 Paul's a comf. He's the commandant of the Coast Guard retired. He's an admiral. Four stars sitting right here with me now. Welcome to the show, Admiral. Hey, Jay, it's great to be here. It's obviously great to be here in the Aloha state as well, which I'm proud to call my home. That's great. You know, it's fabulous that senior officers like yourself choose Hawaii. I guess it's because you had good times out here. You do. And I noticed whenever I was on travel, when I was stationed in D.C., as soon as I landed at Honolulu Airport, my pulse rate went down, my blood pressure went down, and I was breathing through my nostrils and not hyperventilating through my mouth. So, you know, I meant, you know, the Admiral spoke about climate change and national security and world order. The fabulous speech at the Paul Chung Memorial Lecture in the Hawaii Prince Hotel, annual lecture, and he was the lecturer this time. And we took that. In fact, we made a cable movie and we have second part of that cable movie coming up. But you know, there was one question that I'm not sure that everybody in the room would have asked you. I'm a former Coast Guard, so I can ask you, what was it like being commandant? How did you spend your time? How did you see the world through the lens, through the eyes of a commandant? It's a very unique and maybe, in a way, lonely position. Well, it's only lonely if you never get off your high horse. So the first thing is get off your high horse and listen to those around you. And importantly, listen to what I would call the contrarians who have a differing view on world order. So I would sit with the Joint Chiefs and we would put together a national military strategy. And within that, focusing on areas like China, Russia, Iran, island extremism, North Korea, did we leave something out? And the answer is yes, we did. Even in the Department of Homeland Security, we're looking at a flood of migrants leaving their home country. And thinking we can seal off our border, but what are we doing about the root cause of why are they leaving? So my approach to the world, it always begins with why. And then what solutions do we have to go after the why aspect? And one of those is we have a world that is changing around us. It's agnostic to any border and it's a changing climate. Not just from what I read, but I actually made it a point to actually go up to the Jakobsavn Glacier. It's up on the northeast coast of Greenland. I took an independent senator and people can probably figure out who that independent was. But we wanted to see firsthand what is happening up there. And when we flew over the ice fields of Greenland, what we saw were moulins. These are huge sinkholes with volumes of water flowing down lubricating the ice field that's then washing into the ocean. We went up to Jakobsavn Glacier and it has retreated over 25 miles in the last five years. That is light speed for a glacier. And then we sat down and we met with the Inuit elders and we asked them, what are we witnessing here today? So we have two words, climate change. They didn't have an agenda, but what they do see is their way of life has changed dramatically just in the last five years. Oh, and at the same time, we have China has now taken a keen interest in Greenland because as these ice fields are melting, they're exposing raw earth and rare earth metals that China has taken a keen interest in as well. So we see China, even though they're not an Arctic nation, they're seeing opportunities right for exploitation as sea ice. Of course, God's different than the other armed forces. I mean, first of all, the history, the culture is to save lives. That's the primary thing. But the mission has grown leaps and bounds in the past 20, 30 years. It's remarkable when nobody else wants to do it, the Coast Guard will do it. Well, we have a number of unique authorities that allow us to do it. Probably the largest one is under 14 USC 89, which allows the Coast Guard, the only military service that can conduct law enforcement operation. On any given day, we have Coast Guard service members on Navy ships. And if that Navy ship encounters illegal activity, our Coast Guard boarding teams, our law enforcement attachments, can conduct that law enforcement operation. But during the phase of that operation, the Navy ships flag from working for the Navy to working for the United States Coast Guard. But it really is, it's a symbiotic relationship. Yeah. As we look at the threats to maritime security, it's not black and white like it was during World War II. It's gray. And some of those gray areas work best with gray hulls and Coast Guard law enforcement teams working together. How did you, how did you, you know, in your career, you graduated the Academy in, what, 1977, was it? Back in the day of slide rules and before... You're an engineer, of course. Everybody graduates the Academy as an engineer, right? Well, hopefully they graduate. That was job one. And then off to the fleet you go. So, you know, it's a way of looking at things. It's a kind of world view that Coast Guard officers have and certainly senior Coast Guard officers have. And when you wake up in the morning, it's not simple. When you wake up in the morning, you can get message traffic about anything from anywhere in the world. You know, and here you are relatively in my observation, modest, mellow sort of fellow. How can you deal with all of these risks and possibilities, all the choices, all the options? It seems overwhelming to me. Well, when we had a change in administration in 2016, I sat down with my senior leadership team, is that we need to prepare ourselves for not one, but two near simultaneous hurricanes. Category three or higher, catastrophic. They said, well, why would you want to wish that upon yourself? I said, no, we want to be ready for that. So when we saw, we got three. You know, I asked for two and I got a bonus in Hurricane Maria, but we had Harvey, Irma, Maria, one right after the other, a conveyor belt of hurricanes. But it's not so much the response. It's the political fallout that the response is being viewed as less than robust. So I don't have to ask permission to start pulling people, planes, helicopters, moving ships around from all corners of the United States to have them on full alert as a hurricane is getting ready to pass. So many scraps are ahead. How is it that the Coast Guard was already here? We had 95 helicopters in the greater Houston area as Harvey just hovered over that area. And the first thing people saw were Coast Guard helicopters. The winds were such that we could still operate, but it allows us to do that. At the end of the day, I received a nice tweet from the White House that said, no brand has gone up like the Coast Guards, way up. I didn't know my brand was suffering, but I will take that tweet any day of the week. But at the same time, you recognize that as the response goes, so go the view of our constituents, of our government has either supported us or they have failed us. And failure was not an option. Beautiful service. I enjoyed every moment I was in it. And I still think so highly and kindly of it. And the people I meet. All the people are awesome. The people are great. I love them all. Anyway, so can we talk about your slides? Because these are some of the slides you referred to in your talk at the Paul Chung Memorial Lecture. So let's go through them and give us a praisey on what they tell us. Well, a couple of years ago, I read a book about rising tides. The author's name is John Englender. And we've actually become pretty good friends over the years. Another guy named Bob Carell. They've been studying climate for their entire lives. Bob Carell is in his 80s. And they came with me when we went up to Greenland. And they gave a presentation to our Danish host. As you know, Greenland comes under the Kingdom of Denmark. And they showed what carbon dioxide has done. As long as we've been doing carbon dating on carbon dioxide, pre-industrial revolution to modern day. And so what we have seen is carbon dioxide has gone vertical. So our concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere today is at the highest point it's been in hundreds, thousands of years. It's not going to come down of its own, either. And so if you look at that, the metabolic rate of carbon dioxide takes about 100 years, a century, for this to go down. So absent some new intervention that would actually deplete carbon dioxide, the level that we have today will be with us in the year 21-20. And if we continue to saturate the atmosphere with more carbon dioxide, well, we have a problem. And the thing is that we don't know all the implications of that. We're going to find out, maybe the hard way, exactly all the things that this one phenomenon is going to change around us. Some of those things will be lethal. Some of those things will affect the population of the planet. People will not be able to survive some of those things. So the sinkhole, if you will, for carbon dioxide over all these years has been the ocean. It's also been the equalizer in terms of global temperature. Well, now we're seeing the ocean heating up. We're seeing the ocean become more acidic. We've seen most of the Great Barrier Reef. Over 90% of it was exposed to coral bleaching as the ocean continues to warm. We're seeing that here in the Hawaiian Islands as well. So a warming ocean, as water warms, it expands. Sea level goes up. As the ocean warms, it melts ice. Ice melts. Sea level rises as well. So it has multiple effects. And at the same time, we have a warming Arctic. And for the longest period, a cold Arctic almost acts as an impermeable barrier for the jet stream, that cold air to stay north in the Arctic domain. Well, now it meanders. And it's given rise to terms like polar vortex. And so when we have a freeze happen in the lower 48 states, the first reaction is, well, there's no such thing as climate change. It was 112 degrees in Paris, France, this past July. On July 6th, I believe it was. Paris, much of it does not have air conditioning. There you had warm air from Saudi Arabia in south, migrating now into Europe. Record warm temperature. It was 90 degrees in Greenland. 12 billion tons of ice melted in one day. And that can be measured with technology we have with NOAA. It's not going to be re-frozen either. And it's not going to freeze. And up in the Arctic, a lot of that ice melts. And when it melts, it doesn't reflect the heat. It absorbs it. So we have a warming Arctic. And so it's really having an impact. And so what happens when you have warmer water and a rising sea level? Well, the tropics are the first to be affected. I have a picture in Kiribati of a village that is inundated. Let's look at that. Not by a hurricane. Is this the one? By king tides. Miami has a similar phenomenon. At least they have pumps where they're trying to pump water out as quick as it's coming in. You have a rising sea level. And with that, if you throw a storm surge on top of that, we have a problem. You have a warmer ocean, which then generates more heat. Atmosphere absorbs more water. We had Hurricane Harvey dumped over nearly four feet of rain back in 2017. I believe we have a picture of Houston. And here we would say, Houston, we have a problem. Houston, we have a problem. And certainly 7 million people in the greater metropolitan area, and most of these are not flood-prone areas. So you start looking at our disaster relief fund. And we don't have, a lot of these places are not insured. So it places another burden on our already growing deficit budget that we have going on as well. At the first analysis, it's money. But query, big question, because you're studying this all the time and you've thought about it for a long time. What do you use the money for ideally? Do you use the money for building roads further inland? Do you use the money for containing flood areas? Do you use the money? What do you use it for ideally? Well, right now we're almost in denial that this is happening. We can continue to see coastal communities, continue to become more congested, more people moving towards the coast. And it's, you know, pay no attention to that ocean out there. If it's going to rise, maybe not in your lifetime, but it's just a question of the time. So already, it's almost counterintuitive that we are investing in coastal development at a point in time where we acknowledge that, you know, this is not going to be sustainable over time. So look at what we're already spending money on, and there's not a lot of infrastructure development. I went up to the Zooter Zee. And back in the early 50s, in Holland, over 5,000 people were washed off the face of the earth. Killed. And they were killed in a storm off the North Sea. It's below sea level. So they are in the process of building their dyke system up another three to four meters. They're already taking a rising sea level into account. So, you know, it doesn't end up like New Orleans did when Katrina devastated the ninth ward of Louisiana. Ironically, I was living in New Orleans back in the early 80s, and we did modeling on hurricanes. And it was no big surprise that the levee system would not stand up to a hurricane like Katrina. And it wasn't until after the fact that we finally put money into the levee systems. They shut down the Mississippi River Gulf outlet, and they created a dyke system with engineers, consultants, from Holland, and to prevent another crisis like that. So if you use that as an example, it's almost after the fact, and we're not doing enough proactively to get out in front of this. So I see that as a challenge. Our locks, our dams, our coastal communities, where we have airports today may not be sustainable airports. Or a reef runway would be inundated. No, a runway. Exactly. Where we have water treatment systems, not just here in Hawaii, but in many coastal areas, you don't have to go too far from a waterway, and there you will find a waste treatment facility. What does that do to water quality? These are infrastructure investments. If we're going to be resilient, we can't wait until I told you so, and then come back and try to fix it afterwards. Wait that long, then people will not survive the problem. Gee, I mean, this is... I don't think people, as you said, are really aware. You have to be a captain at sea. You have to stand at the bridge and look over to the horizon or the ocean, and then you realize over time, which I'm sure you did, that it's actually very small and very fragile and tender and vulnerable. And if you don't have that experience in your inland or you make assumptions about how it will always be the way it is, then you're taking a big risk. And the problem is that this will affect the economy. If we do it at all, much less right, and in affecting the economy, we have another Sophie's choice in our hands. What are you going to do? Are you going to preserve the economy? We're in a time when everything must change, don't you think? It does. So, first of all, I have a picture of a village up in Shishmareff. I think we have a picture of that as well. Let's look at that. It's a home that's been... So, Senator Dan Sullivan and I paid a visit to the village of Shishmareff. It is one of 31 villages in Alaska that is a great peril due to coastal erosion. Not so much sea level rise, but coastal erosion because the sea ice has gone away. The sea ice has been like our coral reefs. It's a natural barrier to suppress wave action so it doesn't scour shorelines. Well, they don't have that anymore in Alaska. So, now you have 31 First Nations. These are native Alaskans, First Nations on their own right that will need to re-establish sovereignty if they have to leave these domiciles, these villages. So, there's an economic impact of... and a policy impact of where do we re-establish sovereignty for these communities that are affected. Mankind has been on the move for millennia. In search of food and water. And so, I have one slide and most people probably... Ogallala aquifer doesn't roll off everyone's tongue. Why is it common in the Coast Guard paying attention to the Ogallala aquifer? Isn't that interesting? You wouldn't think, would you? But if you look up in the Great Plains, that is the grain belt almost for the globe when you look at the amount of grain that the United States, the bread basket of the United States create a growing global population. That aquifer is being depleted faster than it's being replenished. What happens when we lose the aquifer? What happens to our ability to provide global food security? Can we be self-sustaining? But what are the impacts in other parts of the globe? It's going to be a driver for migration. When you look back to the Syrian crisis, a severe drought, the farmers moved into the city. They couldn't find work. They had a very non-existent governance system. And we have a lot of fragile institutions across the globe right now where governance is not in place. Which gave rise to the whole Arab Spring and how you look at how is it that Russia and the United States have been drawn into the sinkhole of Syria? How did we get here in the first place? There's a climate component to that. Sub-Saharan Africa, over 300 million people today do not have access to clean water. So another driver, if you will, for migration. So where do they go? Do they go to Libya? There's no government there. I think they can take to a boat and land in the European Union where they're growing weary of more guests living within their country. But as we've seen over the thousands of years, people will move when food and water become scarce. And I look at my crystal ball, there's going to be a movement of people. And then how do we accommodate that? We're already seeing that in some of these islands as well. Which are being inundated. Being inundated. You have a slide about that. And that was the one that we saw. That was the village in Kiribati in the Marshall Islands just during a severe high tide. But when you have that much seawater it contaminates their only access to fresh water as well. So again, move water, move. So it's interesting, people have speculated that the next war would be about water. And maybe that's so. But water is already having a tremendous effect on the planet, on these migrations. And the migrations are really discombobulating our entire planetary global society. And hence, you know, when you titled your talk Climate Change, National Security, we should spend more time with that. And World Order. I think climate change is affecting World Order and will continue to affect World Order increasingly as it gets worse. How does it affect national security? Well, when you look at, you know, more frequent, more severe natural disasters. You know, the fact that the Air Force had over five billion dollars in damage. You know, down in, you know, the first air, second Air Force down in Panama City. Hampton Roads, Virginia. You've got a combination of rising sea level and land subsidence. So our bases are now vulnerable to climate change. And we don't have the flexibility to say, well, where else would you reestablish the largest naval base in the world if a rising sea level lands subsidence, overtakes Hampton Roads, Virginia? So that's one of the immediate impacts. But then when we have these natural disasters, I was involved very intimately with Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria. And during Irma and Maria that devastated the U.S. Virgin Islands, British Virgin Islands, the Navy was there in huge numbers. Our Marine Corps was there in huge numbers. Now, they had other missions to do, but they were diverted to deal with these natural disasters. And oh, by the way, some of the bases where they operate out of suffered, you know, extreme damage. So, you know, we have that impact on national security. The burden it's going to place on our federal budget is as we start looking at, you know, year after year more frequent natural disasters, emergency declarations, the Stafford Act, you know, how do we fund the response and more importantly, the recovery from these devastating natural disasters that comes at a cost. And it comes out of our non-discretionary appropriation. The largest non-discretionary appropriation goes to the Department of Defense. So, who are going to be the donors as we look at more frequent, more severe disasters, or do we reset the threshold and say, you know, you no longer get five-star quality recovery funding access? We're going to have to lower the bar. That becomes very politically non-viable. And it comes in other flavors. So, you know, we had the campfire last year. The picture in, this is the campfire. How many people killed? Billions of dollars. And here we have people moving into these woodlands that were parks at one point in time, but very vulnerable. So, water has been distributed unequally. Too much of it in Houston, not enough in California. And then we have a severe drought, and then you have these wildfires. And that comes at a great cost. And it'll happen again and again. So, it's real-world military readiness, but at the same time it's fiscal readiness. And then how do we, how do we appropriate to the needs of the nation when this is becoming a bigger wedge on that fiscal pie? Yeah, so you have to prepare, make yourself less vulnerable. You have to be resilient and recover after the extreme weather or whatever it may be. And then somewhere in there you have to do infrastructure that will remake your entire economy and your society. So, to deal with the new times. This is pretty demanding and it will change our lives. Those of us who survive. You know, I wonder, you've made a conscious choice after you, you know, got out of Washington, which was only, what, a year ago. And to stay here in Hawaii, do you ever think about how Hawaii might be affected by extreme weather? How it might be affected by, you know, the ravages of climate change? Well, one reason I'm delighted to live here in the Aloha State, Hawaii was the first state to put its cards on the table and said by 2040-45 that we will be net zero carbon state. And other states are now starting to follow Hawaii's lead. So we can sit and wait and wait for policy to come down from Washington D.C. or we do something about it now and start incentivizing policies that would make us, you know, net zero carbon. So why leading the way? That's probably your reason for being here. Yeah, and just the whole Aloha spirit. But the whole irony behind climate change are the three largest emitters, if you will, are India, China and the United States. The losers, the most adversely impacted countries when you look at climate change are many third world countries with very fragile economies. So even though they didn't contribute, they are suffering more than most other nations. So when you start looking at climate change, you know, is there an opportunity for a multilateral approach? Now we had one with the Paris Accord. We have since walked away from that. But this rises all boats, not just in the United States, not just, you know, within NATO. But is there a model out there where we can collectively come to closure and one, acknowledge the fact that climate change is not a conspiracy theory. It's not a political agenda. It's reality. Let's acknowledge reality. The data, the science that goes behind it. These scientists don't have an agenda. You know, years and years of analytics have gone into the world as we see it today. And the more difficult part is, well, what's going to look like tomorrow? And how far tomorrow? When you start talking about rise of sea level by 2100, it's like, yeah, it's not going to affect me. It's certainly going to affect your great, great grandchildren. And they'll look back to 2019 and say, did they not see this coming? They had all this information and they turned their back on it. Bad enough that we're leaving this generation with the largest debt we've ever had in our history and we're going to leave it to them and bail us out as we have folks my age that are getting ready to time out and become a, I would call us a burden to society, but an aging population has greater needs when you start looking at mental care and social security and some of these other programs that are out there right now. Is it going to be sustainable? So something is going to have to change. Well, I really enjoyed Greta Thunberg in her, what is it, how dare you, speech. But the one thing, and we're going to close with this, the one thing that I thought was interesting is when she made that speech so powerful, it was emotionally charged to the nth degree, they're plauded. And I thought that really, it would have been more powerful yet if they hadn't deplored it, if they just sat there in silence, sucking it in, realizing how deadly serious she was. She and her generation, on the very point you mentioned. So I leave you with one question, Admiral. I think we agree that we're not doing enough. We're not doing enough. What do we do? Where do we start? What foot do we put out first? I say we, I mean the world. Well, when I talk to members of Congress and so look at climate change, the nation has opened up in the Arctic. What are we doing about it? Well, we've written lots of papers. We've written strategies and you say, where would you spend the next dollar? Well, China's already spent the next dollar. They're building a fleet of icebreakers. The second one is about to go into the water right now. We have a picture. We have a picture of China. That one. It runs through the Arctic. And so China's looking at the fact that this circumvents the transit time between the Asian and European markets if the Arctic becomes ice-free. It comes an opportunity for them. There are vast oil, gas, rare earth metal riches on the sea floor and below. China is up there. We have an area about twice the size of the state of California that the Coast Guard has actually mapped, but we can't lay claim to it because we have not ratified the Law of the Sea Convention. So where does China do research? It's in this extended continental shelf of the United States. So by the time we do claim it, it'll be just like their nine-dash line and say, it's always been ours. So when you start looking at about 13% of the world's oil, about a third of the world's gas, a trillion dollars worth of rare earth metals on the sea floor. At some point in time, we'll be right for exploitation. Russia, on the other hand, has taken another view of the Arctic. They've just delivered their first ice-breaking combatant. I've got a picture of that as well. A military ship. With weapons. That can launch cruise missiles conventional with a range of 2,800 miles. That can range almost every piece of critical infrastructure in the United States. In the United States. From the Arctic. So at the same time, the most viable transit route in the Arctic is the Northern Sea Route. And Russia has a Northern Sea Route administration, and they made a statement that no military ship, meaning the United States, will be allowed to transit the Northern Sea Route unless they provide Russia with 45 days' advance notice. And oh, by the way, we want to know all about the captain, the ship's particulars, and where it's going. And there's no assurance that if we were to do such notification protocols, that they would grant us permission to go in the first place. A complete violation of freedom of navigation. So it was three years ago when the administration, this was under President Obama, that we send our icebreaker, our heavy icebreaker, through the Northern Sea Route as a demonstration of freedom of navigation. I said, maybe. It's a 40-year-old ship. And I cannot guarantee that it will not suffer a major engineering casualty where then we're going to have to call upon Russia and their fleet of 40 icebreakers. Oh, brand new. To haul in our old, only heavy icebreaker in our inventory. I said, I don't like the optics of that at all. And they said, oh, we didn't know. So the good news is we are now starting to build out a fleet of icebreakers. I'm still scared, Admiral. Yeah. What we call polar security cutters. But yeah, we have multiple aircraft carriers. We only have one heavy icebreaker in our nation's inventory, and it's 40 years old. Thank you, Admiral Zuckhoff. It's great to talk to you. Jay, it's great to see you. Great to touch base with you. And it'll be great to create the movie we have in mind from your speech in this discussion. And I hope you can come back later. I'm at your service. Thank you, Admiral. Thank you, Jay. Great to talk to you. Appreciate it. Thank you. You're welcome. Okay. Mahal.