't be any point talking about all of this

if we didn't have the knowledge which we do,

if we didn't have the tools which we do,

and if we didn't have unpredictable potential,

which we also do.

What people need more than a fright

is some credible description of a way out of the problem.

Energy independence fundamentally

is about the ability to meet our energy needs

from within our own borders indefinitely.

There's no more American concept than that,

and that means taking control of our energy future

and investing in alternatives to our current system.

The flip side of the climate threat

is the energy and resilience opportunity.

The more diversified we are in our energy sources,

from a whole array of renewables

to innovative technologies,

the sounder and stronger and more secure we will be.

One of the things we've seen

is a whole generation of veterans

who have come back from the conflicts

in Iraq and Afghanistan

with a very deep, personal understanding of this challenge.

We've seen returning veterans

go into the renewable energy industry,

installing solar panels and starting companies.

They see not only the technology of the future,

but they also see a mission.

They see a continuation of public service

that drove them to raise their hand

and volunteer to put on the uniform in the first place.

We did not end the Stone age because we ran out of stones.

We found something better.

Winston Churchill is alleged to have said

that Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing

after exhausting every other possibility.

We're getting towards the end of exhausting

all those other possibilities.

The response to climate change

involves a type of industrial revolution.

We need to leave behind the technologies

based on fossil fuels

and shift towards a clean-tech renaissance.

The path forward already exists.

If you look at the rate at which the technology is improving,

this actually is an economic boon.

Doing what we should proactively

to deal with climate change

becomes part of the solution set

to what we should be doing proactively

to deal with the economic strength of the country.

These are the plays that are gonna define

the 21st century either way.

We'll improve our security and we'll improve our way of life.

We'll improve our economy.

We may also head off one of the largest risks we face.

The most important thing is for people to see

how actually tangible and, like, within possible grasp

this change is.

I don't think that humanity is guaranteed a pass

out of the problems that it is creating for itself.

If we fail, then it is possible that we can never again,

at any price, obtain the kind of future

that we may be able to secure for ourselves if we succeed.

The technological means are in hand.

The wealth exists.

The question always is is whether or not

the wisdom exists.

In any strategic system,

time is the most precious resource.

It's the one thing that cannot be replenished.