False choices and climate security

When Congress declared climate change to be a direct threat to national security in 2017, it cited both the effects of extreme weather on installations and observations by Secretary of Defense James Mattis that climate change was affecting stability around the world — and thereby affecting our deployed forces. It was not a "green mandate" put in environmental terms; it was about direct effects to our military capacity. That theme held fast in the official climate strategies issued in recent years, by both the Department of Defense and the military services (Army, Navy and Air Force) themselves. Each of these…