A Climate Change Industrial Policy
The U.S. military devotes prodigious time and resources to analyzing future threats and trying to prepare for them. Since the end of the Cold War it has been going through a painful, two-steps-forward-one-and-a-half-steps backward process of reorienting a force structure organized around fighting conventional wars against peer adversaries like the Soviet Union to one better suited to facing “asymmetric” threats: guerrilla forces, insurgents, non-state actors in general. Here’s a quick indicator in the budget for new weapons purchases of how entrenched the old mindset still is. Most of this budget is still devoted to spending ever higher amounts on such items as new “stealth” fighters, high-tech destroyers, and a new fleet of submarines that are irrelevant to fighting terrorism.
Another looming threat has also caught the military’s attention, namely the security implications of climate change. As early as 1997, the CIA set up an Environmental Center that examined the degradation of land and water as a major source of armed conflict around the world. Such niche efforts within the U.S. security establishment have now gone mainstream. Last year the Pentagon commissioned a group of high-level retired officers, including Marine General Anthony Zinni, former head of U.S. Central Command, to study the issue. Its report, published by the CNA Corporation, a Pentagon-funded think tank, called climate change a dangerous “threat multiplier” producing resource wars and failed states.
Most recently the royal United Services Institute, a leading UK defense think tank, released a report underscoring these concerns. It called the world’s response to date “slow and inadequate” and added that “climate impacts will force us into a radical rethink of how we identify and secure our national interests.”
On a conventional battlefield, when generals perceive a new threat emerging on, say, their right flank, they will naturally pivot their forces to confront it. Tackling the security threat of climate change will require immediate and drastic reductions of our greenhouse emissions. This will take, among other things, a lot of money. If the security threat is as great as the military now says it is, it will be necessary to pivot substantial resources to address it.
The military has so far not followed the logic of its threat analysis to this conclusion.
Current Misallocations
While the federal budget assigns military spending its first and most prominent spot, it has no category for spending on climate. In 2005 a congressional committee required the administration to begin providing an annual report detailing this spending. Foreign Policy In Focus has compared the FY 2008 budgets for our military forces and for stabilizing the climate. The overall toplines: our military forces were budgeted $647.51 billion (including supplemental spending on the wars we are actually fighting) while resources to slow climate change were budgeted at $7.37 billion. In other words, we are spending $88 on our military forces for every $1 we are devoting to averting climate catastrophe.
The imbalance is likewise severe, if somewhat less extreme, in the budgets for technology development and international assistance. We are spending $20 to develop new weapons systems for every $1 we are spending on new clean energy and energy-saving technologies. And we are spending $50 to sell and give away U.S.-made weapons around the world, mostly to undemocratic regimes, for every $1 we are spending to help the rest of the world reduce emissions and deal with the current effects of climate change.
In his 2007 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Al Gore called on the world’s nations to mobilize to avert climate disaster “with a sense of urgency and shared resolve that has previously been seen only when nations have mobilized for war.” That will entail committing to a climate change industrial policy.
New Industrial Policy
The term industrial policy has been taboo within the leadership of both major parties for many decades, carrying the taint of planned-economy socialism. All the while, of course, we have had a robust defense industrial policy.
As we now know, an unplanned economy of unchecked greenhouse gas emissions is no longer possible, and must be planned and executed out of existence. The main event will be setting increasingly strict ceilings on emissions. Federal spending to prod and assist in the transition to clean energy and energy efficiency also has a major role to play.
What should the federal spending portfolio of a climate change industrial policy look like? Let’s begin with the (extremely poor) baseline of our current climate change budget. As described by the Bush administration’s Office of Management and Budget, it has four parts:
- Technology Program: $3.9 billion
- Science Program: $1.8 billion
- Energy Tax Provisions: $1.4 billion
- International Assistance: $188 million
The necessary changes to this budget, in broad outline, are no brainers. First of all, this funding needs to be drastically expanded. The possible exception may be climate science. We may be spending about the right amount to study the problem, as opposed to solving it. The relative proportions among the elements of this budget also need to be changed. If we are going to avert climate disaster, we’ll need technological breakthroughs - for better battery storage, for example, and more efficient, cost-effective solar, wind, and geothermal energy generation and transmission. Between FY 2007 and FY 2008, the Bush administration actually cut $175 million, or about 12%, out of its core budget for research and development of new energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies. But waiting for breakthroughs “just around the corner” cannot be an excuse for failing to move forward with the technology we have.
Tax incentives for efficiency and renewables need to be a much higher priority. Among current federal expenditures, the most direct means of reducing emissions is by changing the incentive structure for private investment, through tax changes. The administration has actually proposed cutting the modest collection of credits encouraging, for example, businesses to install fuel cell power plants, contractors to construct energy-efficient homes, and homeowners to improve the efficiency of the homes they own and the appliances they buy.
What’s Missing
Here are a few missing pieces from a new climate change industrial policy. The federal retraining system must prioritize “green job” retraining. The United States also needs to invest into major, new clean infrastructure. This involves not just developing new transportation technologies but spending federal dollars to upgrade and subsidize mass transit to reduce emissions. Federal purchasing can help catalyze markets. States have been way out front of the federal government in scaling up the market for electric vehicles, for example, by buying these vehicles for their own transportation fleets.
The United States also needs an expanded network of Manufacturing Extension service providers to provide technical assistance to reduce emissions. This national network of centers, analogous to the Agricultural Extension network, has been ramped down during the Bush years. Now it needs to be ramped back up, with a strengthened emphasis on assistance for retooling for clean manufacturing and energy conservation, and connected to a state network of green job retraining programs.
All of the elements of this new industrial policy will need to be coordinated by a climate change czar in the White House. That person’s job will be to make sure the pieces fit together. The climate change czar would link public investment to job retraining to technical assistance to new sources of finance for enterprise development, and pull together the various state initiatives into a coherent framework.
And where’s the money going to come from? In pivoting their forces to meet the new threat on their flank, the generals have to also release funds for this fight against climate change. New submarines can’t be used to fight terrorism - or climate change. It’s time to change our budget priorities accordingly, and create a new climate industrial complex.
Miriam Pemberton is peace and security editor for Foreign Policy In Focus. She is the author of the January 2008 report, “The Budgets Compared: Military vs. Climate Security.”
Copyright © 2008, Institute for Policy Studies
Why are we using Republican talking points and framing?
Why are we talking about global warming as climate change?
Global warming is a problem caused by human actions.
Climate change is something natural.
The “throw money at it” solution, really?
Exactly how is the tired notion that we can “solve our problem” by increased funding to highly compartmentalized and specialized Academics and for-profit private Technical and Engineering firms, well, Progressive?
What, just because the supposed grand project the individual researches contribute to has changed from “Saving us from Communism” or “Exploring Space” or “Ending Work” to “Climate Change”?
“Here’s my nanotechnology research proposal to help us terraform Mars.”
Becomes,
“Here’s my nanotechnology research proposal to help us terraform Earth.”
Well, Whoop-idee-doo!
Please stop looking (or at least ONLY looking) toward Advancing Technology, Globalized Electronic Capitalism, and Nation-State Central Governments for solutions and adaptations to living with a changing Climate.
Lots of the changes we can make are outside of these areas.
The horse-drawn plow, or say, walkable city-planning, have been around for quite a while, require modest investment, and can be accomplished at the “Local Democracy Unit” level. Yet these can do much to reduce carbon emissions, more effectively use Solar Energy (through plant and animal and People power), and build resiliency that will be needed in a Warming or Changing World.
Failure to drop the “High-Technology Machinery alone will save us because that’s what I saw on Star Trek” mentality is just as big a mistake as “Green Washing”. That input-substitute B.S. that has brought us a “Green Wal-Mart” and the “hybrid car” and “Organic Baby Greens” that are refrigerated at 36 degrees F in the summertime, from the hour they are cut to when they are delivered, three weeks later and 2500 miles away.
I repeat, not all of the solutions are High-Tech, in fact High-Tech is in some ways part of the larger problem of sustainable-use of resources.
Take “carbon sequestering”, sounds fantastic to me.
But everyone seems focused on some Amazing Machine,
Might I suggest the Humble Tree?
Trees -basically- breathe in CO2 and breathe out Oxygen, right?
We as a species have cut down a helluva lot of Trees in the last period of History, right?
So plant a flippin’ tree already!
Don’t wait for the Study, don’t wait for Funding and Approval, go to the garden center, buy a few native trees, go to the park or your lawn and plant them.
Invite some friends and neighbors to come with you and do the same.
If you’ll be using a public park or empty private land for your planting, call the press first, look up some relevant statutes and laws, prepare to be arrested, use your jail time to organize, get legal council, push to be tried as a group in order to focus attention on the issue, generally make a ruckus and call shame on the city or landholder for keeping land barren (or in the case of garden planting, idle) when the World is in such Tumult, and finally, repeat the process (or hit’em with waves of planters) over and over until the planting is allowed to stay and grow.
This is something you and some people you know can do TOMORROW (depending on weather and region, though it might be good to be ahead of the real planting season in your bioregion due to the likelihood of the First planting being torn up).
No “budget allocation” needed.
An Idea as old as the Levellers.
And today, one with a much greater chance of success.
Remember, SOME solutions are things that have already worked-well in the past and we have mistakenly deviated from, just as SOME solutions are completely original and need further reseach and advancement to be accomplished.
Finding the balance between these is -I believe- essential to adapting to climate change and a sustainable system of Living.
Good Luck and Have Fun.
-matti.
Seems to me a good place to start would be reducing the carbon emissions and other environmental damage from the US military itself. I’d like to see the calculations on the amount of jet fuel and diesel being used per year (per week?) keeping all our overseas bases, planes, submarines, aircraft carriers, etc. etc. constantly in motion and “at the ready,” plus active combat in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, etc. etc. Military bases in the US are one of the most environmentally nasty categories of land use, many of them now Superfund sites. I assume the same is true, probably more so, around the world.
It galls me to see how much effort we’re spending to change light bulbs and eat local apples and bring our own cloth bags to the market, while the US military spews CO2 and everything else out at increasing rates.
It’s unlikely to change, thanks to the careful lobbying by the military-industrial titans who stand to profit from the status quo. But surely this is a demand to press on politicians who’ve figured out that they want to appear “green.”
Betsy: You have it right. The military isn’t planning on doing ANYTHING to reduce its huge CO2 emissions. They are way to important for that! (and not bright enough to see the connection?) They are planning on kicking butt when things get bad.
I agree with the author that we need a climate/energy/industry czar (and council of experts, not politicians, pundits and lobbyists) who reports directly to the President. The training and tax incentives… are exactly what is needed to get things going on a local level.
I’m sure just about everyone here has seen Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. A sobering film if ever there was one. However, Gore recently gave a presentation at TED, and if you watch it, you will see that he is talking at a very personal level to us. He realizes the magnitude of this problem (while he avoids the doomsday scenarios, he know what’s in store) and shows us that fate has dealt us a crucial hand and it’s up to us to play it right in order for there to be a future.
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/243
I much prefer matti’s grass-roots approach over the energy-czar top down approach. As is so clearly illustrated over the past 7-8 years - any hierarchical implementation takes the task out of the hands of the people can be hijacked and disabled relatively easily by the you know whos. If you want to fix all human-induced problems in this world in one fell swoop - then take Jefferson’s advice and “enlighten the people, generally”, engage the people, employ the people, depend on the people, make it the people’s project, put the people’s face on it, get the people involved, give the people a stake, put people first, harness people power, give the people some exercise, give the people a challenge.
Ms. Pemberton is facing the fire but she seems to want the arsonist to run the firehouse. That is the definition of insanity. Now let’s get to working up that K-12 civics curriculum.
It was the very same Al Gore (the czar?) who changed “global warming” to “climate change.” He asked us to substitute the latter term in our presentations of his slide show when he trained 1000 of us in Nashville last year. “Global warming” is what some people don’t believe in; “climate change” is what’s happening!
Nai`a
Maui
America’s biggest security threat is not another group of crack pot Muslims committing Hara-Kiri into a U.S. urban center, it is rather a corporate driven domestic and foreign policy that refuses to adapt at the peril of mankind. Hunger, shelter and disease are fed by bottom line focused, inhumane, corporate decisions backed by media saturated propaganda cloaked in the rhetoric of free enterprise, democracy and patriotism.
No conscious voter should cast a ballot for any politician if the candidate cannot point their finger at the real culprits. To avoid the social collapse of society we must eliminate our addiction to fossil fuels, crack down on corporate theft of the public treasury, move rapidly towards a hydrogen economy, reduce military spending, provide a real social safety net for everyone with national health care, generous pensions and free access to post-secondary education and finally eradicate the endless stream of corporate sponsored brain washing. To accept anything less is to accept our own extinction.
I think we need both simple bottom up efforts and complex top down assistance to make a significant difference. Walkable cities are one important part of the solution but fleets of renewable electric vehicles would certainly help as well and those won’t appear by individual effort. Research and investment into sustainable infrastructure, done properly, should help individual effort. For example, if the gov’t developed and purchased lots more solar the price would come down enough to where more of us can afford it. Just one approach or the other won’t go far enough fast enough, the two need to go hand in hand. Large scale efforts can certainly be done badly (handouts to big corporations), but if they are done with individual end-users in mind, they can be vital.
I do agree we should call it global warming, not just climate change.
“Ms. Pemberton is facing the fire but she seems to want the arsonist to run the firehouse. That is the definition of insanity. Now let’s get to working up that K-12 civics curriculum.”
rt,
You contradict yourself within one paragraph. Let’s get to working up that k-12 civics curriculum implies a community effort. How is that different from a national community coming togather and pooling its vastly greater resources to tackle a overwhelmingly devestating world porblem? If the people are involved, the arsonists is put out of business.
For any of you who may have missed this widely under reported piece of shocking news:
Dr. Hansen, and his international team, have recently submitted a paper to Science magazine in which he states, “If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted…CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm”. It had been previously thought that 550 ppm would be safe and that was the target the EU had put in place.
From 1970 to 2000, the concentration of CO2 rose by about 1.5 ppm each year, but since 2000 the average annual rate of rise has leapt to 2.1 ppm. China is putting in a new coal fired power plant every week, India has introduced a new $2,500 car to its aspiring 1.1 billion citizens, and the US continues increasing its emissions.
The listing of the Polar Bear yesterday is an unfortunate post script to this hidden story.