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The Department of Defense Has Delivered
Another Massive Intelligence Failure
Chinese emissions represent at least as
great a threat to US security as the multitude of weapons enumerated
in the Pentagon’s 2022
report—so why was it not addressed?
The sky is red from the smoke of the Snowy Valley
bushfire in Australia on January 4, 2020. (Saeed
Khan / AFP, Getty Images)
EDITOR’S NOTE: This
article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com.
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Given the secrecy typically accorded to the
military and the inclination of government officials to
skew data to satisfy the preferences of those in power,
intelligence failures are anything but unusual in this country’s
security affairs. In 2003, for instance, President George W. Bush
invaded Iraq based on claims—later found to be baseless—that
its leader, Saddam Hussein, was developing or already possessed
weapons of mass destruction. Similarly, the instant collapse of the
Afghan government in August 2021, when the United States completed the
withdrawal of its forces from that country, came as a shock only
because of wildly
optimistic intelligence estimates of that
government’s strength. Now, the Department of Defense has delivered
another massive intelligence failure, this time on China’s future
threat to American security.
The Pentagon is required by law to
provide Congress and the public with an annual report on “military and
security developments involving the People’s Republic of China,” or
PRC, over the next 20 years. The 2022 version, 196
pages of detailed information published last
November 29, focused on its current and future military threat to the
United States. In two decades, so we’re assured, China’s military—the
People’s Liberation Army, or PLA—will be superbly equipped to counter
Washington should a conflict arise over Taiwan or navigation rights in
the South China Sea. But here’s the shocking thing: In those nearly
200 pages of analysis, there wasn’t a single word—not one—devoted to
China’s role in what will pose the most pressing threat to our
security in the years to come, runaway climate change.
At a time when California has just
been battered in
a singular fashion by punishing winds and massive rainstorms delivered
by a moisture-laden “atmospheric river” flowing over large parts of
the state while much of the rest of the country has suffered from
severe, often lethal floods, tornadoes, or snowstorms, it should be
self-evident that climate change constitutes a vital threat to our
security. But those storms, along with the rapacious wildfires and
relentless heat waves experienced in recent summers—not to speak of a 1,200-year
record megadrought in the
Southwest—represent a mere
prelude to what we can expect in the decades
to come. By 2042, the nightly news—already saturated with
storm-related disasters—could be devoted almost exclusively to such
events.
All true, you might say, but what does China have
to do with any of this? Why should climate change be included in a
Department of Defense report on security developments in relation to
the People’s Republic?
There are three reasons why it
should not only have been included but given extensive coverage.
First, China is now and will remain the world’s leading emitter of
climate-altering carbon emissions, with the United States—though historically the
greatest emitter—staying in second place. So any effort to slow the
pace of global warming and truly enhance this country’s “security”
must involve a strong drive by Beijing to reduce its emissions as well
as cooperation in energy decarbonization between the two greatest
emitters on this planet. Second, China itself will be subjected to
extreme climate-change harm in the years to come, which will severely
limit the PRC’s ability to carry out ambitious military plans of the
sort described in the 2022 Pentagon report. Finally, by 2042, count on
one thing: The American and Chinese armed forces will be devoting most
of their resources and attention to disaster relief and recovery,
diminishing both their motives and their capacity to go to war with
one another.
CHINA’S OUTSIZED ROLE IN THE
CLIMATE-CHANGE EQUATION
Global warming, scientists tell
us, is caused by the accumulation of “anthropogenic” (human-produced)
greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere that trap the reflected
light from the sun’s radiation. Most
of those GHGs are carbon and methane emitted
during the production and combustion of fossil fuels (oil, coal, and
natural gas); additional GHGs are released through agricultural and
industrial processes, especially steel and cement production. To
prevent global warming from exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius above the
preindustrial era—the largest increase scientists believe the planet
can absorb without catastrophic outcomes—such emissions will have to
be sharply
reduced.
Historically speaking, the United States and the European Union (EU)
countries have been the largest GHG emitters, have
diminished in
recent years and are expected to decline further in the decades to
come (though they will need to do yet more to keep us below that
1.5-degree warming limit).
China, a relative latecomer to the
industrial era, is historically responsible for “only” 13 percent of
cumulative global CO2 emissions.
However, in its drive to accelerate its economic growth in recent
decades, it has vastly increased its reliance on coal to generate
electricity, resulting in ever-greater CO2 emissions.
China now accounts for an astonishing
56 percent of total world coal consumption,
which, in turn, largely explains its current dominance among the major
carbon emitters. According to the 2022 edition of the International
Energy Agency’s World
Energy Outlook, the PRC was responsible for
33 percent of global CO2 emissions
in 2021, compared with 15 percent from the US and 11 percent from the
EU.
Like most other countries, China
has pledged to
abide by the Paris
Climate Agreement of 2015 and undertake the
decarbonization of its economy as part of a worldwide drive to keep
global warming within some bounds. As part of that agreement, however,
China identified
itself as a “developing” country with the
option of increasing its fossil-fuel use for 15 years or so before
achieving a peak in CO2 emissions
in 2030. Barring some surprising set of developments, then, the PRC will
undoubtedly remain the world’s leading
source of CO2 emissions
for years to come, suffusing the atmosphere with colossal amounts of
carbon dioxide and undergirding a continuing rise in global
temperatures.
Yes, the United States, Japan, and
the EU countries should indeed do more to reduce their emissions, but
they’re already on a downward trajectory and an even more rapid
decline will not be enough to offset China’s colossal CO2 output.
Put differently, those Chinese emissions—estimated by the IEA at 12
billion metric tons annually—represent at least as great a threat to
US security as the multitude of tanks, planes, ships, and missiles
enumerated in the Pentagon’s 2022 report on security developments in
the PRC. That means they will require the close attention of American
policy-makers if we are to escape the most severe impacts of climate
change.
CHINA’S VULNERABILITY TO CLIMATE CHANGE
Along with detailed information on China’s
outsize contribution to the greenhouse effect, any thorough report on
security developments involving the PRC should have included an
assessment of that country’s vulnerability to climate change. It
should have laid out just how global warming might, in the future,
affect its ability to marshal resources for a demanding, high-cost
military competition with the United States.
In the coming decades, like the
United States and other continental-scale countries, China will suffer
severely from the multiple impacts of rising world temperatures,
including extreme storm damage, prolonged droughts and heat waves,
catastrophic flooding, and rising seas. Worse yet, the PRC has several
distinctive features that will leave it especially vulnerable to
global warming, including a heavily populated Eastern Seaboard exposed
to rising sea levels and increasingly
powerful typhoons; a vast interior, parts of which, already
significantly dry, will be prone to full-scale desertification;
and a vital river system that relies on unpredictable rainfall and increasingly
imperiled glacial runoff. As warming
advances and China experiences an ever-increasing climate assault, its
social, economic, and political institutions, including the ruling
Chinese Communist Party (CCP), will be severely tested.
According to a recent study from
the Center for Climate and Security, “China’s
Climate Security Vulnerabilities,” the
threats to its vital institutions will take two major forms: hits to
its critical infrastructure like port facilities, military bases,
transportation hubs, and low-lying urban centers along China’s heavily
populated coastline; and the danger of growing internal instability
arising from ever-increasing economic dislocation, food scarcity, and
governmental incapacitation.
China’s coastline already suffers heavy flooding
during severe storms and significant parts of it could be entirely
underwater by the second half of this century, requiring the possible
relocation of hundreds of millions of people and the reconstruction of
billions of dollars’ worth of vital facilities. Such tasks will surely
require the full attention of Chinese authorities as well as the
extensive homebound commitment of military resources, leaving little
capacity for foreign adventures. Why, you might wonder, is there not a
single sentence about this in the Pentagon’s assessment of future
Chinese capabilities?
Even more worrisome, from Beijing’s perspective,
is the possible effect of climate change on the country’s internal
stability. “Climate change impacts are likely to threaten China’s
economic growth, its food and water security, and its efforts at
poverty eradication,” the climate center’s study suggests (but the
Pentagon report doesn’t mention). Such developments will, in turn,
“likely increase the country’s vulnerability to political instability,
as climate change undermines the government’s ability to meet its
citizens’ demands.”
Of particular concern, the report suggests, is
global warming’s dire threat to food security. China, it notes, must
feed approximately 20 percent of the world’s population while
occupying only 12 percent of its arable land, much of which is
vulnerable to drought, flooding, extreme heat, and other disastrous
climate impacts. As food and water supplies dwindle, Beijing could
face popular unrest, even revolt, in food-scarce areas of the country,
especially if the government fails to respond adequately. This, no
doubt, will compel the CCP to deploy its armed forces nationwide to
maintain order, leaving ever fewer of them available for other
military purposes—another possibility absent from the Pentagon’s
assessment.
Of course, in the years to come, the United
States, too, will feel the ever more severe impacts of climate change
and may itself no longer be in a position to fight wars in distant
lands—a consideration also completely absent from the Pentagon report.
THE PROSPECTS FOR CLIMATE COOPERATION
Along with gauging China’s
military capabilities, that annual report is required by law to
consider “United States-China engagement and cooperation on security
matter…sincluding through United States-China military-to-military
contacts.” And indeed, the 2022 version does note that Washington
interprets such “engagement” as involving joint efforts to avert
accidental or inadvertent conflict by participating in high-level
Pentagon-PLA crisis-management arrangements, including what’s known as
the Crisis Communications Working Group. “Recurring exchanges [like
these],” the report affirms,
“serve as regularized mechanisms for dialogue to advance priorities
related to crisis prevention and management.”
Any effort aimed at preventing conflict between
the two countries is certainly a worthy endeavor. But the report also
assumes that such military friction is now inevitable and the most
that can be hoped for is to prevent World War III from being ignited.
However, given all we’ve already learned about the climate threat to
both China and the United States, isn’t it time to move beyond mere
conflict avoidance to more collaborative efforts, military and
otherwise, aimed at reducing our mutual climate vulnerabilities?
At the moment, sadly enough, such
relations sound far-fetched indeed. But it shouldn’t be so. After all,
the Department of Defense has already designated climate change a
vital threat to national security and has indeed called for
cooperative efforts between American forces and those of other
countries in overcoming climate-related dangers. “We will elevate
climate as a national security priority,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd
Austin declared in
March 2021, “integrating climate considerations into the Department’s
policies, strategies, and partner engagements.”
The Pentagon provided further
information on such “partner engagements” in a 2021 report on the
military’s vulnerabilities to climate change. “There are many ways for
the Department to integrate climate considerations into international
partner engagements,” that report affirmed,
“including supporting interagency diplomacy and development
initiatives in partner nations [and] sharing best practices.” One such
effort, it noted, is the Pacific Environmental Security Partnership, a
network of climate specialists from that region who meet annually at
the Pentagon-sponsored Pacific Environmental Security Forum.
At present, China is not among the nations
involved in that or other Pentagon-sponsored climate initiatives. Yet,
as both countries experience increasingly severe impacts from rising
global temperatures and their militaries are forced to devote ever
more time and resources to disaster relief, information-sharing on
climate-response “best practices” will make so much more sense than
girding for war over Taiwan or small uninhabited islands in the East
and South China Seas (some of which will be completely underwater by
century’s end). Indeed, the Pentagon and the PLA are more alike in
facing the climate challenge than most of the world’s military forces
and so it should be in both countries’ mutual interests to promote
cooperation in the ultimate critical area for any country in this era
of ours.
Consider it a form of 21st-century
madness, then, that a Pentagon report on the United States and China
can’t even conceive of such a possibility. Given China’s increasingly
significant role in world affairs, Congress should require an annual
Pentagon report on all relevant
military and security developments involving the PRC. Count on one
thing: In the future, one devoted exclusively to analyzing what still
passes for “military” developments and lacking any discussion of
climate change will seem like an all-too-grim joke. The world deserves
better going forward if we are to survive the coming climate
onslaught.
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