What Would a Climate-Focused Defense Budget Look Like?
By John Conger
Every Administration makes changes to the draft budget they receive before it is submitted to Congress, and there’s every reason to expect that to be the case with a President Biden. The budget is supposed to be submitted by the first Monday in February, but that deadline is rarely met. Incoming Presidents Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush submitted their budgets in April, while President Barack Obama submitted his first budget in May. In this window, changes get made to better reflect the priorities of the incoming Administration.
(more…)VIDEO: Can Climate Change Increase the Risk of Nuclear War?
Yes. But it’s Complicated.
In the second video of its new series on nuclear detonation risks and climate change, the Council on Strategic Risks (CSR) posed questions about the impact of climate change on conflict and nuclear proliferation to five leading national security experts with different perspectives. Together, their diverse answers may help us to better understand the complex linkages across climate change, domestic, regional, and global conflict, the effect of nuclear energy on carbon emissions, future trends in nuclear proliferation, prospects for cooperation within the global nuclear order, and the potential for conflict escalation and nuclear war.
U.S. President-Elect Biden and the Climate Security Nexus: Recommendations for the Way Ahead
By John Conger
In the wake of the declaration that Former Vice President Joseph Biden will become the next President of the United States, we must consider what this means for climate security. Make no mistake, there will be significant consequences for climate change and for national security separately, but our focus at the Center for Climate and Security is their nexus. We will be exploring this in significant detail in the weeks ahead, but I wanted to offer two thoughts in the wake of the election result.
(more…)U.S. Foreign Assistance Programs Fall Short of Addressing Climate Change Risk
The Department of Defense has been incorporating climate change into its strategic policy documents for more than 10 years (e.g., here, here, and here). Despite White House pressure to the contrary, it currently is expanding how it addresses climate change to address Congressional requirements contained in recent National Defense Authorization Acts (here). Less visible, but no less important are other federal agencies that are focused on foreign assistance which could complement DoD’s security cooperation/assistance efforts (here). The Congressional Research Service (2020) released a short report on four foreign assistance agencies–U.S. Agency for International Development(USAID), the Peace Corps, the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) and the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation(DFC)–and if their current planning efforts are reducing climate change risk to their own operations and programs. The result is that these current planning efforts fall far short of comprehensively addressing climate change risk, especially when compared to the more robust efforts under the last administration.
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