 I wanted to say I really appreciate all your engage engagement. I hope you don't mind, but I actually included some of the back and forth because I thought it was very instructive. Thank you. Okay. So I think we're good. We can start now. Let's start with a bit of an introduction. So this is Greg Nakano. He is a Naval Academy graduate and served as Marine officer. During the first go for a Los Angeles riots after military service. Greg's a Mandarin at Foudon University and Farsi at the University of Toronto. Before earning an MALD in security studies from the Fledger school. Greg then worked as a civil military contractor for USAID's Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, providing humanitarian assistance. He has helped to expand Tufts allies civil military education program and is currently working to develop an experiential service learning curriculum that helps students, cadets and midshipmen understand the climate change impacts on national security, utilizing the coage Lee and atoll as a living classroom. Today's Greg is going to be talking about the, impacts of climate change on current and future international relations and how that affects security. Greg. Thank you very much. Okay. I don't want to waste a lot of time. So let me see if I can actually make this work. All right. Is that showing up? Okay. First off, I'd just like to say thank you very much for inviting me. I wanted actually to start with a question. And it's, it's a question that really has no. Answer. But the question is. Oh, why are we here? And. Thank you very much. Okay. Don't want to waste a lot of time. So let me see if I can actually make this work. All right. Is that showing up? Okay. Yes. First off, I'd just like to say, thank you very much for inviting me. I wanted actually to start with a question. I want to say thank you very much for inviting me here. And what I want to do with this question is as you're thinking about it. Think about multiple dimensions of where we are and who we are. And the example that I have is. There was a reporter supposedly who went around to the construction workers of the empire state building and asked different workers. What are you doing? What, you know, why are you here? First guy said, Hey, I'm just laying bricks. You know, I'm helping build the highest building in the world. And the third bricklayer actually said this building, the empire still state building is going to be representative. Of America's greatness throughout the world. So even though each one of them was doing the same thing. They all had different perceptions of their engagement and why they were doing it. So why am I here? Well, it's pretty simple. I'm going to talk about this. I'm going to talk about this. On nine July, about a month ago, Jackson wrote me. He said, Hey, we'd love you to come over and speak about climate change. Is what I've been doing. And I was really excited about the opportunity. But I had some questions. So I threw these back at Jackson. I said, Hey, you know, like, who's the audience? What are we talking about? What are the questions should I be thinking about? And Jackson quite appropriately turned around and kicked my ass. He goes, all right, look, what I'm thinking about is conflict based on basic resources. Then he went into some specifics. And I don't know if you, you guys gave these to him, but he said, Hey, what about Bangladesh? You know, the Bangladesh India border water rights between Ethiopia and Turkey, climate refugees in Europe. And he said, we want to look at how the military is adapting. Not only Western militaries, but, you know, overseas to natural disasters. And then he said something which really made me happy. He said, look, these aren't separate national security and climate changes. Everything is linked and independent. We understand that education is the first step. And we want to help policymakers because we're going to be future policymakers making changes to Paul, you know, how things are done. He also said include the consequences of domestic politics. And at the end, he said, this is what I would like the session to do. My response back to Jackson was something like, yeah, you've just outlined a minor in the field of climate change and national security. And then you've given me an hour, actually only 40 minutes because we're supposed to have 20 minutes. The end of this to talk. So what I tried to do is reframe everything and look at these last three points. And I don't, I don't really consider myself an expert. And what I want to do throughout this is say, this is still an emerging field and many of the people who deal with this play when it comes to climate change and national security are literally one mouse click ahead of you. Okay. So this is from the allies survey. Average age was about 20.6 years old when you take out some of the older people. Most of you wanted to live to about 90, 92. So you've got another 70 years ahead of you. And 50% of you said, yeah, I think we want to have kids. Well, this is the world that you're looking at. If you look on the top left, this really is the biggest problem or the challenge that you're looking at. 1950 2.5 billion people. 2050 only 100 years later. It's almost three and a half times four times that number, 9.7 billion. And that's that water park over in China. Okay. On the other side. We are literally eating up the planet. I mean, if everyone tried to live like we do in the United States, I think you'd need something like four earths to actually provide all the land, water and resources to do that. Unfortunately by 2050, it's estimated that the ecosystem carrying capacity is going to be down by about 60% and things like pollinators, bees, insects are actually getting wiped out. So it's producing food is going to be increasingly challenged. I don't know how much you guys talk about this at allies, but we're actually in World War three. And people wouldn't probably say it like that. But if you're looking at Stuxnet on the Iranian centrifuges, or if you're looking at things like. Tick tock in Tulsa on Trump. That's actually cyber warfare. And this is only going to increase over time. And then the last challenge that Americans are going to face is in 1950 on top of everything's at least economically. But by 2050, by purchasing power parity, we're going to be third in the world. So all these things are going to combine to make your life when your policymakers and your children's lives more difficult and challenging. What I did was I tried to frame this in the form of a hypothesis. And it's if the United States doesn't transform our military industrial complex. Then Americans citizens, we will have knowingly accelerated global climate change, increased human suffering and eroded our democratic system. You note that climate change is not the issue. That we're focused on rather it's a outcome. Of policies that we've decided to make with regard to our military. And the simplest way possible I could think of it was putting this little graphic on the left hand side. You can see the little factories pumping out carbon going to the earth. Race is a temperature causes people on the other side and poor places to suffer. And after they suffer enough. Lo and behold, you get some people who are willing to take up arms. And you pump out a little more carbon. And those people really get soft and they decide to do something. And then they actually try and come over and stop the factors from producing carbon and the people who are producing carbon. Of course, rich nations with carbon and push back with their defensive military and eventually push forward to take care of the problem over there. The only problem is that military, whether it's a tank airplane. You know, ship, it's producing carbon itself, which is again accelerating the number of people who are being impacted, increasing number of people who are pissed off. And then coming back to requiring more guns. And we finally get into this. If you look at the industrial fossil fuel based military. That we have today. Utilizing it. To address climate change issues. Positive. In other words, the more we use it to take care of problems generated from lack of fresh water or lack of food or having to migrate. The more we're actually speeding up that process. And if you look at the cost of. You know, run. A fossil fuel military. The. I find these numbers staggering. I don't know what your college tuition is these days, but you can see it left hand side with an hour for the hourly rate of just flying some of these planes around. This was taken from a U.S. government. And if you lay it's a I chart, but if you go down in the bottom right hand side, what you see is 1,609. Billions of dollars. So that's $1.6 trillion that was expended in the global war on terror between 2001 and 2015. So what does that come out to? Well. My math may be off, but 1.6 trillion. You do that 365 days a year, 15 years. You come out to like $3,400 a second. The problem is, is if you look at. What the U.S. government estimated the total number of al-Qaeda in the beginning. The total number of al-Qaeda in the U.S. government. Pre 911 was it was about 75 core and 18,000 active. So if you just do, this is all monkey math, right? But if you just do the monkey math and you just do the rough division, if you look over that $1.6 trillion. Basically it's $80 million per al-Qaeda fighter. Now, if you were talking about someone who came from Afghanistan. Their per capita GDP annual is only $100 pre. One al-Qaeda fighter might make $6,000, $7,000 in his lifetime. We essentially could have bought them off, set them in a nice villa and made them kind of our friend instead of having it the other way around. Do you look on the bottom? Here are some of the numbers. You can dispute them. I mean, there's lots of different places you can get these numbers. So they vary, but roughly 3,000 people died. We ended up sending over a million, million, million and a half and 6,000 ended up killed. And these are now service members. If you look at the, whether it's collateral damage, or intentional civilians, it goes into the 200,000. And if you look at some websites, if you look at excess mortality, it goes almost into the millions. So what does this all mean? The industrial warfare model is pretty ineffectual for addressing these climate change or human security conflicts. And this was a factoid that some insurance actuator put up. You said you're actually more likely to be killed by a flat screen TV in the United States than you are by a terrorist. The real thing is this, is that they estimate, okay, there's 18 to 20,000 al-Qaeda pre-911. And now there's anywhere from 85,000 to 106,000. Unless you're trying to create more people who hate the United States, then this essentially is a failed strategy. So why are we here? I think it's this, is that this is Jay Inslee, governor of Washington, but he says, hey, we're the first generation to feel it. We're the last generation that really can do something about it. And for those of you who filled out the survey, thank you very much. It's, you're right. I mean, it will impact your generation. Yep. I think that everyone agreed is going to impact the next generation even more. I went back to the survey and I was looking at what, you know, you guys care about the most. I was, it was really nice to see that most of you are interested in experiences, love, peace, happiness and family. So if we ask ourselves what constitutes a good life, probably hopefully some of these things come into it. So how does all that fit into climate change and national security? And how will you collectively as policymakers or as fathers and mothers deal with a world of 2050 where 60% of humanity is going to be living in the cities, 5 billion will be water stress. I don't know if you've been taking, you know, note of some of the reports that are coming out now, but they're saying that there's going to be areas around the equator, primarily in the Middle East and India and things like that where. You actually will not, your body will not be able to cool itself quickly enough for you to continue living. And you will basically collapse just by walking around outside. This is the world that we are currently on track to hit. Ecosystem. I don't know how many tree huggers we have, but this, this is talking about the system of food, water, forest, river streams that support us. And I kind of was tongue in cheek when I put this together, but if you look in the middle part about chocolate, it says, if you go online, you can actually find these reports about the growing seasons and the growing areas where chocolate is and where they are viable shifting so fast that they can't actually plant and move the crop enough. So chocolate is going to be endangered. Same thing with wine and probably the biggest one is on the bottom. And this is from fat tire. They basically wanted to say, hey, how much actually would a zero carbon case of beer cost or six pack? I'm sorry, six pack of beer cost. And they estimate right now if you wanted to have a zero carbon six pack, you're paying $100 for it. So how are you going to have children or how are we going to have children? I already have to. And bring them into this world and what are we doing, whether it's students now in college or into your job or as policymakers 10, 20 years down the road to minimize or mitigate these worst future outcomes. I don't know if this looks familiar to you, but this is really the challenge for those of you who remember Malthus talking about agricultural production and population production increase. This is a graph of bacteria in a fixed media in a Petri dish. And basically you have a long timeframe where there's no change in the population. Then you have a rapid increase, which is called the log phase or the exponential phase. And then you have the stationary phase where you have die off. And if you look, this is basically a, you know, the best guesstimate that scientists have put together of human population. So if you look here, we think humans have been around 250, 300,000 years. It didn't crack one billion until you get over here. The 1800s and then you've got that logarithmic growth. So what does that mean? It means essentially at some point in time, we're going to have to have massive die off to level out. And the reason is simple. You've got an earth, which is fixed. And there's no extra surface unless you're going to Mars unless you're able to start a colony on the moon where we can put people on. And if you look at the population 10,000 years ago, when we actually started cultivating food, two and a half million. We're at seven and a half billion. And a per person surface that you're looking at a land that you've got available to live on has actually reduced by 99%. And that's causing all the pressure. That's really what we're talking about. If you're looking at these vectors of how the food, water, energy needs and demands are increasing. Part of it is the population, but part of it is lifestyle. And like I said, if everyone lived like an American or Earth are needed and everyone is looking at America as a lifestyle to be emulated. So this is from DOG 305. It's from 2005. And this is published pretty much about the same time as Iraq was doing the surge. And the military began recognizing that there's no one who can oppose the US military toe to toe in a shooting battle. But the military was having problems actually providing the public health, the public infrastructure necessary to keep civil society going. And so it publishes document. And this is really one of the seminal documents that if you're going to study climate change and national security, you probably should get to know pretty well. Here's just a brief history of some of the documents that the DOD or think tanks have actually put out talking about climate change and national security. If you look at the 2006 CNA report, CNA, if you've never worked with them, they're basically a private think tank, but they're quasi military in that they do a lot of the studies that DOD wants to do that doesn't have the time or the ability to actually dive into. You can see this, this process of climate change being the national security threat evolved. And then about the time that Obama came in, you have DOD 6,016 or rather, I'm sorry, DOD directive 4715, which is climate change adaptation resilience. This is another document that if you're interested in knowing kind of what is what the military is capable of. And that was one of the questions Jackson asked. You might want to download it. You could actually invite a policymaker to speak on this, maybe at the next speaker seminar and have them kind of explain, hey, this is where we're at. This is what we're doing. Of interest is that if you look in 2018, this is now under the Trump administration. 4715.21 was actually reissued. And there are some changes. And again, those might be something that might be of interest for the allies to invite an expert to talk about. Okay, but I'm going to go back to 2010, 10 years ago. This was actually one of the first documents which laid out, hey, these are the 10 or 11 threats that are going to face US military in the future. These are going to be the battles of the future. And if you notice a lot of them, don't really lend themselves to being solved by bombs, bullets or ballistic missiles. The other interesting thing, if you look at 2010 and you go, the Joe in 2010 is it said the, it said climate change is going to be a threat multiplier. In that it didn't say that climate change itself was the threat. It was at food shortages, water shortages, natural disasters, pandemics, energy needs, economic failures. Those were the threats, but climate change was interconnected with all of them. And it would cause a cascading failure of those things. I put this in because I wanted to go back to Brown. A little bit of the history of the Department of Defense and the American way of fighting. If you look on the right hand side, when the United States went into World War II after Pearl Harbor, if you look down, President Roosevelt said, hey, we're not going to war to gain territory or to gain treasure. In fact, what we want to do, what Americans want to do is we want to ensure the four freedoms for everyone in the world. Freedom of speech for everyone in the world, everywhere in the world, right? Said freedom of religion and it's worship, not Christian, Christian God, but worship God in your own way. The other thing was, how do we provide Maslow's basic, right? Food, water and shelter, freedom from one. And then the last one was, he said, the United States is going to war just like we did in World War I to achieve freedom from fear. And it was based on the simple golden rule, right? Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you. So America went to war, released the Jews from the concentration camps. And it was Roosevelt's wife who then worked on Universal Declaration of Human Rights and put those same goals or aspirations into the UDHR. Article 25 for health, article 26 for education, and article 29 for welfare and community. And that's really what this declaration is all about. So if you want to, again, if you want to kind of look at what would be the ways that you could talk to another person, someone who's not American, about some universal core values that you could begin as a discussion on climate change and national security. Universal Declaration of Human Rights is one of those documents. And this was followed up by Marshall. I don't know if you have read the entire Marshall speech, but he says in there, the United States isn't against communists. It isn't against socialists. It isn't against Chinese. It isn't against any nation. What the United States is trying to fight is hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. And the first thing to do if the United States is going to be successful in building peace is ensuring a global economy that is stable and that supports everyone. So the creation of the Department of Defense itself was a step in that direction in that most people think the military of the DoD is there to fight and win the nation's wars. If they say that, there's a good chance they haven't read what the actual mission is. It's called Department of Defense, not the Department of War, because the military forces there are only to deter war, not to win wars. I'm sure most of you know Kennedy, he's, you know, he's well known throughout Boston, but when he was president, he took this to heart and he said, we're going to actually build the agencies and organizations that are going to be able to fight in a human security battle, Peace Corps, USAID, Special Forces, right, liberate the oppressed. And that was the whole intent. Instead of going toe to toe with the Soviets or trying to beat anyone on the battlefield, we're going to provide you the food, the water, the shelter, the tools you need to plant crops and feed your family. The problem was obviously the Cold War, arms race. And this was kind of the other side of what the United States had to do. It basically had to say, look, instead of buying, you know, building schools instead of building hospitals, well, we're going to have to take and we're going to have to buy bombers. And during the Cold War, you know, putting warfare on one side and continuing to focus on this kind of made sense. If you look at it, there was a limited number of people who were in agriculture, baby boom, right? You had a large, largely healthy population. And then the military industrial complex actually helped build factories. It helped produce material that created jobs. And if you look at all of these things here, whether it's microwave ovens or cell phones or LASIK or video, even video games, a lot of it has technology that came from the military industrial complex. So when the Soviet Union and the United States were coming to the end, the United States was actually able to continue building weapons and feeding its people. The Soviet Union was not. So they collapsed. The United States was able to defeat Saddam Hussein easily on the battlefield. A lot of people remember the nineties as really good for the United States. And when people talk about make America great again, they're talking about that time period after Reagan, when Soviet Union collapsed and everything seemed to be going our way. What we don't talk about or what isn't talked about much in a lot of the history books is that in the breakup of the Soviet Union, a lot of countries and a lot of people actually went through enormous hardship. It's an incomplete list. But if you look over that 10 year period, 1992, this is a sampling of the wars and civil wars that were going on during that time. And if you want to tie in climate change to that, you can. Not all the issues, but if you start going back into Ethiopia, you start going back into Somalia, you're going to find people who researchers who are showing, yep, it was tied to drought. Yep, it was tied to sea level rise or some other issue that's pushing the migration of the people around. And for those of you who are keeping track, there's a pretty good. Argument that's been built out for Syria. So I don't know if you know this guy Keynes, but he's talking about economic consequences of peace. And he essentially predicted the. Start of World War two because of the peace that was initiated in World War one. And so what we're seeing in a lot of ways as a recap or a repeat of that process. So. Wanted to build the four freedoms. Going back to Marshall. Looking at the golden rule, the United Nations, it wasn't the United States at this point. It was the United Nations, all the nations who were benefiting from the peace decided, yep, we're going to develop the millennium development goals. And it's back to universal declaration of human rights. How do we get health, education, welfare into people's hands who need it? But almost a year later, almost exactly a year later. You had that. So why did that happen? Actually, if you look back in American history, we actually lay out the reasons or the justification for bin Laden's attack, right? We say that governments are instituted amongst men and that when any form becomes destructive, the people can alter it. And the argument was that. The United States was the sole superpower. And as a result. It was responsible for all the things that were happening. Good and bad around the world. So while Bush said to the country, hey, they hate us because we're free bin Laden actually wrote a letter to the garden and a couple of the newspapers where he actually laid out his long train of abuses that he felt Muslims and people in the Middle East had suffered under the hands of the American forces. And the reason he attacked America and the Americans, not just the military forces. So you said, you live in a democracy. You have the ability to choose where you put your money. And you chose to bomb us. So we're coming back at you. And this is really where we're talking about. Leadership has its privileges, but leadership also has its responsibility. I don't know if anyone actually looked at that video, that long video. He goes into this a little bit. So how do we do this? 2002 now year after the 9 11 attacks. There were strategists who understood this. And they said, Hey, look, we've got to help the people and their children, right? And Bush actually said this in a speech. He said, Hey, we're going to fight against poverty. But we still haven't done it. Now these again, numbers. You know, what is this? Statistics, dam statistics and lies or something like that. I mean, you go in, you can find different numbers. From different sources, but in general, these are the rough order of magnitude that you're looking at. And the real one is the bottom, right? Children that die every day. A lot of it through diarrhea or just lack of food. And this is the choice that we have, right? So we could actually feed them. But the United States has made this choice instead. And if you're looking at. The one nation that actually sells and, and builds or purchases weapons around the world. We're number one. See if this works. Now. Some of you may have seen this, but the only reason I wanted to actually go through this entire. Video was. The United Kingdom. If you're looking at the date over here on the right hand side, the United Kingdom was way ahead of the United States. Until look 1890, right? Until we hit about the turn of the century. And kind of you have to go back and remember where the United States was the Great Depression, the Gilded Age coming out of it. And then 1916 1718 World War one. Right. And then throughout this interwar period, the United States still is the number one industrialized country in the world. And then again, you're going to see another uptick once we had 1945 end of the World War two. And at this point, United States is roughly half. Of the entire world production of CO2 in the atmosphere. Right. 1970s. The oil crisis. You coming up here to the 1990s. The Soviet Union. And it's only here. That China actually begins. Picking up the pace industrializing. And. Coming online to challenge the United States for. Production of carbon. But even at the end, now this is 2018. And you look at it. China is at 213. U.S. is 397. That's almost double. So when people say that client China is the number one carbon producer in the world today, they're, they're correct. But in fact, they're not the total producer. They haven't produced a total amount when you're looking at history. Of course, this is our commander in chief, United States. And this is what he says. And again, if we have a system that's producing the climate change, then we're not doing anything about it. In fact, we're denying that it even exists. What right do people have. Who are suffering. To come try and stop it. Or stop us. And it's cost and effective if we're going to use military weapons to try and stop them. Right. And we're just creating more enemies as we're going along. So this is kind of wrapping up, but this is where. I'm leaving you is that we know what the problem are. But unfortunately, the generation that's in charge has already made their choices. And so you're left with this big stinking mess. It's not your problem. It's not your fault, but it's 100% your problem. So how are we going to accomplish this? How are we going to pay for the sustainable development goals? They did some back of the napkin sketches. He says about 1.4 trillion, which is pretty eye water. And where are we going to get that kind of money? Well, we actually do know where we could get that money from. If you look at the amount of money we spend on. Food that we just waste. If you look at the entertainment industry, if you look at. You know, cosmetic $60 billion. I'm not saying, you know, don't put on makeup, but I'm saying. These are things that aren't as. Essential as food, water and shelter. And then when you. Add those all up. You come around to about a trillion dollars. You're still short. 0.4. But then you add in DOD's budget this year, which is 7, 140 billion easily could cover it. If we're working on hospitals. Factories. Schools. So this is your leadership challenge. You know, let's say you have the same amount of money. You can with $400,000. You could. Get one of these very, very cool. F 35 helmets that allow you like Wonder Woman to actually see through your plane. So it's about 400,000 a pop. On the other side where you could just immunize 25,000. That's, you know, again, these are choices that you're going to have to make. And the real question is. Do we stay with. The standing. Professional army that we have the quote unquote all volunteer force. Or do we go back to the constitution and go back to. The militia, which is the only reason why you're supposed to have arms. And if we decide that, well, then that means. Right. Means less Delta. And much more national card. So this really is on you. One of the documents that was produced looking at the challenges that are out in the 21st century said this is that. The breadth and depth of education. Right in the middle in that white and green part is going to have to include classics, right? History, anthropology, economics, geopolitics, cultural studies, as well as you're still going to have to learn a lot of things. But if you look on the bottom. You have to get out of the school house because the school house is not going to be able to teach you what you need to learn from books. I think some of you mentioned that when you said how well are your students or teachers familiar with climate change or able to teach you. And this was another document that do you put out if you look on the top when it says no one should experience a task in real world operation without being exposed to it and training education. Currently, to the best of my knowledge, there is no climate change national security training that's going on that would allow you that opportunity. And I think some of you mentioned that when you said how well are your students or teachers familiar with climate change or able to teach you. And this was another document that. I'm going to talk about that in a minute. I'm going to talk about that in a minute. I'm going to talk about that in a minute. I'm going to talk about that in a minute. So again, we start with the first question we started with, why are you here? And what are you going to do. Now that you're in a world that, you know, everything is connected. Thank you very much. Okay. Thank you so much for your presentation. That was really. That was very eye-opening. Okay. So now we are going to have a quick Q and a session. If you have any questions, you can click the Q and a type in a question. We can see it. We'll ask the questions and we can kind of discuss those things from there. For now we have some questions for you. That's all right. Okay. So. First up. Recently. So. So, if you're talking specifically about Kervas, or you're talking about the United States response. I mean, those are ongoing. Those are ongoing policies. And I think right now. You would be. Lucky. To find any government. That really has. The full. Consensus of its population. And it's the policy makers. Agreeing to one single strategy. And in part of this is. That. The number, you know, if you're talking about Kiribati, you're talking about Marshall Islands. You're talking about a lot of these. The numbers are minuscule. I mean, Canada or Russia could just absorb them. Right. I mean, it's got such a low population density. That's not the question. The question is. Is there going to be compensation? The question is. Who gets control over the exclusive economic. The easy exclusive economic strategy. That surrounds those islands that has. Tuna or other fish in it that are valuable. These are really the. The questions that complicate any decision. So. When you ask, well, what are the people from Kiribati's doing? A lot of different things. It's just like if someone wants to ask, you know, well, what do Americans think about black lives matter? You're like. Yeah. I can give you like 10 different things. But it's really going to depend on who you're talking to. So. I would love to, you know, whoever asked that question would love to, you know, I can help put you in contact or find some people who are really looking at the issues. But again, who you ask is going to get you a completely different question. Which was why I wanted to start. With the question. With the bricklayers. On the Empire State Building. Everyone you talk to. Has got a different vision of what they're doing. And why they're doing it. I hope that answer to the question. If not. We can get offline. I can try and do a better answer. Very good answer. Very. Whole answer. With another question here. Okay. So this is a bit of a long one. The American ambassador to the American ambassador to Nigeria, John Campbell, one stage of the House committee on science, space and technology that. If our partner security is undermined by climate change. So too is our own. How does this view fit into the America first agenda pushed by President Trump and embraced by a significant portion of conservative Americans. How does the America first narrative impact the deal? These attempts to counter the effect of climate change. If our neighbors are affected by it and thus affecting us. Good. I mean, that's a great question. I think the first. Question goes back to. How do you define. Climate change. How do you define. America first. I don't. Imagine. I mean, I don't, you know, you had that slide with all the things Trump has said. I don't think he. Just believes it. I mean, he says he's a smart guy and he reads everything. Right. So I mean, he's probably read something that says climate change is real. I think it's all how you define things. And. If you understand biogeochemical interactions where everyone is dependent on everyone. Then. Taking care of America first really does mean taking care of the people who produce the food that gets imported. So is the clothes that get imported. Builds the, you know, cars that get imported. Because that's our supply chain. We've, you know, moved that overseas. So if we're not taking, if we're not helping them. Who live in another country. Well, then. We're not going to have those resources at food. You know, so. Is that how Trump is looking at it? From everything that I'm. Seeing no. So this really then comes to, I don't say it's on you. Right. But. I think my generation, the generation that's older. We already know who we're voting for. We, I mean, it's, and it's like deadlock. The people who are going to make the difference in. The people who are going to make the difference in their lives. And so, I think that's the way we're shaping the scale is for. Whoever's not, whatever side you want really, it's going to be your generation. It's going to be the women who haven't voted before, and it's going to be the youth. Everyone who's 18 and above who's never voted before going out and making their voice heard. And so if you think. That. That's the way we're approaching things. It's not going to help your generation down the road with climate change and national security. Well, then, then vote. You know, and that's the only way I think that we're going to get to the next three, five, 10 years. It's. Long-term investments. That makes a lot of sense. Thank you so much for your answer. Okay. Now, another slightly short question. What do you think budget restructuring for the DOD looks like in a political future almost guaranteed to remain polarized? I came across a really fascinating survey recently would said that there's about 30% of. American. Don't. Evolution and. They believe in what's called young earth creation. In other words, the world where the earth is only about. 6,000, 10,000 years old. And. I think. Unless. We collectively begin. Finding areas where we can recognize common. Threats. Then. The budgets are going to be pushed to things. That are. Continually in dispute. I don't know if that makes any sense whatsoever. I think. The first thing we need to solve is everyone coming to an agreement on what exactly the challenges. Are. And until everyone can really agree that. It's the Russians or it's climate change or it's a Chinese or whatever. Then the budgets are not going to be allocated to any long-term and during strategy. They're just going to be piecemeal then thrown. To whatever is the trash can fire of the day. I actually really like that. I think that makes a lot of sense. There's a lot of upcoming issues of. Almost the problem is whether or not it is a problem. As opposed to. Let's. Another question here. Okay. So. The impacts of climate change appear to disproportionately affect certain areas that are less resistant to changes in weather patterns. And more prone to oridity. So. So. I think that's going to have disproportionately high birth rates. Now what future problems do you think the world will face as so many of the world's children are born as areas deeply affected by climate change. And it's kind of piggyback off the other question. How are the neighboring regions going to be affected by the spillover in terms of migration or regional conflicts and stuff of that matter. So I don't know how many people are Irish. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. It's a great, you know, your great grandparents or whatever, you know, escaping the potato famine or stuff like that. Depending on who you talk to, we're actually seeing that right now. You know, it's. It's happening in slow motion. And. I don't know if you ever saw the matrix. It's a kind of an older film, but I mean, it's like, you know. You, we have, we collectively have the ability to actually see the situation. We have the ability to see what's happening in the Mediterranean. We already can see what's happening in Somalia. We already can see if you, if you start looking at the literature, people will say you, you have researchers say. The. The mission on the southern border of the United States is actually being driven by climate change and failure of farms in central and, and sent North America, right? I mean, it's Mexico, Central America. Farms are failing. And that's why they have to move north. They have to move north. They have to move north. So. If you look at the farmland in the northern part of Syria, supposedly that's the. Spark that started the civil wars that. People move down to the city's cities didn't have the ability to. Provide schools or healthcare or, you know, basic services. And so they either had to become a refugee rise up against the government, you know, and people were using them to. They're, I haven't seen it directly, but I think you probably are going to see people who are saying, look, the. Challenges, even with black lives matter and. Things that America is dealing with today. Have climate change elements, but it. But I want to go back to that. Slide that I talked about is that climate change is not necessarily the quote unquote, the problem. The problem is the choices that we make. It's not exactly a question of. On how to deal with environmental change. I don't know if that makes it's. Maybe it's too subtle. Distinction, but. If you study Sun, zoo or you study clouds, important to understand. So if it rains one day, you're going to use a different kind of weapon or you're going to use a different kind of system to accomplish your objective. Well we have a battlefield that is continually changing. So the country or the military or the people that understand and can predict how that battlefield is going to change are obviously going to be in a better national security position to develop appropriate strategies to win by setting up intergenerational ambushes. And maybe high birth rate is kind of a policy that they can use to survive by then pushing them to countries that are richer, bringing those down and relieving the pressure on the inside. Again, I'm kind of all over the place but hopefully that was helped a little bit. I think that was a very good answer. Thank you so much. One other question. So it seems that many logical responses to climate change that will actually be effective will require enormous international cooperation, right? Or at least the establishment of enormous trustee revelations. You use the example of the UN when it was first coming around. There needs to be a lot of international cooperation for these actions. So how can the United States, EU, China and India and other very powerful nations find a way to cooperate on climate change in an area when geopolitical tensions between the countries are preventing cooperation on a wide range of other problems in the world? So I guess there's two levels to this question. Are you asking how the United States government does this? Or are you asking how American citizens do this? Or are you asking how you as a citizen without necessarily a affiliation or allegiance to a particular nation do this? Because there are three different answers there. And if you say that how can the United States do this, well then you've already locked yourself into a West Falien international state-state bilateral kind of negotiation process, which then leads you to a predictable outcome. I think one of the biggest things that most people might not appreciate is your generation is... You pick bad cards, right? I mean, you got that whole thing about 2050 and you have degradation in the environment. But your generation grew up with the internet. Your generation grew up with cell phones. Your generation grew up with Facebook and everything else. You're not constrained by going as an American to reach out to someone who is constrained by the identity of being Chinese or anything. In fact, your generation has embraced to the best of mind, which has embraced being unique and different. It doesn't matter if you're black, white, pink, purple, LGBT. It's just like, hey, everyone's welcome. Great. Now use those technological tools to develop coalitions around the world with other people who think like you. And that whole TikTok thing with the Tulsa rally, I was blown away by that. But I mean, it was from what I understand, it was a bunch of K-pop aficionados, right? As people who are K-pop fans and they came together on a political issue. Allies, you guys have the same capability of reaching directly out. You don't have to go through the IGL. You don't have to go through the State Department. You don't have to... You can start a Facebook page. You can just start something. You can do a GoFundMe site. You can do whatever you want and create the educational processes. You can create the internships, the research projects that you want and get them funded without ever having to rely on anyone and people are doing it all the time. So I would say your generation is so much more empowered that way if you decide to just own it and say, you know what? The grandpas and the people who are inside the administration right now don't get it. I'm not going to wait. And you don't have to. You have those opportunities at your fingertips. Thank you so much. Alright, as our last and final question, I was just wondering if you could maybe talk about what you're currently researching and maybe leave us with a closing thought. Well, like you said, what I'm trying to do is take the concept of Pacific Allies, which was established in 2006, to build bridges between people in the military and people on the civilian side of the government so that we could develop interagency approaches to national security. For the past four years, I've been working in Hawaii with University of Hawaii Pacific Command, the Marshallese and Quadruple to develop Pacific Allies, which is using the same concept so that we help students cadets in midshipmen have an experiential service learning opportunity to understand climate change impacts on national security by helping the Marshallese transform their homeland into a living sustainability laboratory. And every year, we've gotten three or four students to go out work with the Marshallese for about a month. And each time we're trying to do a incremental increase in the complexity and results the impact. So for example, last year, we were able to get the first Google or Street View map put up of Ebi. And we had the students working with the Marshallese and they took the little, you know, 3D camera around and stuff like that. If that's of any interest to any of you or the Allies, you know, members, please let me know. And then the biggest thing is this is that if I could tell you anything or if I could tell, you know, my kids anything is that you have one life, right? And you got one shot at this. And increasingly, don't do what I did because schools are rapidly becoming irrelevant. Degrees are rapidly becoming irrelevant. What is important and everyone marked this on your survey is experiences. And so if your experiences are going to the library and open in a book, those can be replicated almost anywhere in the world. If you want experiences that are tailor made that are going to teach you or give you kind of the emotional or intellectual or physical kind of training or education that you want. That means you have to go out and create it. And you only have today. So hopefully you didn't waste an hour sitting here. But if you do log on to these things and whatever, definitely be like Jackson. Ask every single question that you want addressed in there and make sure that whatever the engagement is, that you're getting the most out of it because otherwise, you're wasting time and you're going to wake up and find out that someone else, whether it's the president, whether it's the dean, whether it's whatever has made a decision for you. That really doesn't serve your best interest. He was kind of I think that's good advice for all of us, especially at our age. Like, thank you so much for joining us for the event today. And I'd like to thank all the attendees for coming in today. If you are interested in future speaking events, keep an eye out on the Facebook page and the allies newsletter. And until next time, we'll see you all later. Alright, bye, everybody.