Storming the Wall. Todd Miller
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he knew of not one top general, with access to the White House or Secretary of Defense who did not understand the climate situation, though he did admit that maybe there was somebody out there.
So it should be no surprise that then-commander John Kelly’s Southern Command was in charge of the simulation “Integrated Advance,” especially with so many future environmental projections of mass migrations from the Caribbean. In 2015, some of the more than 500 members of the Joint Task Force of military and Homeland Security agents disguised themselves as people attempting to breach U.S. borders and boarded rickety boats going north. From a distance, the boats rocking on the waves almost seemed authentic, with only the orange life jackets giving them away. Soldiers also played the role of journalists and media outlets that peppered command with questions, including challenging and critical ones. They practiced setting up positions in Guantánamo Bay where camouflaged soldiers sat behind laptops and looked at live feeds to strategize in real time.
“A migrant operation is one of our most likely missions at Army South so we have to be prepared,”41 said Major General Joseph P. DiSalvo. Using cameras from the private company FLIR (who has been given, over the years, extensive contracts with Customs and Border Protection) the same rocking, rickety boats showed up on the screens in the fake command post. Large, red-striped Coast Guard cutters patrolled the area, dwarfing the simulated boats moving north. “The main purpose of the exercise is to develop working relationships among different U.S agencies and departments to deter illegal mass migration.”42
Even though President Obama said the words “climate change refugee,” there was no legal framework, either in the United States, or internationally, that would give refugee status to a person fleeing a climate-induced event. The Coast Guard was subordinate to the Department of Homeland Security and its tripartite war on terrorists, drug traffickers, and immigrants.
Under the current U.S. border militarization regime, which will clearly be ramped up with the Trump administration, migrants are occasionally rescued and perhaps even given bits of humanitarian assistance, but these efforts are secondary to, and always followed by, interdiction, arrest, incarceration, and deportation.
CLIMATE ADAPTATION FOR THE RICH AND POWERFUL
South Carolina Congressman Jeff Duncan is getting frustrated. Three U.S. Homeland Security officials sit before him with stoic faces. They have been testifying for close to an hour in a hearing titled “Examining DHS’s Misplaced Focus on Climate Change.”43 The South Carolina congressman scrutinizes the bureaucrats as if he can’t believe he’s sitting in the room dealing with this shit. This happens only weeks after 21-year-old Dylann Roof entered the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Duncan’s state of South Carolina and killed nine people during a prayer service with the intent to incite a “race war.” But he doesn’t mention this.
Duncan, who wears a pressed white shirt with a light purple tie, looks at the DHS men intently. “Can you guys tell me why the Earth was warmer during the medieval times?”44
The Homeland Security men shuffle in their seats uncomfortably. Behind them is the audience at the hearing. In front are the members of the committee. The pause is awkward. Deputy Assistant Robert Kolasky, from the Office of Infrastructure Protection, finally makes a gesture that he’ll take a stab at it. When Kolasky gave his testimony earlier, he could’ve been renowned climate journalist Naomi Klein when he quoted the 2014 U.S. Global Change Research Program’s Third National Climate Assessment, which reported that the United States “will experience an increase in frequency and intensity of hurricanes, massive flooding, excessively high temperatures, wildfires, severe downpours, severe droughts, storm surge, sea-level rise throughout the 21st century.”45
Kolasky also told the committee that “extreme weather strains our resources, serves as a threat multiplier that aggravates stressors both at home and destabilizes the lifeline sectors on which we rely. Higher temperatures and more intense storms can cause damage or disruptions that result in cascading effects across our communities.”46 In other words, following the lead of the world’s most respected climate scientists, the Department 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