On Wednesday, Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., was named the new chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, taking up the role held by John McCain who was laid to rest last week. As senators, Inhofe and McCain were both hawkish, but they diverged on many key issues — perhaps most importantly on climate change. Although a warming planet may seem removed from the work of the SASC, it’s not. And Inhofe’s climate change denials won’t help prepare the American military for the future.
The planet is definitely warming, and the military has a lot to lose if it ignores the issue, including infrastructure, supply chains and plans for training and operations.
In 2014, the Department of Defense released its Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap. That same year, Inhofe infamously tossed around a snowball on the Senate floor saying, “In case we have forgotten, because we keep hearing that 2014 has been the warmest year on record, I ask the chair: You know what this is? It’s a snowball, that’s just from outside here. So it’s very, very cold out. Very unseasonable.”
That DoD document outlined the threats of climate change and its implications for the U.S. military. It got right to the point, explaining in the second paragraph: “Among the future trends that will impact our national security is climate change. Rising global temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, climbing sea levels, and more extreme weather events will intensify the challenges of global instability, hunger, poverty, and conflict. They will likely lead to food and water shortages, pandemic disease, disputes over refugees and resources, and destruction by natural disasters in regions across the globe.”
In 2017, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis explained in written testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee during his confirmation hearings that “the effects of a changing climate — such as increased maritime access to the Arctic, rising sea levels, desertification, among others — impact our security situation.” Since then, he has moved forward with the 2014 plan despite an executive order from Trump to rescind all climate-related federal agency actions.
For the military, pretending that climate change isn’t happening isn’t an option.
Inhofe also wrote a whole book arguing that climate change is a conspiracy theory: The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future. He isn’t likely to decide that climate change is real now that he has a new title.
In fact, he’d rather wait until it stops snowing for good in Washington. The military, for its part, isn’t waiting around for that to happen, even if they’d be better off with a chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee who actually believed the climate was changing.
