Episode 372 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you enjoy your shows.
Is climate change a fringe and woke distraction in military planning that inhibits lethality? Or is it invaluable strategic context for this century's power projection? What kinds of missions will soldiers be asked to perform in a world that is getting hotter and more complex?
Today's guest is Erin Sikorsky, Director of The Center for Climate and Security and author of the new book, Climate Change on the Battlefield: International Military Responses to the Climate Crisis.
Though this show is not merely about warfighting and lethality. It's about what it means to have an apolitical military (if that term isn't too contestable). It's also about the military increasingly adapting its own facilities to climate change, and being tasked with many more disaster response missions than it has been previously. What does it mean to have an armed force that is spending more time fighting forest fires than preparing for amphibious assaults? Is this even the correct service to be addressing disasters?
I'd like to do many more episodes on this topic in the future. It's one that I find endlessly fascinating.
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Resources
Erin Sikorsky's bio at The Center for Climate and Security
Erin's book, Climate Change on the Battlefield: International Military Responses to the Climate Crisis
Ian W. Toll's Pacific War Trilogy deals with interwar Japan, especially Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942. Listen also to the episode of the podcast I did with him here, "S3E34: The Environmental Impact of WW2 in the Pacific Theatre—w/ Ian W. Toll, author of The Pacific War Trilogy".
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History episode "Supernova in the East 1" deals with this extensively too.
I started reading Pete Hegseth's The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free, and would like to keep reading more criticism of the conflict between military preparedness and climate change.
Listen in to the episode I did with Jeff Goodell where we discuss how the military thinks about climate change, "S3E51: The Heat Will Kill You First—w/ Jeff Goodell, author and contributing editor of Rolling Stone"
Also, read his book The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World
“Where some states have an army, the Prussian Army has a state.”
― Voltaire
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Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hey, thanks for listening. This is Ross Kenyon. I’m the host of Reversing Climate Change, the podcast you are listening to right at this very moment. Before we get into the bulk of today’s show, I’d love to tell you about our sponsors, Absolute Climate and Philip Lee LLP. I’ve made great radio with both of them. They should be familiar to you if you listen to the show, but I want to tell you about why you should learn a little bit more. The first sponsor is Absolute Climate.
I did a show with their founder, Peter Minor, a few months back. And a lot of people love that show. I was asking a question of can registries design their own methodologies for carbon markets without it being a conflict of interest? And Absolute Climate’s thesis is no. They shouldn’t be in the business of doing that. We actually need to disintegrate functionality within carbon markets even further. They are literally the only independent standards body for carbon removal that exists. Their name is very well chosen.
I think they are some of the most aggressively idealistic people within carbon removal. It’s come up on Reversing Climate Change so many times about how and why there’s tension between commercial teams and science teams within carbon markets. There’s some fundamental tension between the rules of running a business, or I should say the rules of running a profitable business is maybe a better way to put that, and climate impact. And I think Absolute is one of those companies that, at least from my experience of what I know of them over there, I think they’re going to be some of the staunchest holdouts, just trying to make sure that there can be a justified true belief that a tonne purchase is a tonne truly removed.
They’re betting big on not compromising. It’s a bold strategy. I respect the absolute hell out of that. Absolute is very much doing things their own way and they stand out to me and I will never mistake them in a lineup. Go check them out. I really am endlessly And that’s also true of our other sponsor, Philip Lee LLP. In fact, I told them to pitch me on some weirder legal shows. I really like doing shows about the law. I think the law is such a fascinating part of our shared social life.
It structures so much of it. It’s badly understood by most people. And just structuring deals within carbon removal is hard. I’m talking grown up deals here. Like when you’re trying to put together an enormous package, complicated structuring. A lot of money changing hands. The stakes are high. You really do need a good lawyer. I’m sorry to tell you that if you are a startup out there in carbon removal, you’re going to probably pay a fair amount of money to lawyers. There’s just no way around it.
Your choice is basically, do you get a bad lawyer or a good lawyer? One really cool thing I can say on Philip Lee LLP’s behalf, well, one... Ryan Covington and I did a very fun show about how basically no one except for an elite few really know what bankability and project finance even mean. And he lays it out very clearly. If you’d like to go listen to that show, it’s awesome. And it’s linked in the show notes. And also we ended up talking about Ernest Hemingway, a firm not too.
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You really make this so that it’s something that, in a busy life with lots of competing priorities, I’m able to keep coming back and making more Reversing Climate Change. Thanks so much for what you do, and now, here is the show. Hello and welcome to Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon and I have been podcasting about carbon removal and things adjacent for more than eight years. And I’m so happy to be here. Thanks for spending time with me. I’m so grateful to have you here.
If you listen to this show regularly, you love it. Before you do whatever you do when you listen to podcasts, open up a Spotify, give me five stars on the Reversing Climate Change podcast. It would make a huge difference. The same thing is also very valuable on Apple Podcasts, and you have the option of writing a review on Apple Podcasts for Reversing Climate Change. Open up the app, go to the show, write a quick one. Just say, I love this show. You should listen too.
It can be that simple. It can be that quick and it would be very much appreciated. There’s also a paid subscriber option for $5 a month. It gets rid of all the programmatic ads and also there’s bonus content. Recently, I put out a show I did with Grant Faber where we talked about how we hung out at the New York Tenement Museum and what we learned from the experience connected it to various media types that relates to How do we talk about big issues? What kinds of museums and curated spaces are inherently empathy generating?
Why that might be important? Questions like that about aesthetics that I think are really important, but also like not right over the plate. Today’s show is right over the plate. I had Erin Sikorsky on. Erin is an author. She wrote a book called Climate Change on the Battlefield, International Military Responses to the Climate Crisis. Erin is the director of the Center for Climate and Security. She served on the U.S. National Intelligence Council. And it’s someone that I really look to when trying to understand how climate change is going to affect military preparedness, disaster response, war fighting in the future.
This conversation covers a lot. In fact, at one point, I think Erin even laughs and notes that this show is reaching to so many different parts of geopolitics, of security competition. We go through If you’re listening, you can hear my genuine passion for this topic. I think it’s really fascinating. I like sketching the future and thinking quite a lot about it. And as you can probably tell from listening, I also love sketching the past. The past is also They do things differently there, as the old joke goes.
And I really like learning from it, seeing how it rhymes with the present. What can we learn? What can we expect? And that makes this show especially relevant because we don’t actually have that many cases where something like this has happened. Certainly not in modernity. I don’t know that much more needs to be said right now. I hope you enjoy the show. Thank you to Erin for being here. The link to her book is in the show notes. You should pick it up and read it.
It’s a fascinating catalog of how militaries around the world are responding to climate change and thinking about their future of preparedness and which kinds of armed services are important to them, which kinds of hardware are important to them, which kinds of missions are important to them. It’s a really fascinating book. I’m looking forward to diving into more of this in the future. I’m always trying to find more interesting geopolitical shows because, as I mentioned, I get so hyped up about it. It captures my imagination so powerfully.
I hope you enjoyed the show. Here it is. Thanks for having me, Ross. Glad to have you. I really enjoyed your book. It’s one of those books that got written that I think you got lucky that the US military’s composition has been changing recently and your topic ascended to news prominence. I wanted to start off with a basic grounding question that relates to that implication, which is, What is actually the relationship, at least in the U.S., and maybe you can go globally, between civilian administration and government and the military?
I think people don’t really think about it unless it’s really bad and there’s a coup or something like that. But what actually is the balance between these different parts of the government?
Erin Sikorsky: Yeah, it’s a great question. And, you know, frankly, I wish I wasn’t lucky that this topic had gotten so much attention given the changes here in the U.S., but it is what it is right now. In terms of the, I mean, the military is apolitical, right, in the United States. It is. It is run by a civilian always that is appointed by who is elected president, as all the heads of other federal agencies are. But the military themselves that serve in uniform are meant to be apolitical and serve to implement uniform.
U.S. policy, but not comment on politics or get involved in politics. You know, and I think you saw that in, you know, a few weeks ago when Secretary Hegseth gathered all the generals from around the world to come to Quantico outside Washington and gave a very political speech. You saw those generals sitting there in the audience, stony faced, not reacting to that politics, which is what they’re supposed to do. And traditionally have done in countries where they don’t do that. That’s where you see problems, right?
When militaries can be deployed as a political arm of the government, that’s traditionally been something the United States has really tried to avoid and look down upon.
Ross Kenyon: We take that for granted, and I think it’s functionally invisible. Is it important? Are there some benefits to maybe having a more political military, or is it just inherently a dangerous way to organize a state?
Erin Sikorsky: For my personal opinion, I think it can be dangerous, right? Because you never know what political leadership you’re going to have, right? And the military’s job is to defend the country, protect the Americans in America, and we need them to do that without regard to politics. And so I think, yeah, I think it’s absolutely critical for a democracy, right, to have an apolitical military.
Ross Kenyon: The examples that I can think of besides just military juntas in various parts of the world or coups or just rule by the military, I’m also thinking of the old joke about how most states have an army, but Prussia is an army that has a state. An old joke that’s probably 100 plus years old that still kind of rings true. Or I think about how in the interwar years, how Japan was governed by, at least partially by assassinations and by competing factions in the Navy and the Army.
Right. I think I would be hard pressed to think of any examples that felt good. And I also think of George Washington being considered the American Cincinnatus, who, you know, military leader, could have been a king, essentially, and tried to walk away from that and didn’t think we should invest that office with that much power. Those are all the examples I can think of. And that might be my bias geographically. That’s where I’m from. Culturally, I just want to make sure I’m not closing the door to the possibility that rule by the military is actually somehow possibly a good thing.
Saying this out loud sounds like I’m being so charitable that I’ve become a fool. Am I a fool?
Erin Sikorsky: I mean, but I think you got to distinguish between rule by the military and also that there are things outside of the military’s core domain where they can play a beneficial role potentially, which is where I think you get into some of this conversation around climate and disaster response. But again, that’s different than rule by the military.
Ross Kenyon: Fair enough. Yes. I’ve long been fascinated by multiple dimensions of this topic, both the changing geopolitical context here, security competition between states and how that’s going to change in the Arctic and the rise of economic autarky and just the way that American rhetoric is changing where it used to be multilateral. Now it’s distinctly not multilateral anymore. I’m watching these things very closely and trying to figure out what it means for the climate and carbon removal. It has me pretty spooked. But I’ve also been encouraged by things...
I’m pretty sure I originally got this from one of Jeff Goodell’s books about how practical the military is. And they’re just worried, like, hey, if... Newport News is flooding all the time. It doesn’t matter if it’s red or blue. That’s just bad for the military and preparedness. And they are a practical set of people, in my understanding, and they just want to get the job done for the most part. And yet politics almost gets in their way a lot. That’s a story I have in my head.
Is that true or is it more complicated than that?
Erin Sikorsky: No, I think it’s absolutely true. I mean, the military is pragmatic, right? And practical and... You know, they experience climate hazards already in their their day to day work in existence. I mean, you talk to any soldier that was deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan and they recognize how extreme heat. Right. How things can affect equipment, can affect your capacity to fight on the battlefield, but also how things like drought. For example, can affect communities in which you’re operating, how it can drive support for extremists if you can no longer farm in your community, right, and you’re looking for alternatives to support your family, what the Taliban might be doing or what ISIS and Iraq might be doing might seem more attractive.
So they’ve... Even if they wouldn’t call it climate change per se, they’ve experienced the effects, right? And I think that’s why you’ve seen some of the regional combatant commanders, military leaders who have led operations in the Indo-Pacific, for example, or in the Middle East, as some of the most vocal proponents of understanding and addressing climate change because it affected their ability to do their core job, right? You know, the U.S. military is huge. There’s a diversity of viewpoints and approaches. I’m not saying these views are universally held, but I think especially at senior leadership levels among uniformed military strategists, especially logisticians, people who have to move things from point A to point B, they all get it in terms of how climate and environmental issues can shape their capacity to do their jobs.
Ross Kenyon: So interesting. I need to read the Pete Hegseth book. I haven’t read it yet, but I know there’s a lot of talk around it about how caring about quote-unquote woke issues like climate in a military context takes away focus from lethality. The American military should be focused on being an effective warfighting machine. But everything you just said sounds like important strategic context in order to be an effective warfighting machine. Are they being led by their base? Are they playing domestic politics? Is it something else?
What am I missing?
Erin Sikorsky: Yeah, no, it’s a good question. I mean, I think some of it is domestic politics. Some of it also is, I think, a conflation between understanding and preparing for and addressing climate impacts with the transition to clean energy. Because sometimes I think the conversation around militaries and climate Focuses narrowly on the need for the military to decarbonize. Right. And the need for the military to transition away from fossil fuels. There are huge, frankly, I think, operational benefits to that. I was actually just reading an article about these new electric bikes that the Ukrainian military is fielding.
I know, but they’re like the wolf something. I mean, they’ve got a great name and they’re meant for use on the battlefield, right? So, I mean, there are benefits. You don’t have a heat signature. They’re very quiet. So I think when someone like Secretary Hegseth talks about climate being a woke issue, right, or what you hear from some Republican members of Congress at times is, you know, oh, there’s no charging stations on the battlefield. We’re not going to make electric tanks. They would weigh, you know, a gazillion pounds and and that to me is a very narrow understanding of how climate change shapes national security issues.
And what’s interesting is when Hegseth, you know, he’s been saying this stuff publicly called climate change. You know, we don’t do climate change crap anymore is what he said in an interview. But they signed out a memo internally in the Pentagon that said, look, none of this talk about climate change should be interpreted to mean that we don’t care about resilience, that we don’t care about weather, that we don’t care if our bases can withstand hurricanes. So when they say climate change, I think they really are focused on the fuel piece, right?
The clean energy piece, not so much the broader understanding of how climate is reshaping security.
Ross Kenyon: Yes. And I think of something like the great green fleet of biofuels powered U.S. Navy. That might be something where you’re like, is this the best use of biomass? And I don’t even know if this ultimately if it maths correctly.
Erin Sikorsky: Right. Oh, exactly. Exactly. So it’s those experiences, frankly, that I think shape biomass. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Those moves, whether they were feints, whether they were playing to the base, I don’t really know exactly what happened because it just sort of fell out of the news about a month after it started happening. I don’t know why. It cost Canada’s Conservative Party the election. I don’t really get what the upside was. But I think it was at least gesturing towards those parts of the world are changing. Obviously, there’s a lot of security competition that’s going to happen in the Arctic. Everyone knows it.
Everyone’s preparing for it. And yet it’s like very obviously related to climate change. And yet... The president will go in front of the United Nations and say that climate change is the worst hoax that’s ever been perpetuated upon the people of the world or however he’s not quoting exactly. How are these things happening at the same time? I can’t keep track of all the...
Erin Sikorsky: I know. I mean, look, the cognitive dissonance or like contradictions in this administration are vast. But, you know, I mean, I do think it’s interesting. I think Greenland especially is this recognition that the Arctic is a geopolitical country. Challenge or space in a way that, frankly, it wouldn’t be if we didn’t have climate change. China, for example, would not be interested in the Arctic if it weren’t melting, right? And wanting to have access, also, I think, access to critical minerals, to resources. I think the problem is, and this is why not bringing climate change into it is missing something, is that If you’re only worried about the Arctic in terms of how can we get whatever’s up there or control it, you’re missing that if you get to the point where it’s easier to operate up there and the ice has melted and there’s commercial access and you can drill and whatever, there’s a whole bunch of other things going wrong with the globe because of climate change that are frankly more important to U.
S. national security, in my opinion, than who can try to drill for climate change. Seabed minerals in one of the most challenging places you would ever think to try and drill for seabed minerals, if you will. So, you know, I think it’s important to talk about the Arctic and the changing geopolitics because of climate change, but also not lose sight of the fact that if we get to the point where the ice melts so much, where you have, you know, the Greenland ice sheet collapses or you have very minimal ice in...
In the winter up there, that there’s just going to be a whole lot of other stuff going on that’s really dangerous for a lot of people, including in the United States around the globe.
Ross Kenyon: Many of those things that would come about in a world that was changed in the way you describe are things that often drive right of center people, right leaning populists kind of berserk too. It’s something like crop failure in a part of the world could cause mass immigration to Europe. Or to the US. And I think all of these places in the global north have some sort of incipient, right-leaning, xenophobic. I wish there was a non-pejorative way to say it. It’s just like it’s ours and it’s Fortress Europe and Fortress America, I think is what you refer to it as.
Once that starts happening, it encourages people to think of scarcity, that people are coming after what is ours and we need to protect it. And I think for us to have a planet that is not on a war footing permanently, maybe that’s a dream too far. We probably shouldn’t be encouraging like those parts of our psyches, I think.
Erin Sikorsky: Right. No, I agree. And I think it’s why it’s been in the climate security conversation and the climate security community. It’s really important to be careful about how we talk about migration. Right. I mean, the migrants themselves are not a threat. It is the reaction to they are at risk. They are the ones facing the threat, the biggest threat. Right. And that reaction to migration can be really problematic and create security risks of its own. So, you know, I think there’s a version of, quote unquote, climate security that, as you say, is fortress Europe, fortress America.
And we want to make sure we avoid that. But again, your other point is like, if these are really what you care about, these issues, then making investments necessary. You know, whether it’s in climate adaptation or agricultural resilience or whatever it is, things that USAID was doing in the U.S., right? Things that the Feed the Future program was doing in the U.S. Those are small investments comparatively you can make. That logic makes very strong, intuitive sense to me. Why isn’t that being pursued in this way?
I always feel like there’s some piece of the puzzle I’m missing here and maybe there isn’t, maybe...
Ross Kenyon: Maybe you’re just saying like, yes, you could choose to either pay for the prevention portion of it or you can deal with it in an adversarial way later. There’s some line, I think you’re quoting Mattis or someone saying that, you know, you can, if you don’t invest in diplomacy now, like buy me more ammunition. Yeah.
Erin Sikorsky: Yep. No, exactly. And I mean, you know, obviously this administration has been horrific in terms of the destruction of the development programs and all of that here in the U.S. But this argument has not been a winning one. It’s been hard for even... You know, the Biden administration who seemed to get these issues, right, was the and not just in the U.S., but I think even in Europe and elsewhere, this longer term investment approach, right, this, you know, a dollar today to save ten dollars in the future has always been a hard one for governments and politicians, I think, because we operate in such a Quick election cycles, right?
I mean, how does that show return on investment or benefit to me and my community today? And so it’s never been an easy policy environment for some of this, but it’s obviously gotten a lot harder now.
Ross Kenyon: I think that is actually one of the top contenders for the grand thesis of why climate change, which is just the discount rate. Humans are just, discounting puts our brains in ways that make it impossible for us to solve this easily. And if someone asks me, I can go into like the weird spiritual reasons that we don’t feel at home on the planet or treat it like we don’t really belong here. You can also just say it’s the discount rate
Erin Sikorsky: and just skip 14 more other paragraphs about it. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s hard. But also, I mean, you know, there’s so much work that’s been done that showed the benefit. For example, I’ll give you an example on migration where a USAID program that was operating in Central America, they were providing drought resistant seeds to certain And they did statistical studies afterwards, you know, after a few planting seasons of doing this, those communities obviously did better when extreme weather came, when drought came. And those communities had a 70% less interest in migrating to outside of their country than other people within Honduras did.
Right. So that to me, you know, I testified before Congress last year on this topic. I use that statistic. I think any member of Congress who’s looking at how the U.S. budget is being spent would point to that and say like, hey, that’s that’s a really great return on what we’re interested in. So there are there are concrete data points behind this. And I think I do think there are politicians, members of Congress who get it. But I think this moment is just not one in which they can act.
Ross Kenyon: How many of those investments have just gone away? And I’ve also read stories of, I think I might’ve got this from Bob Woodward or maybe somewhere else about how harmed American soft power has become of just like, Mm-hmm.
Erin Sikorsky: No, I mean, so if you want to talk about, you know, geopolitical competition and power, especially vis-a-vis China, you know, a lot of these cuts to climate programming, especially in the Pacific Island region, right? Yeah. The country that’s going to help you with that. And we can get into how genuine China’s help is and how much of a problem they still are, obviously, in terms of emissions. But when the U.S. doesn’t show up, I mean, it was interesting. You mentioned the president’s speech at the U.
N. during the General Assembly. So you had that contrasted with President Xi for the first time making a NDC commitment from China, which everyone agreed wasn’t good enough, but it was still something. And They’re moving forward and that gives them, I think, huge geopolitical leverage that the U.S. doesn’t have, as well as economic leverage now with the green economy and just the investments they’ve made in technology. And the U.S. just continuing to shoot itself in the foot now with, you know, cutting back on wind projects or solar projects or investments in batteries.
I mean, all sorts of things. That just makes no economic sense either. So, yeah.
Ross Kenyon: To that end, I want to go back to the great green fleet that we sort of pooh-poohed 15 minutes ago. But, you know, you link it back to, it’s obviously a reference to the great white fleet, right? Teddy Roosevelt, around the world, U.S. naval tour. And that was a way of saying America is becoming a great power or already is a great power. We’re on the world tour. We’re showing you that we’re here, the rest of the world. And it was an example of leadership.
They even painted the fleet white rather than that gunmetal gray because they weren’t trying to hide in the waves. And that’s an interesting thing. And how important is the U.S. military for... Just brand management. That was an example of trying to raise the profile of the U.S. We don’t really think about it because the U.S. is the world’s brand for a country and has been for most of our lives. So we don’t think about how important it is. And of course, the line is Coca-Cola spends more than anyone else on advertising.
That’s why Coca-Cola. Is the U.S. military meant to be a sort of soft power arm as well as a hard power arm? Is that a way to conceptualize it?
Erin Sikorsky: I think so. I talk about this in my book about the role that the military has played in international disaster response after typhoons and wildfires and hurricanes. And that’s, I think, given huge benefits to the U.S. in parts of the world as the U.S. being seen as a partner who can help in times of It also provides hard security benefits then when your allies and partners have resilient infrastructure, then if we need to use it for something for the military, right, you can do that.
But I mean, in this vein, I think one of the most important tools the U.S. military has and still has is the National Guard Partnership Program. Where National Guards from particular states in the U.S. have had long time, like 10, 15 year, 20 year relationships with other countries. It’s like sister cities, kind of sister militaries. And they often will travel and do training exercises with their partner. Militaries. These days, a lot of that training is around disaster response. It’s around fighting wildfires, best practices for fighting wildfires.
It’s around managing flooding, right? How do you use drones, for example, to surveil flooded areas to try and help rescue people? And there have been times over the past couple of summers when you’ve had these extreme heat waves and wildfires across Europe where National Guard And members happen to be in capitals in Europe having these training exercises and then some kind of disaster happens and the National Guard has helped deploy in those countries. And so I think, you know, talking about soft power and strengthening that relationship.
That’s been a really important thing that the military has done that then redounds not only to the U.S. broadly, but also to the military itself when it has to go ask those countries for something hard that it might need help with.
Ross Kenyon: Are we asking the military to do too much when we’re asking them to focus on disaster relief and preparedness? Is that confusing, the role of the military? Do people join the military to fill sandbags and fight forced fires? I don’t really think that’s why people go into it. Is that not a confusion? Why might it not be?
Erin Sikorsky: Yeah, I mean, it is a real point of debate now, a lot of places, not only in the U.S., but elsewhere. I mean, I think the National Guard in the U.S. is kind of unique because I do think in many cases— People join that because of interest in helping in their communities, right? That’s often how they’re used. But to our north, Canada, past two, three summers have had record deployments of their military to deal with wildfires, to evacuate communities, to help provide support.
And military leaders there have complained significantly about this, saying this is distracting us from other training, our core duties. You know, you need to come up with another plan, Canadian government. You can’t always turn to us is the easy button. Similar conversations have been happening in Australia around firefighting there. But others will say, you know, in Canada, for example, others will say, well, if the Canadian military’s job is to keep Canadians safe, the number one threat many Canadians are facing now are wildfires and extreme weather events.
And so should we not figure out a way to use our defense forces to support that? You also have had... You know, huge recruiting challenges with the Canadian military over the past decade or so. And there are some and I make this point in my book, I don’t know the answer to the question, but I wonder if The idea of, you know, joining a force that is about helping your community, keeping your neighbors safe, keeping their homeland safe. Right. Would that be of interest to more Canadians than saying we might need you to go to fight in the Indo-Pacific over Taiwan someday to support the United States?
You know, so I think I think those are important questions for militaries to be asking. I also think there are real places, as we were getting back to earlier, where places where militaries are not operating in democratic environments when they can be deployed politically. That’s a real problem for disaster response because who’s deciding which community gets the support from the military? When the military shows up in your community, is that seen as a positive thing or is it seen as a threat, right? So, yeah, it’s complicated.
And certainly... You know, I think in an ideal world, you would have civilians with the capacity to do the response. I think the challenge now is that extreme weather events are coming so frequently and so much more intensely. And then we’re set up for, you know, the military is often the only institution that has the logistic capacity, right, the discipline, whatever you need to be able to respond in a timely fashion.
Ross Kenyon: Wow, fascinating answer with so many threads to pull on. I’m wondering if that still holds from your book where you’re talking about recruitment challenges in Canada and how the Canadian military was deployed for disaster response and wildfires. I think, especially now, many of the Canadians that I speak with are actively concerned about the 51st state talk. They don’t think it’s a joke or harmless saber rattling. I had someone talk to me the other day who was saying that Canadian identity is heavily provincial. I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense.
I mean, like, you’re like, It’s not that connected and people live along the South and it’s very big, but this was a great unifying thing. That kind of talk sort of unified the Canadian people in a way. So I imagine though that if they are actively worried about can America be trusted, being focused on disaster preparedness and relief is likely going to feel in much more competition with just basic security guarantees for the Canadian state.
Erin Sikorsky: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, we’re in a moment of, I think, increasing uncertainty and a lot of our long held assumptions or beliefs about the international system, right, and the U.S. role in that system are being challenged. And so I think a lot, not just Canada, but many states are grappling with this. I mean, it’s funny, we, the organization I lead, the Center for Climate and Security, we do a lot of tabletop exercises, scenario exercises, kind of future planning exercises. And anytime we run those these days and have somebody try to play the United States, no one really knows how to play.
You know, like, do you play the Trump administration? Do you play how it used to be? You know, everyone’s having a hard time thinking if you’re playing the U.S. 10 years from now, what does the U.S. actually look like? Right. And so I think that uncertainty... You’re right, makes it really hard. And we just, you know, we live in a security environment where states don’t have the luxury of only one type of threat they have to manage, right? It’s not just threats from other states.
It’s not just threats from non-state terrorist actors. It’s not just transnational problems without passports like climate and pandemics. It’s all three of those things. Together at once and they layer on top of each other. They interact with each other to create new threats. It’s a really complex environment that requires different approaches and thinking. And I think, you know, few countries are that’s hard to grapple with.
Ross Kenyon: Because wargaming sounds very fun. I think people sometimes think that the U.S. being less predictable as it has been with the second Trump administration is potentially a good thing for negotiation. It has a Southpaw quality, too. We really don’t know what’s coming next. And that makes the U.S. surprised. Reversing and powerful when it does move in a certain direction. And then stuff about the lobbying for the Nobel Peace Prize for the ceasefire. And then I sent Modi to the summit with Xi and Putin.
You’re like, oh, God, what is happening with him? And so like, is the Southpaw quality that good for negotiation? Or is it actually really good as the world hegemon to just have this incremental slow and steady predictability to it? Which of those do you actually want for creating a stable world order?
Erin Sikorsky: Oh, I mean, I would take the slow and steady and the predictability over, you know, whatever is happening out of the White House right now. You know, I think security guarantees only work if you have trust, for example. I think the terrorist politics in particular show you that capriciousness, I mean, the choice that countries will make is to move on without the United States. And that’ll take them a while. Right. They can’t do that overnight. But I think even if you get a new president who’s more reasonable in 2028, you know, whether Republican or Democrat, you’re not going to come back from this with with countries.
And I just think it we’re only hurting ourselves, frankly, at this point in the long run.
Ross Kenyon: That was my instinct too. Maybe if you’re a secondary power, maybe some amount of less predictability can be... I’m actually trying to think, like, is there any... Because these are all iterative games that we’re building on. So any amount of unpredictability probably just spooks future cooperation. Like, if you even feel like short-term you win, does it actually make you better off medium or long-term? I’m not even sure that it does.
Erin Sikorsky: Yeah, I mean, it depends, right? And I think it depends what you’re being unpredictable about. Right? You know, I think if they, yeah, I don’t know. But I don’t see any grand strategy behind what’s happening right now. I just see very personalist politics that are about enriching a few and not about trying to really keep America safe. Mm-hmm.
Ross Kenyon: Well, as an American, I’ve been very focused on America and Canada. You’re in the mix to you today on the podcast. Yeah, probably look more to Europe, too, because it isn’t only the U.S. obviously that’s looking at business. Militaries around the world are doing this, but they’re all doing it in different ways, which is a really cool part of the book. Like you catalog several countries and how they do things. Yeah, yeah. Calling on the UK and NATO to include climate spending as counting toward defense spending in their countries.
Like the NATO, like the percentage GDP.
Erin Sikorsky: Yeah, exactly. But for the 1.5% that can be built on resilience, basically making the case that to be resilient in today’s world, countries need to transition to clean energy because that creates more resilience and you’re not dependent on fossil fuels. And so I think there’s been... What I found in my book looking at the UK is this understanding that investments in clean energy can help build resilience and that the military, a very kind of almost technocratic approach within the military of looking to technology and innovation as a way to allow the military to keep doing what it’s doing, not change any of its strategy necessarily, but do it in a clean energy way.
So I think that’s interesting. And I think there are a lot of leaders there that are trying to work closely with defense industry as well as clean energy industry to try and bring all these pieces together. And I appreciate that they’ve mostly managed to navigate the... I mean, you had UK hosting COP under Boris Johnson. The Ministry of Defense there has been very forward-leaning. But I do think there are limitations to that approach as well, which I talk about in the book, because I think you’re not asking yourself the question, is climate change actually...
Changing or shifting what we should be doing as a military, right? Or are there other limits to our ability to adapt and manage these risks going forward? And there’s a really interesting scholar out of the UK. He’s at Loughborough University, a guy named Duncan DePledge, who’s doing work on what he calls net zero militaries. He speculates, and I think this is hard to see in the moment, but would we ever get to a point where militaries are making decisions or countries are making security decisions about even going to war based on their emissions profiles and what they can allow in terms of emissions?
I think we’re very far from that. I don’t see it as likely, but I think it’s interesting that’s being thought about, right? Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: That just sounds far from the bill to me. I can’t imagine a country prioritizing their security perceptions under the climate expenditure of that. It seems crazy.
Erin Sikorsky: Yeah. Yeah. No, I think it is hard to imagine. I think there are pieces of the puzzle, though, that he talks about in terms of training or in terms of thinking about how we conceptualize warfare on the battlefield and how countries might innovate using clean energy. I mean, we kind of laugh about the Ukrainians on electric bikes, but seriously, I mean, the innovation that you’ve seen in Ukraine is It hasn’t been heavy equipment, right? It’s been drones. It’s been all sorts of things that are not traditional military kit, if you will.
And so I think thinking about the role of clean energy in all of that is really interesting, frankly. And I think there are opportunities for militaries that push the envelope here to try and... To try and see what’s possible. And so I will say, I think you see some of that coming out of the UK. I think you also see interesting things coming out of New Zealand, which is another country I talk about in the book, much different country, obviously very small. That’s a very small military.
But from their perspective, climate is and disaster response is the core duty of their military. Right. That is what they make decisions about military investments based on the utility for doing rescues in the Pacific Islands. Right. Right. And they see protecting their neighbors and other Pacific Islands in the face of strengthened typhoons and storms, sea level rise, all of that as kind of core to their mission, which is how I distinguish, I mean, that’s how I distinguish countries like New Zealand, China, Kenya in the book as case studies from UK, France, the US to a certain extent, although the US is so big, it’s kind of a different kettle of fish.
But, you know, the countries that just want to keep doing what they’re doing, but do it with climate change in mind versus countries that are actually thinking about changing what they’re doing or revamping their conception of security overall in light of climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. Well, it’s not surprising that New Zealand is even able to do that. The United States used to be like that in pre-Jingoist era, where before we became an imperial power, global power, it was just sort of like, Why bother having a Navy? And even adding ships were like a big thing that people would fight about in Congress. That is just a thing of the past at this point. So they are lucky in that way. But maybe not. I think they’re in a position to help.
And I imagine there’s probably some amount of self-interest where having an entire atoll nation go underwater means that they’re going to be expected to take on many desperate people into a small country that I imagine the competition for resources in New Zealand is... Although I’ve heard there’s actually a lot of bad immigration stuff, problems out of New Zealand where people like they’ve recently loosened their immigration requirements because people will just come to New Zealand, get the like permanent resident visa and Australia where the wages are higher and like where the opportunity is greater.
Interesting. But those aren’t the same people that are trying to attract. They’re not trying to get, you know, if Tuvalu goes underwater or something like that, that’s a different problem than, hey, it would be nice to have Americans and Canadians coming here and bringing their fancy jobs and paying taxes here. That’s a different kind of problem or culture.
Erin Sikorsky: Yeah. Well, and I think also, you know, increasingly in the calculation for New Zealand, too, is competition with China and recognizing the risks that China can pose. And so they see their ability to help Their neighbors manage climate hazards as an investment in countering China as well and showing up for their neighbors in a way that then maybe limits China’s ability to influence in some of those countries. So I think that’s part of the calculation for them, too.
Ross Kenyon: One thing you said about the body in the UK that proposed this NATO spending for adaptation, that just seems... Perfectly designed, perfectly engineered to piss off a NATO skeptic like Donald Trump. That just seems like, I can’t think of something that would be more aggravating to American MAGA.
Erin Sikorsky: Yeah, I mean, look, I, you know, I was at the NATO summit in June and they, you know, deliberately made sure that climate was not on the agenda at that summit at all, which was very different from the past four or five summits where Secretary Stoltenberg, who in part because of his past history as a climate negotiator, right, and his recognition that is important to NATO, you know, talked about it a lot. And I understand why they did that. They were very laser focused on keeping Trump and the U.
S. in the alliance. But had there been a panel at the public forum where some amount of climate stuff was talked about, I can’t imagine that would have been the reason. You know, and I think I think what the argument that these folks in this letter make, which and they’re all retired security leaders. So there it’s like the retired security. Head of the Dutch Defense Forces and multiple generals and admirals from the UK and elsewhere. So they’re not, you know, they’re not they’re not lefty tree huggers or anything.
Their argument they’re making is... It’s not uncertainty as long as you buy our LNG. Yeah, yeah. But with this administration, even if you do buy the LNG, it doesn’t mean you’re not, you know, potentially in the crosshairs at some point for some other reason. So, which is where, back to our earlier conversation about the uncertainty, I think can really hurt you is if people can’t trust you. Anyway, but the point they make is the resilience, you know, part of resilience is investment in clean energy.
And so, and I think this is a little bit, I mean, look, all the countries pledge 5%. 3.5% is supposed to be real, no kidding, defense. 1.5% is resilience and everything else. That 1.5% has been spent 10 times over now by countries, right? They’re going to be counting things they have already done in that category. Right. And so part of the argument here is you should think about and count investments in clean energy as part of that 1.5 and you should keep making those investments because they make you more resilient as a country.
And I think that’s a strong defense argument. Yeah, I don’t know. The administration won’t like it, which is probably why NATO won’t make a big deal about it and do it. But I think it still makes a difference to have security actors making that case and reminding countries that You know, what it means to be resilient in the 21st century. And that means, you know, new thoughts about energy. And they’re not, you know, JP Morgan at Climate Week a few weeks ago released a big report about this as well.
And countries exploiting all of their diverse energy sources are the ones that are best positioned to succeed in this economy. And increasingly, that means solar and wind and geothermal and other things like that.
Ross Kenyon: Hmm. I used to be much more concerned about the future of NATO and how durable the agreement actually was, mostly because the personalism of Trump felt like... We could skip all the institutions. I could just call these leaders up. I can cut a deal with Putin. We could be out of here right away. I could just solve this. And then we’ve seen that not happen. And then as recently as this week, sanctioning, I think it’s actually today, sanctioning the Russian oil majors right now that I think it happened this morning in a way that has not yet been done.
And he’s publicly signaled dissatisfaction with Putin in ways that are new. And I’m wondering if My previous concerns about the durability of NATO were maybe overblown. And now we’re seeing maybe, okay, there’s a reason this exists. I’m not able to cut a deal. Maybe it is time to have some sort of multilateral kind of approach here. That might be too optimistic, but I’m catching like little green shoots on that. I don’t know if that’s true or not.
Erin Sikorsky: No, I hope so. I mean, I hope so. You know, we’ll see. But yeah, no, I mean, it’s a better place than we were maybe six months ago. Yeah. Do you think NATO is a durable institution? I think so. I mean, I think as long as European countries see benefit out of it, and I think now, frankly, even with, you know, Trump wobbly, I think Europeans think it’s more important than ever. I think, you know, Sweden and Finland joining, I think as long as the Russian threat there continues, it gives a purpose to the alliance that, you know, is important.
Ross Kenyon: What do you think is going to happen with the... I want to call it Sino-Soviet. I got to call it some other term now. That no longer is a term there. Sino-Russo relationship.
Erin Sikorsky: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, all sorts of good questions all over the place. I mean, I think, you know, it’s interesting. I think that relationship is a fraught one, right? They have competing interests that don’t naturally necessarily align. But in the face of... The United States and Trump in particular, I think that helps drive the two of them together. China has been very supportive, if not perfectly vocally, but about Russia and Ukraine, that sort of thing. But I think it’s risky. I mean, I think the Arctic, for example, is a place where if Russia had its druthers, China would not be operating in the Arctic, or at least they would only operate there under Russian government.
Control slash, you know, grace. But China has more money and more resources and Russia is really stretched. But I think it’s a relationship of, you know, political convenience more than shared. So it can be fragile. But at this point, I mean, I think they see benefit in continuing to work together.
Ross Kenyon: Much of what you wrote about the Chinese in the Arctic in your book caught my attention because I was trying to do the geography and the exclusive economic zone and be like, Where are they supposed to go exactly? How could China operate in the Arctic when it seems like the Arctic Council in those states, they already claim it all, as far as I can tell.
Erin Sikorsky: Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, I think part of it is China being a very long term and its view, right? I think also I’ve heard really interesting things about their engagement. I mean, they engage in Greenland also. I’ve heard... About, and don’t know the details, but about them engaging with Native communities in Canada as well, and trying to build some relationships there. I think this is where the cooperation with Russia is critical to them. And, you know, you’ve seen Russian and Chinese joint military groups.
Exercises. They also use commercial cover for military or security activities in the Arctic. But no, it’s not easy, right? And there’s nothing, I don’t think it’s inevitable that China is able to exploit that. I think it’s hard. But I think they also, you know, are thinking long term and planning for the future. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, sorry to be all over the place, but your book captured my- No, no, no, it’s fine. It’s fine. I like it. It’s a good conversation. Oh, I wanted to ask you as well about the French presence in Africa. There’s climate ramifications there, but it seems like, have the French ever been successful at post-colonial or counterterrorism missions? It seems like since Algeria and Indochina, they basically, they just don’t do it very well. Yeah, yeah. What’s going to happen in those places?
Erin Sikorsky: Well, I mean, in many cases, the French are no longer there, right? Like they’ve all been they’ve been kicked out. I mean, the United States, too. So but no, I think their approach, I mean, they’ve spent so much time focused on the Sahel and so much time focused on climate security in the Sahel and figuring out how to try and manage that. And it just really hasn’t hasn’t had a lot of a lot of success. And I think it’s, look, I’m not a regional expert, but, you know, like I talk about in the book, I think it’s, again, only thinking about climate and the climate security issues in the Sahel as things connected to what the French already wanted to do in the region, right?
Without thinking about how maybe their goals might have to shift because of how climate is affecting things in the region. Yeah. And, yeah, I mean, they’re out of the game there to a large extent compared to, you know, just a few years ago. So I think they haven’t succeeded. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: I wonder how much that presence there calms radicalism and calms some of those issues versus inflames it. Would this actually even be worth it, even if it worked?
Erin Sikorsky: Yeah, no, I mean, well, it depends. How do you define worked, right? Like, I think that was part of the challenge is like, what exactly is the goal? Is it just to make sure people aren’t migrating north to Europe? Is it to make sure the terrorist threat is managed? Is it to make sure that countries there are run democratically? I mean, you know, like, what is the end goal? And I’m not sure... I think I could ask you about these questions all day long, Erin.
Ross Kenyon: I’m so excited about your book. I hope you’ll keep writing more and more like this. I think it’s such an important topic. I think it’s fascinating and it’s totally under-reported on. At least in the mainstream climate, I think they’re a little too crunchy, I think, for some of this book. I love this. You can probably tell listening, I’m like, this guy’s a military history, kind of like diplomatic nerd. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I wish it was more common. So thanks for just helping to make this conversation more common.
Erin Sikorsky: Yeah, of course. Of course. I think it’s really important to cross the, you know, the silos as much as possible between climate and security and look for opportunities to both, you know, integrate in both places. So thanks for having me.
