[CPEO-MEF] CLIMATE: "Can the Department of Defense win its complicated battle against climate change?"

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

Can the Department of Defense win its complicated battle against climate change?
The world’s biggest institutional user of oil is grappling with the impacts of climate change.

by Daniel Ross 
Independent Media Institute 
May 16, 2019

The 150 mph winds that Hurricane Michael blasted through Tyndall Air Force Base last October left a trail of destruction, ruin and exorbitant financial loss at one of the Department of Defense’s (DoD) key military bases. The damage could have been worse. Fifty-five of Tyndall’s fleet of F-22 fighter jets had been flown to safety before the hurricane hit. Nevertheless, some of the 17 remaining F-22 jets – their combined worth a reported $5.8 billion – suffered damage, along with roughly 95 percent of the buildings.

But it’s the fallout from these events at the airbase, along with the ensuing cleanup, that holds a mirror up to the complex set of forces confronting the military as it grapples with the global threat of anthropogenic climate change.

Plans to spend a reported $3 billion plus over five years to rebuild Tyndall will be drafted with a view to making the facility “sustainable” and climate “resilient.” These plans are in keeping with the findings of a DoD installation vulnerability report published early last year highlighting how more than half of some 3,500 military sites are affected by flooding, drought, winds, wildfires, storm surges and extreme temperatures – weather events and climate patterns that will worsen as global temperatures increase. The Pentagon’s latest climate change report focuses on the ways in which 79 operationally critical military installations are vulnerable to a warming planet. Indeed, a long list of reports and policy measures tip the hat to how seriously the DoD takes the impacts that global warming poses to its missions both at home and abroad.


…

For the entire article, see
https://www.nationofchange.org/2019/05/16/can-the-department-of-defense-win-its-complicated-battle-against-climate-change/

--

Lenny Siegel
Executive Director
Center for Public Environmental Oversight
a project of the Pacific Studies Center
P.O. Box 998, Mountain View, CA 94042
Voice/Fax: 650/961-8918 
<lsiegel@cpeo.org>
http://www.cpeo.org

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