 Good afternoon everyone. My name is Carol Werner. I am the director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. I'm delighted to welcome you to the briefing this afternoon on the National Security Implications of Climate Change. We are honored for this briefing to happen and at this very time late point in time as well as we look at these important issues and I want to express my my gratitude and enthusiasm for the partnership that we have in terms of bringing you this briefing through the partnership with the Henry M. Jackson Foundation as well as the Center for Climate and Security and I wanted to be sure and mentioned that we are joined by some members from the Henry M. Jackson Foundation today including John Hempelman who is the president of the Jackson Foundation Board as well as Laura Eglitsen who is the foundation's executive director. So thank you very very much for your support for your long understanding and visionary approach to this important issue and in carrying out the legacy of Senator Scoop Jackson who set up for whom the foundation was set up to continue his unfinished work in the areas in which he for so long played a very key leadership role while he was here in the Congress and especially in the Senate where he also chaired the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee but where he took such an important leadership role with regard to international affairs, education, human rights, environment and natural resources, management and very importantly the whole role of public service. So we are very very grateful to the Jackson Foundation also very very grateful to the Center for Climate and Security with whom we are also partnering with regard to this briefing and we are going to be hearing from a number of people who have a long history and who have given much much thought to this important issue of climate. What does this really mean for national security? What are the angles that need to be thought about? And to first start off this briefing I went to first introduce Colonel Tom Watson who is the director of government affairs for the Center for Climate and Security. Carol thank you very much. The Center for Climate and Security is delighted to co-sponsor this event today with EESI and thanks to our ESI partners for all your hard work to put this together. The Center for Climate and Security would also like to thank each and every one of you for taking the time to join us today for the national security implications of climate change. A briefing to discuss the role of climate change as a threat multiplier in the geopolitical landscape and the implications that it has for national security. This briefing will explore the risk management and planning considerations facing the Department of Defense as it seeks to maintain force readiness and bolster infrastructure resilience. We think you'll find today's panel both timely and informative on this important issue. The Center for Climate and Security is a non-partisan security and foreign policy institute with a distinguished advisory board of nationally recognized military, security and foreign policy experts, some of whom are here today as part of our panel. The Center for Climate and Security envisions a climate resilient international security landscape. To further this goal the Center for Climate and Security facilitates policy development processes and dialogues like today's panel as well as providing analysis, conducting research and acting as a resource hub in the climate and security field. It is now my pleasure to introduce your moderator for today's event, the Honorable John Conger. Mr. Conger is a member of the Center for Climate and Security's advisory board. In addition he is an independent consultant and president of the Conger's Strategy and Solutions LLC and a non-resident senior advisor at the Center for Strategy and International Studies. Mr. Conger previously served as the principal deputy under Secretary of Defense Comptroller where he provided advice to the Secretary of Defense on budgetary and financial matters. He has also overseen energy, installation and environmental policy throughout DOD as the assistant secretary for defense for energy, installation and environment. He served as the acting deputy under Secretary of Defense for installations and environment as well as the assistant deputy under Secretary for installations and environment. Mr. Conger has also served as a staff member here in Congress including a professional staff of the House International Relations Committee. Prior to that he was employed in the private sector as an aerospace engineer and defense analyst supporting the office of the Secretary of Defense. He has multiple degrees from MIT and a master's from George Washington University. Ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to introduce your moderator for today, Mr. John Conger, Sir of the podium, Juris. How are we all doing today? Good. It's a little bit warm in here. We're going to keep the door open so that the air flow is okay, but we're going to get background noise. So that's the tradeoff you're all going to have. So thank you for being here today for what I hope is going to be a pretty enlightening discussion. You heard a couple of times the reference to how timely this was. I want to thank President Trump for making news last week on this topic. We did not plan that in advance. But nonetheless, as we go forward with the with the change in administration from President Obama to President Trump, the apparent change of opinions on climate change, we can't help but wonder whether this topic is still one that the DOD is going to care about, whether this was all just politics at the beginning, or whether there's a really a core national security issue that drives DOD's interest in the impacts of climate change. I'm going to give you a preliminary answer to that by quoting Secretary Mattis, President Trump's Secretary of Defense. His quote was, I agree that the effects of a changing climate, such as increased maritime access to the Arctic, rising sea levels, desertification, among others, impact our security situation. I will ensure that the Department continues to be prepared to conduct operations today and in the future, and that we're prepared to address the effects of a changing climate on our threat assessments, resources, and readiness. So that's the bottom line. That DOD will adapt to changes in the climate and position itself the best and ensure that it can carry out its mission and defend the country. The DOD knows what they're doing, and they'll be measured and responding to this risk. But there's a lot you can do to mitigate risk once you acknowledge the risk exists. Today, we have a group of experts, each of whom is a member of the Board of Advisors to the Center on Climate and Security, and each of whom are uniquely qualified to address these points. They'll talk about why DOD still cares about climate change, how it affects the DOD mission, and the ability to carry out mission today and in the future. So I'm going to introduce everybody and call on each one of them to make some opening comments, and then we'll do some questions and answers. I'm going to ask that panelists during their opening comments talk about any facet of the problem that they wish, but to include in their thoughts one starting question to blend in with their intro, in the absence of politics, how would DOD approach this issue? Setting aside the focus on climate by President Obama and the resistance to focus on it by President Trump, what would DOD do? So that's sort of an entry level thought. I'm going to go through and introduce everybody all at once and then pass it to them to make their comments. So immediately to my left is Sherry Goodman. She is a member of our advisory board and a senior fellow with the Wilson Center. Prior to this role, she was CEO and President of the Ocean Leadership Consortium and Senior Vice President and General Counsel and Corporate Secretary of the Center for Naval Analysis. Before that, in the Pentagon, she was the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Environmental Security, and I will say that few people have done more at the nexus of climate insecurity, particularly her shepherding of the seminal series of reports issued by CNA, starting with the National Security and the Threat of Climate Change report in 2007. To her left, General Ron Keyes is a member of the Center and on Climate and Securities Advisory Board and Chairman of the CNA Military Advisory Board. So that's the board that put out the study I just referenced. Most recently, he co-authored a report on sea level rise in the U.S. military's mission issued by the Center on Climate and Security, and there should be copies in the front table. General Keyes has retired four-star general from the Air Force. He retired in November 2007 after completing a career of more than 40 years. He is a command pilot with more than 4,000 flying hours in fighter aircraft, including more than 300 hours of combat time. He has seen climate challenges as an operator around the world and as commander confronting the impact of climate on operational readiness at Langley Air Force Base, now Joint Base Langley Eustis here at home. To his left, Dr. Jerry Galloway is a member of the Center on Climate and Securities Advisory Board and a co-author of the aforementioned study on sea level rise. He is a professor of engineering at the University of Maryland, focused on water resources and disaster management, and he is also a fellow at the Texas A&M Hagler Institute for Advanced Studies, working on urban flooding in the United States. He joined the faculty of the University of Maryland following a 38-year career in the U.S. Army, retiring as a Brigadier General, and served eight additional years in the Federal Government. Professor Galloway is the former Dean of the Faculty and Academic Programs at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces and former Dean of the Academic Board, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where he was a professor of geography and the first head of the Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering. And last but not least, Rear Admiral Ann Phillips is a member of the Center's Advisory Board. Previously, she had a 31-year career in the U.S. Navy as a surface warfare officer. She commanded Destroyer Squadron 2-8 and Expeditionary Strike Group 2, and she was a member of the Navy's Climate Change and Energy Task Forces. After retirement, she chaired an infrastructure working group for the Hampton Road Sea Level Rise Preparedness and Resilience Intergovernmental Pilot Planning Project. So thanks to each of you for being here, and I'll turn it over to Sherry for opening comments. It's great to be here with all of you today. Thank you to the Jackson Foundation, to the Rockefeller Foundation, to CSS and EESI for organizing this. Many of you looking around for Carol can remember when we could hardly fill a room on this subject, let alone standing room only. So 30 years ago, 30 years ago, I was the youngest and only female staff member on the Senate Armed Services Committee. At a time when Senator Jackson still served in the Senate, I worked for Senator Nunn, who had just become chairman of the Armed Services Committee. Senator Warner, John Warner of Virginia, was a ranking Republican. And there were many days and many times when there was absolutely no difference between Democrats and Republicans on the issues that we worked. And so I come and speak to you about this subject from a long bipartisan tradition that has been the hallmark of national security, policymaking and practice in this country, that has been around for decades, and which I think is incredibly important to this subject and to many others in national security that we face today, because we are living in a time that's highly polarized. But 30 years ago, what was more common was that on the Armed Services Committees, they could barely spell the word environment. In fact, that was not my portfolio at all. As most of my colleagues here who are old enough like me, I was more like the age of many of you in the audience then. And at that time, we were working on things like nuclear weapons and arms control and military readiness and troop readiness. All these issues are still very important. But during that early, in the early post-Cold War period, in this Cold War period, we began to understand the practices of the industrial age that had led to environmental challenges. And so the Armed Services Committees, both sides of the aisle, Republicans and Democrats created within the Defense Department something that still endures till today called the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program, which took research and the science capability. And I think this is very important, a sort of underlying factor here, that science, research, technology, development, innovation are a core component of everything that we do as Americans, but everything that occurs in national security and that undergirds our understanding of what our threats are. Because in the first instance in national security, you start from what are your threats. In the nuclear age, we understood the nuclear threat. We spent billions of dollars of America's GDP to defend and deter what we consider to be the highest consequence, but very low probability threat of a bolt out of the blue strike from the Soviet Union. Now, in the climate age, we have in climate change arguably a equally high, potentially high consequence and higher probability threat. So that is our chat, but we think of it in terms of risk. What are the risks? And then we plan and program and budget accordingly to reduce those risks to our forces, to reduce the risks in operating around the world. So now when we look around the world today, we see that there are many threats, of course, terrorism, right on our doorstep almost every day, revanchist Russia, rising China, and among those threats is climate change. And that's the environmental considerations within defense have always been, in my view, really a bipartisan consideration, dating back 30 years ago from what I mentioned, starting with considerations of how to address environmental problems during the Cold War and early post-Cold War period. And there are a number of programs, which John and the generals and animals here were responsible for administering during their times in DOD either to clean up military bases or comply with environmental laws. And as new challenges emerge, we approach each one in its own right. And in the last two decades, it's become very clear that climate change is one of those significant threats to America's national security. And that's why 10 years ago this year, when I was at CNA, we formed the Military Advisory Board, that General Keyes now chairs, that General Galloway has served on, that Admiral Phillips is associated with, that many other leading generals and animals in the armed services have been associated with to understand what are the national security implications of climate change. And we've characterized that as a threat multiplier, threat multiplier for instability in fragile regions of the world. And we see it. We see how are the geostrategic posture is affected by climate change. Just take the Arctic. We have a whole new ocean that's been created and opened up within the last decade as a result of the melting of rapid melting of sea ice in the Arctic. And now we have to begin to have more capability to operate in the Arctic in ways that we did not need to do quarter century ago. We see a potential rush for resources as there's more access to them, opportunities for additional fishing, navigation, transport, tourism that bring both opportunities but also risk. So that's just one very poignant way in which climate change is changing our world as we know it and changing how we have to position our armed forces to address that as well as other capabilities. Second is important extreme weather events. We've seen that there are more extreme weather events of various types around the world. And we now have to position our forces to be able to respond to increased typhoons, increased extreme weather events, storms that might that are creating new risks, particularly within the Asia Pacific, which one might call sort of the disaster alley of that of that region, where there are extreme risk and combined with the urbanization that we see now in that area of the largest cities in the world, both also people living at very low lying areas everywhere from Bangladesh to the Philippines that are increasing risk. When there's an extreme storm sea level rise and with people who are will be need to need assistance. Thirdly, and I want to I want to leave some some time here because I end some some of the subject for my fellow panelists here. We see that is also affecting our our military posture at home. Our installations are at risk all along the Atlantic coast from a combination of sea level rise, storm surge and coastal erosion. And that is not a partisan issue. That's something that's affecting us. All wherever our wherever our coastal military installations are located. And that's if we want to continue to operate we're going to need to address the infrastructure. Today's a day that the administration is talking a lot about infrastructure. Well, we have a lot. There's a lot of infrastructure and military bases that needs to be hardened and secured against rising seas and extreme weather events. And much of this also connects then with the communities. Wherever our military bases are, they are part of the community. And that brings us into building more resilient communities to addressing these risks because the bases are really part of the community. So in Norfolk, where people can't get to the base because of nuisance flooding that occurs now on a regular basis. That's a risk for our military. And it also is a risk for the community. So we see that these extreme weather events, storm surge, increase desertification occurring around the world and drought. In particular, drought, we know that underlying drought was a source of conflict, a source of instability leading to the conflicts in both Syria and in the Arab Spring uprisings. And that's now been well documented by research done by CSS and other scholars that we need to better understand how drought, prolonged drought, is going to be a source of instability in conflicts in the future as the world experiences more water stress and water scarcity. Some of it aggravated by climate change and also by water mismanagement. So these are all nonpartisan, bipartisan issues. There were ones that require us to harness the capabilities across a range of government agencies. I know many of you are, you can't all be working on the Armed Services Committee. So you're working on committees that span a number of budgets and jurisdictions. You know, the research that's done across a number of agencies from NOAA to NASA to NSF, including the Department of Defense, Department of Energy, the Department of Energy, the Department of Energy, is all important, as well as moving our nation forward on that. We've always been leaders in the next wave of energy innovation. We have that opportunity now while caring for those who have to make the transition from one from fossil energy into new forms of energy. But as we make our country and our world more secure, moving along, staying at the forefront of that energy innovation curve is going to be increasingly important. We have the ability to do that. And we see that we're doing that already today, particularly in the Department of Defense, as we figure out how to power the force for the future, looking at everything from smart microgrids to wind and solar to power our forward operating bases when they're at the front so they can be more resilient and operate more securely. General. Okay, so having said all that, let me answer the question. You know, if this weren't political, what would we be doing? Well, one, we'd be enjoying a renaissance of much less oversight. And that causes us problems. And number two, we probably have more money to work some of these issues. But the real question is, you know, why does DOD care about this at all? Because even though we live in the communities, you know, we're just normal people, we just happened to wear a uniform in our profession. We're not necessarily known as tree huggers and environmentalists and all the rest of that. But the reason we care is because there's really three things that we focus on in the military. The first thing is mission effectiveness, the ability to go and do what we have to do. We go and fight America's wars when she calls upon us to do so. And we win those wars. So we have to be able to base. We have to be able to train. We have to be able to test, mobilize, deploy, operate, reach back. We have to be able to do all of those things in the face of everything that could happen. Whether it's somebody walks out and cuts a wire, somebody throws a satchel over a fence, or whether a flood comes in or whether sea levels rise. So we need to be able to do that. So it's mission effectiveness. It's about going and fighting and winning. The second thing that we focus a lot on is battle space awareness. And this, I think, somehow confuses people that we're not focused on climate change or we're not focused on renewable energy because we put it all together. We don't break out to each threat individually and put that in its own program element and get money for that. We look at what are the threats that impacts to our ability to operate? That sort of battle space awareness applied to where we base, where we train and all the rest of the things, just like we do when we're in combat. We look at will we have enough water? Will we have enough fuel? Will our convoys being exposed? Will we have a problem with weather in a certain area because of dust, very fine, gritty dust? Or will we have problem with disease and everything? So we focus on those from an intellectual and intelligence focus to make sure that we know what are the threats. And then we have a term, the third thing, it's called survival to operate, survive to operate. Because in our line of work, we know that we're going to get hit. And when we get hit, we're going to have to still operate. It was a term that we coined back in the days when we were really concerned about chemical warfare. You had to suit up in your phase four suits and put on your mask and hope that you didn't pass out from heat prostration, but that was survived to operate. We were going to get chemed and biode and we were going to continue to fly airplanes. We're going to continue to fight. You go back to the first Gulf War, you can see the pictures of people walking around in these in these suits. So survived to operate. So we have to look at are there things that are going to prevent us from surviving to operate? Are floods going to cut our deployment roads or cover our runways? Are the wildfires going to knock down the grid and we won't be able to get our electricity on and on and on and on. So those are the three things we look at. Mission effectiveness, battle space awareness and being able to survive to operate. Now, what do we think are kind of the in a nutshell? What are the effects? Well, here's some of the problems that we have. The first problem is just on training. If the fire season has gotten longer, we've got people on the fire line. You don't want to put people on a fire line unless they're trained to be on a fire line. That is dangerous business. If they're training to be on the fire line, they're not training to be whatever it was. They came into the Army, Navy, Marines, Coast Guard, Air Force. So that's sort of training thing. If we're going to do more swift water rescue, if you've ever been involved in something like that, that is some hand-eye coordination. You've got to know what you're doing there or you will be, you will be swept away too. And as we look at the changes in climate, we've got we've got airplanes that spray for vectors of disease, mosquitoes, things like that. Are we going to have to have more of those airplanes? Are we going to have to have more of those crews? We've got planes out of the mobile airborne firefighting system, stationed out mainly in Colorado. Do we need more of those airplanes? Are they going to be engaged doing that mission much longer? What about our hurricane hunters? Do we need more of those birds? Do we need more of those crews? So we start to look at it's a balloon. We don't think we're going to get that many more people and that many more dollars. So if we're going to do these kinds of things, we're going to have to make some hard choices. And the other issue that you that you have is when you're you're doing these these kinds of things, is that you can be so involved. Suppose we had a major wildfire and we had a lot of stuff and a lot of our our National Guard is primary in these kind of reactions and then someone decides to do something in North Korea or in Afghanistan or rock name some of the dark and dusty and dangerous places around the world. You know, you've got your force all split up. And people think about, you know, when we talk about humanitarian crises and things like that, we tend to think about over there. We're probably fast approaching to the day when it's going to be here. If you go out, you know, sometime we were taking a trip, go with your principal and go out to Kwajalein and see what Kwajalein looks like out in the West in the ocean and how low that thing is. Go out there, go out to Diego Garcia and look at where that where the water is. Go to Langley Air Force Base at seven feet above sea level. That's where our raptors live. It is a, you know, jewel in our crown and how, the thing you've got, we've analyzed, it doesn't have to grow three feet in tidal depth. It only has to get a few or four or five inches and now across a bay that's four or five miles across and the wind comes in, you've got a lot of water and it starts to inundate. I was there in 84 commanding a fighter squad. We had probably over the time it was there four or five hurricanes come through. We took a little damage. We took some water, but we changed a few things and we were good to go. I went back in 2005 as a commander of air combat command, same base, and we had one nor'easter come through, just plain ordinary vanilla nor'easter. We went about three or four feet of water in the main road that went outside of my quarters and we had people scrambling to clean grates and pump water just because in that amount of time things had gotten that much worse when you get just a smaller storm starting from a higher base. So those are the kind of things that we we start to look at is how bad could it be and this is the analysis that we do. You look at where you are and you go okay what could happen and you go how bad could that be? Could we stand that? Because in some cases we're just going to grit our teeth and we trained to be able to do that. But then if you if it's so bad we can't stand it how much would it cost to move it back to something we can stand? And what technologically would we have to know in order to do that? And when do we start doing that technology so it's ready to implement when we get to the point that we have to have it? So it's a matter of how bad could it be? Can we stand it? If we can't stand it, is it affordable and accessible for us to actually change it? And then you go back to that analysis and you go and what if we're wrong? What if it's really not happening? What if it really doesn't get that bad? How much money will we have pumped into this these things that we're planning on doing and then find out we really didn't need to do that? And where's the off ramp? Where can we stop? And we've still done something that makes us better able to operate. Our mission effectiveness is up our battle space helps our battle space awareness and helps us survive to operate. So that's the reason that the military cares because it's our job to be ready our job to be able to mobilize and deploy when when you call us on the phone you expect someone to pick up the other end and some people say well can you give me an example of where a disaster has happened? You go no not really not yet that's the whole point of this is I don't want to be standing ass deep to a stall a tall shrimper when you guys call and say hey we're up here on the top of our house you know we would like your choppers to come rescue us I go yeah I'd like to do that but you know they're up to the skids and water themselves so that's the kind of forward planning that we're trying to do to make sure that we can operate. Now there's the other thing that I just close with is that's here that's kind of in the US but as Sherry said you know it's a catalyst for conflict if you don't have much water in some places aren't going to have as much water they're not going to grow as much food they're going to be a humanitarian crisis there's going to be a huge migration and at some point we're probably going to get called to go help or there may be too much water I've been involved as the director of ops and you come and we're down in Zimbabwe and they had floods covered the whole country if those become more likely then we're going to have to respond to those kinds of things so those are the kind of not only are we getting more work if you will inside the the our United States but we're going to get more work outside the United States and so now it's a matter of competing priorities what do you want me to do where do you want me to be how do you want me to train so that's the reason that we're focused on it have been for a long time if you go to the CCS websites you'll see there's a long list of things go back to about 2003 which was the very first sort of official look at what is climate chain going to going to do to us but in 1994 I was commanding Eilson Air Force Base and we were doing search and rescue exercises with Russia Canada and the US and we were back then talking about when these lanes start to open up we're going to have a lot more shipping it through there we need it so we need to have better communications up there we need to have better cooperation up there and etc etc so we have seen this coming you know for a long time but it's just been painfully slow to start to focus and and flow the money thank Jerry thank you it's interesting you asked the question what would it be like if politics weren't here and I'd say the military would be doing the exact same thing they're doing right now if you go back to older field manuals there's one for the 1980s it said whether in terrain of the most significant aspects of battlefield combat whether it's the runways that have to be open so you can land on them whether it's the open seas or it's the hill you're going to climb when they're in change and they are in change right now the military is concerned about that so the military has long had an interest in dealing with things like this and forecasting what might happen an example during the World War 2 as you can you may recall in the news we had to cross the Rhine River and we were fortunate to secure a bridge at Ramagan which became a famous movie but all the time that that activity was going on they were getting ready for this dash into Germany the military forces grouped a large number of meteorologists and climatologists and intelligence people together to determine what might the Germans do and what might nature do to make the Rhine go into flood to change the ability of the forces to operate it was critical to what General Eisenhower was planning to be able to understand what was going to happen on the ground and that's what we see in so many ways when we're dealing with moving forces overseas to a place we've never been at or a place where we've been to but it is changing will we be able to carry out the military operation so we are very interested that the DOD all services care about being ready so that you expect us to be able to go we've got to be able to deliver on that I'm an engineer and so I've spent a lot of my time I I've done some strategy and worked about what's going to happen to be the threat multiplier and the challenges in Bangladesh or Singapore or somewhere else where people are rushing to the cities and under climate change we may have real significant problems in dealing with these Singapore the sea level is rising in that case they're dealing with it because they recognize they have to plan 20 30 and 50 years out in a stepwise fashion other countries can't do that and they'll become significant challenges for us but are we ready that's the real question and there are three things I would talk about very quickly one that general keys has already mentioned the entire issue of training we training is at the heart of what the military does and if our bases are not capable of providing a platform for the training we need then we're not going to be as ready as we should be we've already seen the challenges it goes back to as far as the red cockade and woodpecker at Fort Bragg North Carolina that stopped training in many areas we've stopped training in parts of the National Training Center for various animals that are there that are on the endangered species list as the temperature rises with climate change it will cause major significant movements and where we're going to have to deal with these sorts of issues and we'll have to address them that's the way we do our country is responsive to that we're going to have to look at what is the temperature going to do to the ability of our troops to train you can only train outside a certain period of time when the temperature gets above a certain level we shut it down all of those things have to be taken into account as you move forward the other issues that come up are how do we test the equipment for the future we have to come up with new methods of acquisition of material that we're going to need the trucks that we use now the combat vehicles we use the ships and the planes all have to be prepared to operate in this different environment my experience in Vietnam with dust was it was terrible our helicopters are very wonderful but you put them down and consistently in dust just if you did in Iraq or you do now in Afghanistan and you create severe problems if you're operating in environments where the temperatures are very much different than they were when you plan to operate there then you can't get the helicopters to go to certain elevations you can't do other things that make your operation move smoothly so we've got to think about what equipment will we require in the future how will we test it do you want us to be ready to go we can't use people are saying fighting the last war you can't operate with the last war is equipment when the world around you is changing so it is important that the military consider what is on the horizon and what are we going to do about that horizon if we have to land in the Pacific we've had a look at the Pacific Sharia has mentioned the entire issue of operating on islands in the Pacific Quajolain as sea level rises subsidence occurs in places can we still land where we used to be able to land and will our vessels when the seas are more intense will they be able to move ashore the landing craft that have to move our supplies in so we have to think through all of these and you would expect them to do that and that's why I say this kind of thinking is going on at the highest levels all the time it is only when there is interference in the thinking people say don't do it don't think this way it's really not happening that the military begins to push back a little bit and say no we have to be ready for these eventualities it's terribly important that we do that there's a last one that is kind of interesting because we don't hardly think of it we don't live just on military installations we get supplies from all over the world we you can recall in 2011 when the area north of Bangkok Thailand an area of great industrial power where they were manufacturing parts and all sorts of the systems that were being used we discovered later in systems in the United States if that area is under water we can't get the supplies for just in time manufacturing we have to be aware of those sorts of things last year you may recall there was flooding in south of North Carolina interstate 95 was shut down for a week for about 30 miles you can't move large amounts of material when you need to when the the roads are under water are we prepared for that our military installations have ties to the neighboring communities the lifelines whether it's the power is the water or it's the roads are they all working together to get us to the right approach when the time comes that we have one of these major events you've seen the the quote thousand year floods you've seen the disastrous storms that we have on our coast all of those have we have to be ready for those and that's what the military is trying to do to look ahead to see what is it that we're dealing with and can we in fact be ready for the future and can we in our installations especially do it in coordination with our civilian neighbors in our study on the Gulf or on the Gulf and east coast communities tied into the military we found that there are interesting challenges in every one of them because we now have military personnel living off post that have to get on post we have workers that man key installation of facilities that we need to have get to the post we again need them to support what we're doing and we need to support what they're doing as we adaptively deal with climate change and that doesn't mean always we're going to build a wall we're going to build levees we're going to build breakwaters we're going to go for natural systems we're going to find new ways to do it your military is at the forefront of dealing with some of these challenges and again it comes back to we're not going to be any different whether there's politics or not because the military is focused on having a military that's ready to move and in order to do that we have to think through the hazards that we're going to face the risks that are created by those hazards and then the strategies that we're going to use I'll stop at that Admiral good afternoon everyone thanks thank you Mr. Conger for your kind introduction and thanks to all of you for for tolerating a really tight room we're glad to see such a tremendous response as Mr. Conger mentioned I'm a surface warfare officer I drove ships for 31 years and like my military peers here today on an active duty around the world I'm an operator I'm trained to view a mission in strategic strategic operational and tactical terms do what's required with clear eyed pragmatism to prepare for and execute that mission I don't do it with any sort of political focus whatsoever I have a job and I know how to do the job DOD has a long history in fact of taking climate impact seriously because they create an intensify operational risk and global instability as the other panelists have mentioned this morning this afternoon this is a real threat it's not an imagined threat based on a political agenda we in the department defense department have an inherent a responsibility to prepare to execute our mission that responsibility drives serious consideration for climate change because we are seeing more and more of the impacts of it in our daily lives as we execute our mission and prepare for it here at home and also as we operate overseas and finally climate change adaptation requires a whole of government approach and the defense community needs the opportunity to execute as general keys implied without a constant shifting of perspectives words strategies impediments to be able to execute its mission we know what we need to do we know what we're faced with allow us to plan evaluate risk prepare and operate we have a national security mission to fulfill after all the challenge is particularly acute as some of you have heard mentioned today in our coastal military installations and no more more so than in Hampton roads where I live Hampton roads is a region on the front lines of climate impact right now we're experiencing sea level rise at twice the rate of other east coast locations second only to New Orleans in the degree of change that we are seeing because we're also dealing with land subsidence that is unique to the Hampton roads area this is a serious and growing threat not only to regional military readiness but to national military readiness why because there are almost 29 separate federal entities within the Hampton roads region spread across nearly 100 distinct facilities of these the largest percentage nearly two-thirds are department of defense facilities and two-thirds of those are Navy facilities including unique national assets like naval station Norfolk arguably the largest naval station in the world Newport news naval shipyard our only aircraft carrier construction and refueling facility and one of only two submarine construction facilities in the country in addition as general keys as mentioned air force combat command army training and doctrine command major army logistic spaces special operations forces and key training facilities for those commands the largest NATO command outside of Europe supreme allied command for transformation is in Norfolk Virginia Jefferson labs NASA Langley and oh by the way we're the fourth largest commercial port on the east coast gateway to the Chesapeake Bay all of which helps to support not only the economy of the country the economy of Virginia but the military and federal facilities that reside in Hampton roads region 45% of our regional economic development is based on the presence of federal facilities as well as critical infrastructure so it impacts as you've heard the whole community the whole region is impacted by what's happening here and its ability to support the military 65% of the 1.7 million people who live in Hampton roads 17 cities and municipalities travel to another city to work so resilience and adaptation can't be limited to just protecting a base or a facility or a city it has to be done across a whole of government and community within the region in my ongoing work in the region I often encounter people who cannot wait to tell me about their experiences with water I'll share a few of those with you a NATO colonel and his wife I met at a Christmas party as soon as she found out I worked on sea level rise she couldn't wait to spend the next 30 minutes telling me about life in Hampton roads dealing with water she had to learn to drive a four wheel drive vehicle she had to learn to think about what the storms that the weather the tides were going to be to get in and out of her community she had to learn different ways to get places that she needed to go to be able just to go to the store pick up her husband at work execute her daily life in Hampton roads region there are people I know in Virginia Beach who have to decide what vehicle to take to work and when they're going to leave based on the tide cycle and when while this used to be only limited to significant storms now this can happen anytime if the winds blow in the right way we've got sunny day flooding and you have to change your plan you have to operate differently in your life I know of retired military couple who live in a very prominent Norfolk neighborhood who openly discuss their concern that they will have to abandon their home because of the constant flooding that makes it difficult to get in and out of their neighborhood even though it doesn't directly impact their house so we are dealing with this on a routine basis people change their lives every day in Hampton roads just to be able to execute whatever it is that they need to do and many of those people many are involved in supporting the military in some way shape or form and they are the families of service members who are stationed in the region so in discussing the national security implications of climate climate change you can see that Hampton roads is really a crucible for the entire range of changes between the large number of federal and DOD facilities and the fact that we are now constantly dealing with water in places we don't want, need, or expect it on an ever more routine basis we are really dealing with challenges at our present and we know we'll have to deal with them into our future within that context the Department of Defense believes it has an inherent responsibility to prepare they take this very seriously and they've got to have the ability to plan, implement, interact with the local community share data in an open manner so that we can plan regionally to not only support our local and regional missions but to execute our national security strategy thank you okay so I'm going to sort of sum up the answer to the question that I posed which was is there what amount of this is politics and what amount of this would happen regardless of politics and it sounds like DOD would have to pay attention to climate change regardless of politics and they were going to regardless of politics there are things that are going to happen and there's two main categories that I heard discussed one is on mission and another one's on infrastructure and let's do a couple of questions on each one and let the panel talk about them first let's start with mission if we go back to the the Mattis quote and where he says I agree that the effects of a changing climate impact our security situation can maybe have a couple of comments about things that are going on today that are exacerbated not caused but exacerbated by climate so that our folks in the field have to actually pay attention to what's going on with regard to the changing climate sea levels, et cetera that affect their preparation for their job what they have to train for out there in the field today I know there's a lot of discussion of Syria and whether drought is exacerbated that situation Sherry you talked a little bit about the Arctic how could that change our future mission profiles as the ice melts up there does anyone want to take a whack at that and focus on that piece of the puzzle well I think the easy one is if there is an easy one is the Arctic we know what the problems are in the Arctic as the Arctic opens up you have more people up there so now you're going to have you have more opportunity for one mischief accidents, et cetera et cetera but when you go north some of the big problems you have is we don't have a good picture of the north like we do on most of the rest of the globe so having those kind of intelligence surveillance reconnaissance assets up there so you know what's going on so the Coast Guard can see what's happening second thing is communications are bad at the top of the world so you got to make sure that you have the capability so now when something does happen someone gets notified so someone can go out and fix stuff so that's sort of a an approach to okay what will we have to do when you can no longer walk across the north pole but you can sail across the north pole that makes a big difference another thing is of course I think and Jerry can probably talk better about this than I can but it's just a matter of water if people don't have enough water then when you send your troops in there they're not gonna quickly dig a well and find water either so it's a matter how do you make water how do you reclaim water how do you make sure the water is pure enough to use how do you carry enough water do you go in with pallets of plastic bottles or do you go in with a couple of cantings do you have the water buffalos the big apparatus that we use to move water around can you go in and use your desalination or you can use some of the other systems that we have to actually reclaim reclaim water so I think that's a an issue as we get into some of these some of these areas and other areas from an Air Force standpoint we have looked at the the issue of working we working with base or the base is gonna be tenable because that's a big deal for us you gotta have a long piece of concrete in order to get in and operate otherwise you're operating at great range and so in some cases they may be under water in other cases it may be too dry they're too dusty we can't operate it's untenable so those are the kind of things that we're looking at from an Air Force standpoint just to add on to what General Keyes has already mentioned you know the in addition in the Arctic the permafrost is shrinking very rapidly now to the point that we're looking at having to relocate a number of Arctic villages Alaskan villages because of a combination of sinking permafrost coastal erosion and rising seas in in addition you know there there's new opportunities for energy exploration which is going to bring bring risk and potential reward we're going to see operation along the right you know the US and Russia are only about 30 miles apart at their closest point in the Bering Straits which until recent years was was navigable only for a very brief period of the year and was used primarily just to refuel and restock villages up at the top of the world but now we saw even last year a Chinese LNG tanker make the trip through across the Russian Northwest passage and down the Bering Straits I think this is just the beginning of what will be much more ship traffic in that in that area for a variety of reasons last year there was a 4,000 the multi-thousand passenger cruise ship called the Crystal Serenity that fortunately sailed without incident throughout the Canadian Northwest passage and in the US and American Arctic and is planned to travel again this summer in my view it's only going to be a matter of time before there is some incident that requires a significant search and rescue or oil spill response our Coast Guard along with associated military guard and other forces are already planning and preparing for such eventualities and as a result we're looking at buying not only new icebreakers for aging icebreaker fleet but additional types of communication maritime domain awareness capabilities potentially even a deep water port up in that region which the US has never had and so really this region of the world is changing more rapidly than anywhere else on the planet now and it is putting the US and other nations in the world and not only Arctic nations because countries from China to Singapore to Spain see new opportunities to obtain either the energy the fish the tourism or other opportunities that will be there in that region and that will bring as I said both significant risk which today we're not really prepared to address and that will is forcing us to sort of shift how we look at those priorities for that region compared to other places we need to have force available throughout the world so that's sort of the overview on mission and we can get to more questions on that in a little bit but so clearly DOD needs to plan in advance for missions that they're going to have to fulfill and as the world changes there are going to be new missions that they have to think about from a fixed infrastructure perspective the world that we're in a given location and the world is changing around us and is going to affect those things that we can't move or at least not easily General Keyes and General Galloway you just recently finished a report on sea level rise for CCS could you summarize the findings of the report briefly? I would say that the challenge we identified is that we are seeing coastal erosion we are seeing the sea level rise and we're seeing the challenge of increased numbers of large storms that are causing problems in addition if you happen to be a place like Norfolk where there's subsidence the water is rising and the land is going down you create all sorts of problems so there is the physical issue of how do you deal with that and the defense structure the Army Corps of Engineers and the other agencies of the government are looking at are there ways besides putting concrete out to deal with that because it's very expensive and may not last very long so that's a challenge the other challenge is to recognize that this is gonna be phased over time and to develop a plan to deal with this consider what the challenges are forecast what your risks are over time and then develop the plan that says I'm gonna get to this step when I need to this step when I need to but be prepared to change as all of these conditions can change on these coastal areas what's of interest to me in talking about the infrastructure it's not just our infrastructure that we are worried about we're worried about the infrastructure of our partner nations we use their bases we have hundreds of bases overseas where we rely on somebody else to give us the support or we expect them to handle their particular problems and we'll come in to back them up when they have these same sorts of problems on the coastal areas especially you create even more problems so the challenge becomes one of we have these bases we need to do something about them will we develop a plan that will let us get from here to 2020 then 2040, 2050 and have them remain as they are needed remain able to carry out the missions that are currently assigned and that's gonna take a lot of planning it's gonna take a lot of resources eventually to do that not everything today but over a period of time we have to have a program and that developing that strategy is gonna be critical Admiral you recently sat and chaired a working group on the intergovernmental relationships when you have sea level rise near Hampton Roads how does the local municipalities deal with the bases how do the bases deal with municipalities can you characterize how this particular sea level rise and subsidence issue is driving requirements what do folks actually need to communicate to each other how much planning needs to be done jointly and is it just in I mean Hampton Roads is sort of like the front line of this issue but there are other places where municipalities need to talk to the bases and have frankly on other issues for a long time what are the kinds of things that need to be going back and forth in communication between those two I think the first thing is understanding common standards as an example if the Defense Department is going to plan to adapt to sea level rise implications in the Hampton Roads region over the next period of time 20, 30, 40, 50 years what sea level rise scenario curve are they using to make those plans and how does that compare with what the cities are looking at and what the cities are thinking if they aren't using and planning to the same standard then they aren't ever going to really meet in the middle and we could miss dependencies and interdependencies where we're going to find that infrastructure, roads, highways utilities will need to be upgraded based on one set of circumstances but if the city is using a lower sea level rise scenario curve as an example meaning there won't be as much water at the same time then they won't be prepared they won't be ready so shared common standards is important there are also even though there are many opportunities for the federal facilities and for the local communities to engage with each other we found that there were not a lot of actually structured ways in which that takes place there weren't just there don't appear to be a lot of detailed planning infrastructure updates, meetings memorandums of understanding where they would be sharing information with each other on a routine basis that was actually kind of puzzling and we had in our working group just by chance the stormwater engineers from Little Creek joint expedition based Little Creek the cities of Norfolk and Virginia Beach which are the two cities that surround that area had actually never met and during the course of the working group they were all in the room together they actually were able to meet share data that they wanted from each other for 20 years but they couldn't figure out how to get it so the challenge is of course 20 years ago the need wasn't what it is today so we are seeing some now that there's a greater need there's a greater interest in more established, more routine policies, plans, procedures so that the cities and the federal facilities can actually share and plan together the other challenge of course is budgets the federal government's budget system does not align with what the cities are using it doesn't align with the state budget particularly so the challenge of making all those things fit together to be able to plan to actually execute things where perhaps joint coordination is required that's difficult and then I think the last thing I would say is when you look at the way we deal with flood planning in this country a flood insurance rate map system and the way we determine what is critical infrastructure and how far above base flood elevation do you raise a building if it's critical or if it's not critical well that is based on historical data and what you expect to happen right now this year today we have to change how we think about that because we're planning 50 years into the future you don't want to build a building 50 years into the future saying that's gonna have that lifespan and say let's build it it's critical infrastructure let's build it three feet above the base flood elevation that we have today because in 50 years that's gonna be a different base flood elevation and your building may not be functional so that's a paradigm shift in the way that we think and plan very little flood planning and oh by the way it doesn't just go up it goes out considers future predictions and until we figure out and this is not just the federal DOD issue this is an everybody issue how to prepare for that we're gonna have to be challenged to plan appropriately and to collaborate on planning so what makes Hampton Road so interesting is there's so many cities and so many facilities that are all together that all have to collaborate so it's fascinating and it will be a great challenge for the future so before we go to questions from the audience I actually have somebody who handed me a piece of paper with a question from the audience since they had the forethought to do that they get to go first the question was what is the along the same lines here talking about adaptation and the infrastructure what is the impact of the president's executive orders or appealing of the executive orders on the military so does anybody have any comments on say for example I recall the adaptation executive order what was repealed are there specific impacts that are gonna come from that does anybody have any thoughts on that I would say I wouldn't think so unless something happens here I mean a lot of the pushback we get becomes political and someone says you can't spend money on that on the other hand the military has been very effective I think saying we're not spending us on climate change we're not spending this on renewable energy we're spending us on missing effectiveness it's very hard for someone to come into a commander and say you can't spend this money to make your base more resilient you can't spend this money on your port in order to make you more effective and so I think I mean one of the things that we do not like in the military is we get these edicts that come in because we can have you know people can send us edicts and says you have to do X and generally it's an unfunded mandate so we don't like unfunded mandates people come in and say you have to do this and you're looking to go where's the check that's attached to this there is none and so we have to take very precious money from something else in order to do the mandate so I don't see that as a we're too far down the road we understand this at a very granular level and we can make the case that if you don't do this this is going to be the effect and we won't be able to fly we won't be able to mobilize we won't be able to test or whatever it is if you go down to Eglin and you look at the blockhouses or out on the beach that we have all of our very valuable telemetry in that we do all of this very high-end testing and you can see how undercut they are by the coastal flooding from storms that before would never even reach halfway up the beach then you understand we've got to spend money here or we're going to lose millions, hundreds of millions so I don't think that's a from my perspective and my experience has been is that it makes sense it's a pragmatic practical kind of thing it's not Democrat it's not Republican it's not liberal it's not conservative it's climate it's mother nature mother nature doesn't belong to a party she just trunnels the law but to go to the executive order itself this is tied into the federal flood risk management standard that was promulgated by the last administration two years ago it is clear that everything we've talked about being ready for the future takes that into account just as you said if you're rebuilding and it's focused on rebuilding with federal funds after a disaster the money should go into putting you not back where you were but where you may be in the future and by the way we just spent $15 billion in New Orleans to rebuild the levees with the target height of the levee focused on the 2053 elevation not the 2015 elevation makes a lot of sense why put yourself in the hole the day after you finish the project and so I believe that the people thinking about the infrastructure program that we'll see in the next week or the next two weeks recognize that if you're going to build for the future and not for today and my hope is that we will continue on the path of this federal flood risk management standard just like a do over on that too because I know some folks that work in the insurance industry and work in the insuring of insurance companies in that space and I frankly think this is going to be commercially driven because you're not going to be able to get any kinds of insurance it's like the folks down in Miami Miami has looked at this and said holy smokes if you've been down on a strand down there in Miami you know the road is fairly close just behind the beach and it's pretty cool and they've built that they started building that raising the road and they have these little suitable system of linkage and levers that allow the water not to wash up it stops the water but then water will come out but then when the water gets so high out on in the ocean that one-way valve doesn't go either way and it stops and now all the rain dams up behind it so the people that have all these nice houses on the other side of the road they can't get insurance because their first floor is now classified as a basement so there's all this sort of unintended consequences but it's commercially driven if you're not going to be able to get insurance then you'll think twice about going to your insurance company and saying well how could I get insurance? Can I build to a different, even if I'm not mandated federally can I do something so I can protect myself from a catastrophic loss? And so I think that some of these things that other commercial interests are going to weigh in on this and more or less forces to do forces to do the right thing without governmental rules and regulations. So I'd like to get a couple questions from the audience if we could, we have a room full of staffers I'd really be interested in hearing what people are in fact interested in and we've got about 20 more minutes left. We have a wandering mic going around and if you could wait before you ask your question until you get the mic just so that we have it fed into the tape, the video. So there's the mic, does anybody have any questions? Don't worry, I have a page full if nobody wants to raise their hand and be on television I'll keep going. Do we have any? We got at least one there. So first off, thank you so much for coming to speak with us today and answer the questions that were presented and in regards to my own question the idea of mitigation, risk mitigation as a whole kind of focused on adaptation, infrastructure, planning, forethought in that realm but in terms of mitigating the impact that humans might have on climate change is that also just a language aspect with the current administration and past administrations of not trying to create barriers to what you can do internally or what is the lack of kind of talk on mitigating the military's impact on the environment? So you're talking about emissions at this point, right? Well, let me do like 30 seconds even as the moderator I'm gonna answer a little bit because I was, you know, sort of, I ran the installations in an environment office when we were getting the greenhouse gas requirements down on us and we still thought about the problem, like it was about energy efficiency was about money, not about emissions. Renewable energy projects were about resilience and savings, frankly, and not about lowering emissions. Those were good benefits to have as well but it wasn't why we were doing what we were doing. Did anybody else have any thoughts that they wanted to add? Yeah, I'll just say, you know, when you get to mitigation, here's the thing you have to understand and I hope everybody will take this one to heart because you may have heard this old saw that goes around and says the Department of Defense is the largest single user of energy in the United States, right, you heard that, right? The percentage of that, in order to be the largest single user is 1.7% of all energy that's used in the United States. We run on equivalent of about 350,000 barrels, I think it is, a day. Versus, you know, big U.S. has run on what, 20 million barrels a day, pick a number, but it's a lot bigger. So, if the DOD goes out of business tomorrow, we really don't move the needle on mitigation. I mean, our contribution, now we're gonna try and be good stewards, we're gonna try and, you know, fly our airplanes and sail our ships very efficiently or we're gonna use alternative non-polluting fuel where it's possible and we're gonna do all of those things because it makes mission sense and budget sense for us, but this is one of these things that we can't win this for. We can show why it's important and why we believe in it, et cetera, but we're not gonna be able to win this one because we just don't have the market throw, we don't have the volume to make it happen. So, from mitigation standpoint, that's gonna be very, I mean, we will do what we can do and we'll do the right thing, but that's not gonna fix it because you're still gonna have 98% of the budget that needs to be fixed. That said, and I agree with General Keyes on that point, when the military lowers its carbon boot print, so to speak, it's also able to provide leadership as it has in other technologies and innovation throughout the years. In the transition, if you go back in the transition from steam to coal to oil to nuclear, all forms of energy, the United States military was at the forefront of leading those massive transitions in energy. Today, the US military, while not alone, is among those leading in that transition to diversifying its energy mix. Of course, it's gonna continue to operate on forms of fossil energy for the foreseeable future. That said, when I was in the Department of Defense, the way that we budgeted for oil, it was essentially a tax on the rest of the defense budget. It would come in at the end of the year, after the services, the Army, Navy, Air Force, everybody else built their budget to do whatever they needed and then if the price of fuel had gone up that year, then it was an extra cost on the military. So there was, in some ways, there's a direct incentive to be more fuel efficient because then you can use those funds for military readiness, training, other operations, equipment. And at the same time, being more innovative, being more efficient, improve security of energy security and energy resilience. That's why Secretary of Defense Mattis, when he was commanding our forces in Iraq, famously said, unleash us from the tether of fuel. That didn't necessarily mean unleash us completely from fossil energy but unleash us from the long supply lines that are putting our soldier, sailors, airmen and marines at risk in convoying fuel to the front. And in those 10 years, since he made those comments, the military has gotten very busy, diversifying and innovating in being able to reduce the burden on our forces of those long logistics supply lines. I would add to that, the military has set the example in our relations with our partners overseas, they're very impressed by what the US military has done and they are following it. So words do matter and my personal opinion is there's such a thing as a climate that's created, the climate right now is when you go overseas or you go to an installation or people come here from other countries, they say, you're with it. The question will be, will they draw some other conclusion even if we continue the pace but take a different public stance on it? So I think it's important, the MAB has said in its two previous reports, the United States must take a leadership position in dealing with climate change across the board. And so I don't think we ought to forget that even though we are gonna pursue, I would argue that the military will pursue active actions but will at the same time be guiding and listening to and talking to our allies. All right, do we have another question? Oh, do you have the mic? Thank you for speaking with us. I have a quick question about the relationship between Congress and the DOD. So are there particular things that Congress can do outside of the allocation of funding to help the DOD in mitigating some of the risks you guys have spoken about today? Does anyone want to take that? How can Congress be helpful? I think that's probably one of the highlights is the fact that Congress will invite members of the DOD to come over and sit down and talk. Now we would prefer to talk in an office call. Open testimony does not enthrall me. I don't think most people are enthralled with open testimony because all of you understand it's high theater sometimes. But we need to get down to where we can talk about why we're doing what we're doing, why we believe it's the right thing to do, and have that pragmatic discussion around the table rather than jockeying for position or having a mic thrust in front of us so now we're on the news. That's just not useful. I think generally speaking, the folks on the Armed Services Committee that I dealt with back in the day, that's where we get our work done. So I think that ask us why we ask DOD, why do you do this? It's not because we think it's something cool to do. I mean, we're pretty busy, so we really don't have time to do cool stuff. We have got to do stuff that's focused on mission effectiveness. And I think everyone would be happy to explain that, say this is why we're doing it, this is why we need to do it. If you need to take the peers down at Norfolk and you need to build them higher, that's a discussion we should be able to have. It's one of those things, the unthinkable happen even if you don't think about it. So we need to think about it and we need to talk about it. Nothing should be able, you shouldn't be able, someone shouldn't be able to say, I don't want you talking about that. That's not good because we're not sharing the information and we both have. So I think that's important. I would, this kind of gets back to the executive order question too and the challenge is with the rescission of the executive order, what does that impose within the Department of Defense? It's mind doubt. Right. What are we allowed to do? What are we not allowed to do? Does this mean that things that I had planned that were mitigating or resiliency strategies or infrastructure corrections, changes, upgrades, modifications, I can't do them now? Does this mean I can't use certain words? Does this mean I can't execute plans that I already had in place? That the doubt is the problem and right now there is some doubt because there's concern that if the military speaks openly about what it's trying to do and why it's trying to do it, it will be told to stop. That's bad. We don't want that to happen. So what we really need, I think what the Defense Department would be, would appreciate from Congress is the opportunity to have that conversation and the opportunity to say, here's why I need to do this and here's what I'm doing it to prepare for and be straightforward about it and that this is an impact to our national security and we have to prepare for it at the end. So the implication, I just wanted to throw a clarifying note out there. So the implication is that if Congress was to be clear that DOD can go about its normal resilience and adaptation plans and execute those that that has nothing to do with the political discussion that's going on here. The other thing I would say and adaptation planning is critical to future preparation to execute our mission. And doing it right is important. It would be interesting to ask the members how many of them had had the opportunity to talk about the relationship between the bases and the military or the people that live off post and what they've done to think about climate change together. What are the adaptation steps they have to take together? I've met people that have spent a lot of time with their members and others where the, just as you said about even on our own military installation not meeting everybody, where we don't have the two working together and the Congress can be a great spur to having that sort of joint effort to look at the future. All right, I think we have time for, based on the length of these answers, one more question. I see a hand up in the back. The mic can get up over there. Hi, thank you all for coming here today and speaking with us. My main question is you talked a lot about the effects that we're seeing with the linkage between climate change and rising sea levels. I was wondering what kind of effects are we seeing away from those coastal areas, more in the mid range where you're not as close to rivers or lakes. Thank you. Everybody's close to a river. I'll tell you that as we've learned and we are seeing challenges right now across the nation with the effects of larger storms and when they come more intense storms. All you have to do is go to Houston or Baton Rouge or other cities in this country where there are problems. That same thing can happen to military installations. So what here before had not been a problem has now become a big problem. And we're working on, as I mentioned or said in the introduction, I'm working on the challenge of urban flooding in the United States, which is hardly ever seen because it doesn't last for more than two or three days, just gets your house wet. But if you're very poor, you have a very difficult time. The same thing, if you have older barracks at military installations and you get these intense rainfall events or we've talked about the temperature rise you have in places in the United States it's just too hot to train. Well, that's a problem for it. So it's not just coastal. There's all sorts of things including where we don't have these great concrete runways. Asphalt on roads and runways in intense heat can be certainly a problem when you get the temperature too high. I worked on a pilot project in Hampton Roads Region which you've heard. There were in addition to that two other DOD pilots. One was in Mountain Home Air Force Base and the other was Michigan Army and Air National Guard. Both of those pilots were largely focused on drought, fire issues to some extent, flash flooding but a whole different set of circumstances than sea level rise and recurrent flooding. So three very different regions, three very different challenges, all climate driven. That just reminded me that Mountain Home was one of my bases. One of the big issues with Mountain Home is aquifers drying up. And then it goes through this kabuki dance of how to get water out of the Snake River and get it to Mountain Home because it's a great place, it's got great capability but the issue there is not enough water and that's one of those non-refilling aquifers. And so you start looking around in fact OSD and the services are looking, surveying the bases saying where is water gonna be a problem? The closer you get to the coast, then you start to have salt water intrusion and that's a whole other set of problems. And then some of the highlands you end up, you're just not gonna have enough water. How do we protect that capability? And then you start looking at, from a national standpoint, in some areas we got way too much water in some of the rivers and some of the rivers we haven't got enough water but that was the water we were planning on generating electricity with. So it's all of that kind of, we gotta start looking at those kind of things and again it goes back to, how bad could it be? Could we stand that? Tactically and dollar-wise, what could we do to get this back to something that will work and when do we have to start and how do we know we're making progress and then you always ask the question, what if we're wrong? We don't have enough money to waste, we need to have a plan that's adaptable and we can look ahead. And I think that, as Sherry has said, that we have spent a lot of brain power looking at this. I think we're a pretty good example of how to look at this and think about how to move ahead. Cause it's, I remember saying when we were working on renewable energy, particularly for fossil fuel, that doesn't solve our problem because if you gotta get 500 miles deep to refill your tank, it doesn't matter whether you're carrying a biofuel or a fossil fuel, you still gotta get 500 miles deep. But I was trying to explain to people why we were interested in this. I said, look, no commander wants to write a letter home. You know, dear Mr. and Mrs. Smith, I was so enthralled with renewable energy that I got your son or daughter into the valley of death and ran them out of fuel and they're dead. I mean, that's not, we don't want that. By the same token, I don't want to write that letter and saying, I didn't focus enough on fuel availability and I get your son or daughter into the valley of death and I got them killed. And I said, that's a serious kind of, when we look at this stuff, this is not sort of academic. These are real people, shedding real blood in faraway places and we gotta make sure that we've got the capability to keep them as absolutely as well-equipped, well-led and as well-protected as we possibly can. All right, we've got like three minutes left. I see a little hand peeking up there. If it's a short question, we can do this. You've touched a bunch on this, but so given the projected budget and the projected agenda, do you feel like you'll be able to accomplish what you need to secure mission operations, et cetera, awareness training? Or do you feel like that agenda or budget may hamper you in certain ways? So before anybody answers, let me clarify that nobody here is in the Department of Defense right now and it might be a challenge to answer that question, but if anybody wants to take a whack at it, they can. All right, I'll go ahead and, oh, if you want to go, go. It's a good question and the challenge right now is that there's a lot of uncertainty in the system about the extent to which the planning, the responsible planning preparation for resilience, for adaptation, from training to operations to installations can continue to go forward. And that's because of the actions of recent weeks. And so it's important. I mean, I think Secretary Mattis's statements on the record are very important, but it needs to follow through throughout, it needs to be communicated throughout the Defense Department. It needs to be heard here on Capitol Hill. It was reflected in the statements by the new Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coase, when he was up here on the Hill, testifying not long ago about recognizing climate change is a threat, but it needs to continue to be heard at all levels of command and in all parts of the services and throughout the U.S. government, really, so that the agencies that have been doing the work and the universities and the others that have been supporting that work can continue to plan in a responsible way and protect the American people. So let me, because I can't resist and I used to be the Deputy Comptroller of the Defense Department, I have to answer the budget question. There isn't a climate change line in the DOD budget. This is more about how you spend money than what you spend. If I am gonna build a new building and I decide not to build it in a floodplain, is that climate change spending or did I need that building anyway? Is how am I spending my money rather than what money am I spending? I think is the key question and DOD wants to be able to take risks into account. That's the crucial point. Don't make me do something stupid in either side of the equation. I don't wanna waste a lot of money putting in a project that doesn't have a return on investment either, but if I can avoid a risk by spending my money smarter, if I need to replace a pier because I need to replace the pier and I wanna build it a little bit higher so it lasts longer, why wouldn't I be able to do that? So that's more what it's all about. All right, we are at the end of our time. I'm gonna give our panelists a last opportunity to give sort of a 30-second closure and then we'll hand it back. Anybody? No, all right. So everybody wants to be finished up. I think, Carol, were you gonna give closing comments? I had it on my agenda. Thanks very much. And on behalf of our whole partnership, we want to express our appreciation to all of you for being here, for those of you who are watching online. Thank you and please feel free to follow up with the center with EESI in terms of any other questions or issues that you would like us to try and address in the future. These issues are profoundly important and we really need to be about problem solving and doing the best that we all can because we're all in the soup together. So thank you again very, very much for coming and thank you, wonderful, wonderful panel. Terrific.