as part of his presidential campaign he said that he would “cancel the Paris Climate Agreement and stop all payments of U.S. tax dollars to U.N. global warming programs.”33 And in June 2017, he did exactly that, removing the United States from what some consider the most important international agreement ever signed, to the complete dismay of many people not only in the United States, but across the globe.
In mid-November 2016, a week after the election, the Climate and Security Advisory Group delivered to the president-elect a book of recommendations. This group was composed of 43 U.S.-based military, national security, homeland security, and intelligence experts, which included former commanders of the U.S. Pacific and Central Command and the former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan for national security—the same sorts of people who were at the “National Security, Defense, and Climate Change” conference discussed earlier in this chapter. The document stressed that the new administration needed to build off the “progress already made”34 by both the Barack Obama and George W. Bush administrations around climate change and national security.
When I contacted the American Security Project’s Andrew Holland, the senior fellow on Energy and Climate, to get his take on Trump’s intentions with climate, especially regarding the extensively reported “hoax” comment, Holland responded (cautiously): “There’s a lot of different moving pieces in a government: the President isn’t everything! What the SecDef has to say is important—as apparently is what the President’s daughter has to say!” Indeed, former Exxon Mobile CEO Rex Tillerson stated in January after taking charge of the U.S. Department of State: “I think it’s important that the United States maintain its seat at the table on the conversations around how to address threats of climate change, which do require a global response.”35 Even Trump himself has said and done wildly contradictory things, such as asking officials in County Clare, Ireland, to approve construction of a sea wall to protect his golf resort from global warming, and meeting with climate advocate Al Gore. Also at this meeting was Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, who said that she wanted to “make climate change . . . one of her signature issues.”36
In March 2017, Trump signed an executive order that sought to eliminate a number of Obama-era policy iniatives—such as the Clean Power Plan and the September 2016 presidential memorandum on climate change and national security. Little more than a month later, the U.S. intelligence community issued a “Worldwide Threat Assessment”37 in which climate change is identified as a prominent national security threat. The Assessment, as presented by the Director of National Intelligence Daniel R. Coats to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, repeats the climate security doctrine almost verbatim: global warming is “raising the likelihood of instability and conflict around the world.”38 The report stated that “this warming is projected to fuel more intense and frequent extreme weather events ” and that countries with large coastal populations would be the most vulnerable, especially those in “Asia and Africa.”
When I asked Stephen Cheney at the 2015 conference about how climate change would directly affect the U.S. southern border he told me that in fact the night before, in Las Vegas, he had had dinner with the commander of Southern Command, General John Kelly. Of course, he had no idea at the time of Kelly’s future as Homeland Security secretary. What Cheney said was “We did talk border security and what’s driving immigration and there is no doubt that climate change is having an impact there as well. As it gets hotter, as the catastrophic events become more frequent, it’s having an impact on how they grow their agriculture in the Latin American countries, and employment is becoming a problem, and it’s driving people up north. So he’s seeing that problem.”
Indeed, Cheney said in a November 2016 interview not only that Secretary of Defense Mattis “get[s] climate change”39 but that John Kelly did as well. “I know both of them understand it. I’ve talked to them about it… They know, they get it.”40 In the same article Cheney said that he knew of not one top general, with access to the White House or Secretary of Defense who did not understand the climate situation, though he did admit that maybe there was somebody out there.
So it should be no surprise that then-commander John Kelly’s Southern Command was in charge of the simulation “Integrated Advance,” especially with so many future environmental projections of mass migrations from the Caribbean. In 2015, some of the more than 500 members of the Joint Task Force of military and Homeland Security agents disguised themselves as people attempting to breach U.S. borders and boarded rickety boats going north. From a distance, the boats rocking on the waves almost seemed authentic, with only the orange life jackets giving them away. Soldiers also played the role of journalists and media outlets that peppered command with questions, including challenging and critical ones. They practiced setting up positions in Guantánamo Bay where camouflaged soldiers sat behind laptops and looked at live feeds to strategize in real time.
“A migrant operation is one of our most likely missions at Army South so we have to be prepared,”41 said Major General Joseph P. DiSalvo. Using cameras from the private company FLIR (who has been given, over the years, extensive contracts with Customs and Border Protection) the same rocking, rickety boats showed up on the screens in the fake command post. Large, red-striped Coast Guard cutters patrolled the area, dwarfing the simulated boats moving north. “The main purpose of the exercise is to develop working relationships among different U.S agencies and departments to deter illegal mass migration.”42
Even though President Obama said the words “climate change refugee,” there was no legal framework, either in the United States, or internationally, that would give refugee status to a person fleeing a climate-induced event. The Coast Guard was subordinate to the Department of Homeland Security and its tripartite war on terrorists, drug traffickers, and immigrants.
Under the current U.S. border militarization regime, which will clearly be ramped up with the Trump administration, migrants are occasionally rescued and perhaps even given bits of humanitarian assistance, but these efforts are secondary to, and always followed by, interdiction, arrest, incarceration, and deportation.
CLIMATE ADAPTATION FOR THE RICH AND POWERFUL
South Carolina Congressman Jeff Duncan is getting frustrated. Three U.S. Homeland Security officials sit before him with stoic faces. They have been testifying for close to an hour in a hearing titled “Examining DHS’s Misplaced Focus on Climate Change.”43 The South Carolina congressman scrutinizes the bureaucrats as if he can’t believe he’s sitting in the room dealing with this shit. This happens only weeks after 21-year-old Dylann Roof entered the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Duncan’s state of South Carolina and killed nine people during a prayer service with the intent to incite a “race war.” But he doesn’t mention this.
Duncan, who wears a pressed white shirt with a light purple tie, looks at the DHS men intently. “Can you guys tell me why the Earth was warmer during the medieval times?”44
The Homeland Security men shuffle in their seats uncomfortably. Behind them is the audience at the hearing. In front are the members of the committee. The pause is awkward. Deputy Assistant Robert Kolasky, from the Office of Infrastructure Protection, finally makes a gesture that he’ll take a stab at it. When Kolasky gave his testimony earlier, he could’ve been renowned climate journalist Naomi Klein when he quoted the 2014 U.S. Global Change Research Program’s Third National Climate Assessment, which reported that the United States “will experience an increase in frequency and intensity of hurricanes, massive flooding, excessively high temperatures, wildfires, severe downpours, severe droughts, storm surge, sea-level rise throughout the 21st century.”45
Kolasky also told the committee that “extreme weather strains our resources, serves as a threat multiplier that aggravates stressors both at home and destabilizes the lifeline sectors on which we rely. Higher temperatures and more intense storms can cause damage or disruptions that result in cascading effects
