of Homeland Security projects that civilization as we know it will be difficult to maintain. The intelligence community knows that the sea is rising and will engulf entire swaths of territory, it understands the surges brought by hurricanes and the ensuing flooding, it anticipates the coming crises of wildfires and water scarcity.
However, to Duncan’s question about the medieval period, Kolasky says, “I don’t think any of us can speak to that.”
“The Earth was warmer,” Duncan interrupts. “Grapes grew higher on the mountains. The Earth was warmer. You’re not going to refute that,” Duncan says, extending his hand toward Kolasky, “I hope.”
“I think that we got threats of ISIS, we got cartels shooting at helicopters, we got unaccompanied children coming into this country, we’ve got illegal aliens murdering beautiful, innocent lives in San Francisco, we’ve got a woman who had her head blown off in Los Angeles by someone,” Duncan says, sounding similar to Donald Trump.
“There are events after events going around the world that are true threats to the United States. Folks that want to do great harm to Christians, that want to do great harm to us. They come to this country to end the American way of life. [And] for whatever reason, we are spending our hard-earned dollars on climate science and this belief that it is one of the biggest threats to national security.”47
In a measured, placating tone, Thomas Smith from the DHS Office of Policy Strategy, Plans, Analysis, and Risk explains to Duncan that U.S. authorities will continue to target the very types of people that Duncan mentioned. Homeland Security is not about studying climate science, he explains, it’s about understanding the shifting global climate as a “threat multiplier”48—there’s that phrase again.
The term “threat multiplier” first appeared in the 2004 United Nations report “Threats, Challenges, and Change” but didn’t enter the common security lexicon until 2007. According to researcher Ben Hayes, “just as emphasis on the ‘war on terror’ was receding . . . influential security actors in Europe and the U.S. began to outline foreign policy options for addressing climate change as a security threat.”49
The term “threat multiplier” hits a deeper chord, because the “threat” referred to much more than just severe weather, and gets back to Watson’s point at the beginning of this chapter. More dangerous than climate disruption was the climate migrant. More dangerous than the drought were the people who can’t farm because of the drought. More dangerous than the hurricane were the people displaced by the storm. The climate refugee was a threat to the very war planes required to enforce the financial and political order where 1 percent of the population wielded more economic power than the rest of the world combined.
At the global policy level, there are two principal responses to climate change: mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Adaptation “seeks to lower the risks” posed by changing conditions. Climate adaptation could mean a wide range of things: building protections against sea-level rise, improving quality of road surfaces to withstand hotter temperatures, rationing water, farmers planting different crops, businesses buying flood insurance. Through USAID, the United States has invested $400 million for worldwide climate adaptation programs, and in 2015 Secretary of State John Kerry committed the U.S. to double that amount. Often workshops focus on food security, health, humanitarian assistance, and water management, what the agency calls “key climate-sensitive sectors.”50 These State Department programs are on the chopping block in the Trump administration, and predicted to be slashed or gutted.
The climate “adaptation” plan that is rarely mentioned, but which drones silently over the globe, is the militarized security apparatus that is preparing to enforce “order”—including, in many ways, the suicidal fossil-fuel economy of today—even as it accelerates ecological crisis. Given that all environmental security assessments factor in the massive displacement of people, border militarization becomes one key component, among many others, to maintain the status quo.
Instead of, say, a sea wall’s resistance to physical storms, a border wall envisions a sort of resistance on the part of the rich and powerful against the people whose homes and liveliehoods were destroyed by those storms.
As David Ciplet, co-author of Power in a Warming World, points out, there are choices regarding how money is spent. “Hundreds of billions of dollars each year subsidize fossil fuel industries globally—the main cause of climate change—and nearly $2 trillion are spent on the military.”51 And, of course, the military, even as it greens its own technology, provides the business-as-usual security for the fossil fuel industries.
Thomas Smith is one of the principal authors of the 2014 Homeland Security Quadrennial Review, the main public doctrine that explains the DHS mission and now recognizes climate change as a central threat. Smith said earlier that experts in the Office of Policy Strategy did a number of activities to understand the threats and hazards facing the United States, and “the strategic environment we operate in.” This collection of analyses was known as the Homeland Security Strategic Environment Assessment. It looks at risks, threats, and trends during a given time frame, in this case, the 2015–2019 window, and collectively identifies “natural disasters, pandemics, and climate change as key drivers of change to the homeland security strategic environment.”52 In the Quadrennial Review, Smith says, these associated trends continue to present “a major area of homeland security risk,” and he specifically mentions that “more frequent severe droughts and tropical storms, especially in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean could increase population movements, both legal and illegal, toward or across the U.S. border,”53 a tame version of the threat forecasts issued by officials worldwide.
To Duncan, Smith says: “We describe that climate change can aggravate stressors such as poverty, such as food insecurity, such as causing population migration. For vulnerable populations with weak government institutions it may enable terrorism to take hold.”54
The congressman from South Carolina is definitely not the only one fooled into thinking that discussions in Washington about climate change are limited to science and to laws regulating carbon emissions and debates about whether or not it exists. In the strategy rooms of Washington, a climate adaptation program for the rich and powerful is being created, and the walls and weapons to protect their systems of profit and politics as long as possible. The real threat is the inability to obtain alloying agents needed to make more fighter jets.
THREE
THE 21ST-CENTURY BORDER
If you ask us what’s going to happen in the near future, we have no fucking idea. Sorry for using the word “idea.”
—Subcomandante Marcos (now known as Galeano), at a press conference.
Three Honduran men sit by the train tracks in the small, broiling town of Tenosique, Mexico. They wait where hundreds of Central Americans congregate each night in hopes of jumping on the freight train notoriously known as The Beast, as it chugs north to the United States. In the distance, across the tracks, an army truck rumbles by. In the back, two soldiers stand poised with assault rifles, their faces covered with black balaclavas. The shiny Dodge Ram contrasts against the rusted machinery scattered in the overgrown grass and cement. It is as if we are on the set of a movie somewhere between Children of Men, a film that depicts the United Kingdom as an ultra-militarized police state rounding up and incarcerating refugees, and The Road, a tale of a father and son who walk across a post-apocalyptic North America devastated by an unknown cataclysm.
The Honduran men’s names are Luis Carlos, Santos Fernando, and Ismael. They have been living by the tracks in a
