 Welcome, everybody. I'm Sharon Burke. I'm the president of Ecospherics and a long time associate at New America. So I'm just thrilled to be here today with my New America colleagues to bring you this very important conversation about climate change and national security and what it means at the Department of Defense specifically. We have wonderful speakers with you. I'm going to introduce them to you. We're gonna hear from them and then we'll have time for your questions. So let me get started. I'm first going to talk about Colin Kahl who is the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy. I know many of you who are joining us today probably have been in the Pentagon and have experienced there, but I can tell you it's really a small city. Like it even has its own stores and its own banks and its own DMV. And when you walk the halls, you run into people as like your neighbors in a small town. And one day a long time ago when I was working there, I ran into a former boss of mine who was at the time the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Michelle Flournoy. And we were chatting in the shop and I asked her, she had just hired a former colleague of both of ours, Colin Kahl at the time. And I asked her how Colin was doing. Now I knew him as a scholar who had written pathbreaking work on the roots of instability and the role that environment plays in that. And I was curious how he was doing now that he was in the Pentagon. And she just smiled in this sort of serene Michelle Flournoy way and said, it's amazing how much work you can get done when you don't care about who gets credit for your work. Now I don't think Colin would mind my saying that that's not necessarily what I was expecting her to say, but he did go on to have a really respected career or a tenure at the Department of Defense as a leader there. And then he went to be the National Security Advisor to the Vice President of the United States who of course was Joe Biden at the time. Colin is now the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy which is the number three position in the department, number three civilian position in the department. And it's a very important job for setting the strategy, the plans, the way the department functions. It's hard to overstate how important this is as a leadership role. So it's great to have him here with us today. And we also are joined by UC on your screen, Mr. Joe Bryan. I think the first time I met Joe he was a professional staff member on the Senate Armed Services Committee. And I think that first conversation with him he was actually really, really worried about the security of the nation's electric grid system. Well, he took those concerns right into the Department of Defense working for the Navy where he took actions to build energy resilience for the Navy. And then did that again in the private sector. So it's no surprise at all that the Secretary of Defense would ask him to come back to the department as the first Senior Advisor for Climate Change. So I'm just thrilled to have both of them here today to have this conversation with us. And I wanna start with the Undersecretary. So Undersecretary Call, my opening question for you is just can you talk to us about why climate change at the Department of Defense? What does it mean for the Defense mission? And for all the other things that you're worried about that you're working on all the time? Thanks, Sharon. It's great to be with you again, a dear friend and I wish we could be in person but maybe there's always next year. It's great to also be with all of you who are sharing us in this discussion online. So I mean, the fact that the Department of Defense has taken climate change more seriously is just a reflection of the fact that climate change is literally changing the world. It is producing heat waves, droughts, floods, more frequent and extreme weather events but it's also changing the underlying operating environment that the Department of Defense is going to have to conduct its operations and missions for the foreseeable future. In some places like the Arctic, for example, accelerated climate change is opening up the Arctic and its valuable natural resources for greater competition in the international arena. And this is really kind of a place where kind of geopolitical and geostrategic competition is smashing into climate change. In other parts of the globe, the stresses that climate change is creating on food systems in terms of water scarcity, the pressures it's putting in terms of human migration is destabilizing countries, especially already fragile states or creating a push factor that is driving people to leave their countries and head for other places, whether that be from Central America towards our borders or from the Sahel in Africa toward Europe. And there are examples in the Middle East and elsewhere. And so at the Department of Defense, we can envision a proliferation of missions in the future in which climate change will directly impact what we get called upon to do. So that could be disaster relief and humanitarian response overseas. It could be interventions in an increasingly unstable landscapes. It could also be frankly, the degree to which the department is called upon to assist civilian authorities here in the United States. And just to give you one data point, Sharon, so five years ago, I think the National Guard in the United States was called on to do about 14,000 person hours of firefighting in the United States. This year, it has been more than 170,000 person hours of firefighting by the National Guard. That is just an extraordinary burden on our National Guard, but it's reflective of the fact that, we oftentimes, every year, it seems like it's the worst fire season of the century so far. But one way to think about it is, unfortunately, this year is probably the best fire season for the rest of this century because climate change is just getting worse and worse. Before coming back to the Pentagon, I was living in Northern California and my kids didn't have snow days after all it's California, they had smoke days. Couple of weeks, every year, they couldn't go to school because the smoke was so bad from wildfires burning throughout California. So this is impacting all of us and it's gonna impact the way the department does its business. Let me give you one other example and that really relates to the pressure it's putting on U.S. installations and infrastructure around the world and how these things can come together. So in March of 2019, Mozambique experienced the most significant cyclone in the country's history. It flooded such a wide expanse of Mozambique that it was flooding the size of Luxembourg. You could see the flooding from outer space and on the exact same day, Omaha, Nebraska was hammered with extreme weather and off at Air Force Base, which happens to be the headquarters of DoD's nuclear strategic command found itself seven feet underwater. And just six months prior to that, in late 2018, we had bases in North Carolina and Florida hammered by hurricanes. People having to leave bases, aircraft having to flee to higher ground, it generated billions of dollars of damage to U.S. installations. And if you saw the wreckage on these bases, I mean, frankly, no terrorist organization has done that amount of damage in the past few years to American installations in the United States, but climate change has. So if we do not take this issue seriously as a department, we are not tackling the current security environment. Okay, so it's about the mission, it's about the security environment. It's about IHADR and DISCA, it's about the built infrastructure. So the next question, natural question is what are you doing about it? You have a brand new document that just came out, the Defense Climate Risk Analysis. Can you talk to us about that and what the significance of that document is? Sure, and I think really, I think one way to think of the DCRA, which was released last week alongside a number of other documents put out by other government agencies and departments is really the department's effort to kind of paint the landscape of the strategic risk that climate change is causing across the board to use the best data, the best science to basically map out the types of challenges that the United States is gonna have to face in the security arena as a consequence of climate change and what types of missions that will produce for the department, all the ones Sharon that you mentioned in terms of defense support to civilian authority, humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, crisis response, but also things like the department having to operate in harsher climates. Now that could be in places like the Arctic where the climate will remain harsh but access to the Arctic will increase and our infrastructure will be eroded or it could be facilities in the Indo-Pacific that become more difficult to operate around at the very same time that we're trying to compete with China in the Indo-Pacific. So really the DCRA is really meant to kind of map out the risk factors that are likely to drive missions for the Department of Defense. And we do that because to show the urgency of getting after this problem, adapting to it, mitigating it, but also planning around it. And one of the things that I have to do in my job is to make sure that the department's strategic documents and policy documents represent the real security challenges that we face. You know, the Secretary of Defense has said, you know, first and foremost, China is our pacing challenge and that is absolutely right. But we don't face a choice between state actors being a challenge to our security and these big transnational shocks being a threat to our security. Both are a threat to our security and we have to be able to address both. That was made clear in the Interim National Security Strategic Guidance that the Biden administration put out at the beginning of the administration. It'll be reflected in the national defense strategy that we publish early next year. And I just see the DCRA as the next step to making sure that the urgency of the climate crisis is integrated into our thinking in the building. Great, and I want to let all of our viewers know that they can read the report. I believe that we have a link on your screen in the lower right-hand corner by clicking on the button and I would encourage you to read it. It's a first time the department has put something like this out that pertains to strategy and mission. But of course, I want to come back to what you said about China, but before I do that, sticking with the DCRA, great words, it's a really good document, but what comes next? Like how do you implement it? How do you bring it to life? So a couple of things. So first, its findings will be integrated into the national defense strategy, which is the guiding document for how the department thinks about the world and organizes itself. I mean, the NDS is itself nested under the national security strategy and we will expect that the national security strategy will come out next year. It will surprise no one that climate will also be a prominent theme in that document. So the next turn of the crank will be in the national defense strategy, but we'll also see it operationalized in how our services are doing their planning and their investments. We'll see it in how the combatant commands are thinking about their campaign plans and their approach to the various parts of the world that they deal with. You'll also see in the coming months some organizational changes in my own office and OSD policy to make sure that we're dealing with issues like climate change and energy and the Arctic that we're taking these issues with the growing strategic seriousness of it. So, I'm not the budgets guy. I'm not the operations guy. I'm kind of the policy and strategy guy. And so my job is to make sure that the realities of the climate crisis are kind of a through line through our various strategic and policy documents. But I also know where the rubber hits the road is in what we're actually doing in a department to mitigate some of these challenges and adapt to them. And that's really where Joe comes in and I'm sure you'll have lots to talk to him about. Yes, that's a perfect TEP. And I think I'll take the cue and go over to you, Joe. So the DCRA was a fascinating document. It was a first time thing, but it was preceded by like a week by the climate adaptation plan, which was super ambitious. I mean, that is an eye-opening piece of work. Can you talk to us about what that document says and what it means for the department? Yeah, and thanks, Sharon. And thanks to New America for putting this together. It's a pleasure to be sitting next to Colin and I get to sit here and learn from all his experience. And I think Colin's team and the whole policy shop really did an amazing job of putting this DCRA together. And it's as Colin referred, I mean, this is really a foundational document. It's the first time we've done this sort of thing. So I think it's incredibly important. They did a great job putting it together and it complements the document that you refer to, which is the climate adaptation plan. But first, I think something that the concept that's really important is that, climate isn't just something that happens to us. It's the context within which everything we do sits. And so climate impacts the United States. It'll impact our military, but it also impacts our allies and partners and it impacts our adversaries and competitors. And I think an important thing to think about is is the country, the alliances that are best able to handle that that are most resilient to the challenges that climate change poses will have a strategic advantage. And so I think this isn't a competition between what's good for the climate and what's good for the mission in any respect. It is really that the country, the alliances that are best able to manage what we know is going to become an increasingly harsh reality of climate change is going to be best positioned to capture the future. So the climate adaptation plan as a compliment to the DCRA is really a roadmap to ensure that the Department of Defense can continue to operate under changing climate conditions and maintain operational capability and in fact, even enhance operational capability in the face of climate change. And it has five lines of effort. As you mentioned, it's incredibly ambitious. The acquisition and sustainment folks put that together. I think, you know, Richard Kidd and his team and they did a fabulous job of putting together a document that as you say, is quite ambitious and it's first of its kind for the department. Five lines of effort under the cap. One is climate informed decision making. So one, do we have the right science? Do we have the right intelligence? Do we have the right business processes to be able to manage what we know is going to be a challenge to our organization? And that's a big question for the department. As you know, it's a complicated place with lots of data centers and lots of people doing lots of different things. And we need to make sure that our decision processes that we're operating from a standard, that we're all looking at standard operating procedure, we're all looking at the same data, the same intelligence to make sure that we make good decisions around climate. Second is train, test and equip a climate ready for us. Are we putting in place the right kinds of material requirements? Do we have the right training? Are we integrating climate into our exercises in order to make sure that we're ready to face the kind of threats from climate that we're likely to face in the future? The third is a resilient climate, a resilient built in natural infrastructure. And this, Colin referred to, this gets a lot of attention, right? Look across the United States, look across the world and you see the impact of severe weather and climate on our installations. It runs from anywhere from wildfires out west and we've had evacuations just in the past couple months on defense installation, setting aside the fact that we're spending tremendous amounts of National Guard resources and people time fighting fires in time that could be spent doing other things. We have huge costs that we're incurring from hurricanes. We have river and flooding that Colin referred to out in an office. So across the country and around the world we're seeing tremendous challenges associated with a changing climate, both for our infrastructure and to our training spaces. Look, we have to curtail a live fire training sometimes in the face of drought. So these things are all getting worse rather than getting better. And there are things we're gonna have to contend with in the climate adaptation plan is our roadmap to getting after that. The fourth line of effort is supply chain. And I think this is one that we've all become all too familiar with over the past couple of years. I think COVID really exposed for us some vulnerabilities and critical materials for the United States and supply chains and the Department of Defense and the rest of the country is gonna have challenges associated with climate change. Look, our defense industrial base exists around the country, our facilities exist around the country and around the world and they are not immune from the impacts of climate and we need to make sure that we're gonna be able to get what we need when we need it. And so we need to better understand where are those critical links in the chain that we need to improve the resilience of? I'll just mention one example. We have, there's a facility out in Missouri, Lake City Army Ammunition Plant which produces a huge amount of the small caliber ammunition for the department. It also happens to be on the Army's list of the base's most at risk from climate. So we need to think about that and understand what the implications of a climate event could be for our supply chain and critical materials at what Colin referred to as some of the most inopportune moments, right? And the last line of effort under the Climate Adaptation Plan is really about collaboration. This is not, the Department of Defense cannot solve this problem on its own. We need to work across the interagency to figure out what are our risks, how to mitigate those risks and then certainly we need to work with our allies and partners who obviously are gonna be impacted by the same challenges. And that is gonna be critical again to going back to the context. The alliances and the countries that are best able to manage what is now inevitable in the face of climate change are gonna be best positioned for strategic advantage in the future. So CAP and the DCRA together are foundational documents for the department setting a path forward to address what we all know as a growing threat. So people are lighting up the screens with questions. So I'm gonna get to those in just a second but I can't let you go Joe without geeking out on operational energy because you know how hard it is. So are there any major initiatives, any big programs coming down the line that we should know about when it comes to and operational energy for those who are, looks like we got a lot of experts in our audience but the energy that we need to achieve the mission, the training and all of that and that we need better technologies, better kinds of energy, anything that we should know in that space that's coming down the line. Well, to take a step back, first of all Sharon, your foundational work in the Department of Defense on operational energy is, in fact, some of the folks who used to work in your shop are now holding positions across the department. So your legacy is- Those people are the ones that did all the work. It's good to say. Yeah, all right, well anyway, they're here, they're here and they're doing great work. So thanks for that. What I think is really important is for us to take a step back even before you get to operational energy and acknowledge the fact that the world has fundamentally changed around energy in the past decade. We are in the middle of a major transformation in global energy systems. A couple of statistics. The International Energy Agency says that over the next two years, 90% of the capacity additions to electric grid globally will be renewables, 90%. If you look at the auto industry, I mean, anybody who's watching TV can tell that something's happening with electrification in the transportation sector. And the pace and scale of change in transportation with GM committing $35 billion to transformation forward, all the major auto companies moving that direction. That is serious implications for energy globally, for the US economy, but also for the Department of Defense. And I think that we need to recognize that the direction of travel on energy markets is clear and understand what that means for us economically, but also for defense capabilities. And what I'd say on, and this is something you know really well, Sharon, that is that there is not a competition between kind of advanced energy, clean energy and defense capability or doing the mission. In fact, they're quite complimentary. Things like, you know, we talked a little bit about the resilience of our installations. Our installations rely on the public electric grid for their power. What we know is that grid's at risk from things like climate, but also things like cyber attacks. Look at, we had the pioneer pipeline attack just a few months ago. And how do you get more resilient in the face of those kind of threats? Well, you get really efficient. You reduce your demand, so make sure you don't take pressure off the grid. You do things like put distributed generation, things like solar panels that don't require logistic support or battery storage. You put them on site to support critical missions. So those missions can stay up and running even if you take the public grid down. Now, that's critical to the mission. It also happens to be good for the climate. So credible alignment around that. And operationally, and this is I think what it read in your wheelhouse, you know, we have a joint warfighting concept and one of the key pillars, one of the four key pillars of that joint warfighting concept is contested logistics. And what we know is we're gonna have a fight getting logistics into theater when we need it and where we need it. And the fact is that one of the best ways to address contested logistics to require fewer logistics in the first place. So the more efficient we can be at the tactical edge, the more efficient we can be in our operations, the less we'll require of our logistics and the more we can mitigate the risk for contested logistics. Now, that is essential to the mission. It also happens to be quite good for the climate. So I think the thrust of our work in operational energy and the thrust, even of our work around resilience of our facilities is that what we're doing is good for the climate but it's absolutely essential for the mission. And we can get into specific programs but I think as a conceptual idea, we need to... Well, that's great. Yeah. No, that's great. And actually what you were just talking about with contested logistics reminded me something I wanted to come back to with undersecretary call, which is you talked about China. Not that those two things are connected but you talked about China. And I think there's been some concern that all this emphasis on climate change takes away the focus from China. Can you talk about that and whether or not there's an opportunity cost for a department that's talking about climate change when it should be laser focused on China? Yeah. I was smiling, because there's this sense that, oh, you're focusing on these issues. You won't be able to focus on China. Let me make one thing absolutely clear. And the secretary of defense says this a couple of times a week. China is the pacing challenge for the Department of Defense. China is the only country that can challenge us systemically across the board, militarily, technologically, economically, diplomatically. They have a very different system. They envision a very different global order and they are driving hard toward that future. We are in an intense competition with China. It has profound security implications. There is zero risk that the Department of Defense is not gonna take China seriously enough, zero. And there will be climate change in the NDS. There'll be a lot of China in the NDS. So there's no risk of that. But more of it is along the lines of what Joe talked about, which is actually these issues are more intertwined and I think sometimes the skeptics or the critics may think. So first of all, in places like the Arctic, climate change is actually accelerating competition with peers and New York peer competitors. Not just Russia, which is an Arctic nation, but also China, which has aspirations for commercial and resource endeavors in the Arctic and is kind of using scientific endeavors to plant the flag in various ways. There is a lot of ways in which climate change is gonna force countries around the world to adapt. Even if we take dramatic actions to slow the rate of carbon going into the atmosphere, more global warming is inevitable. It's only about the rate. Some degree of global warming is inevitable, which means there will be a race for resilience, a race for adaptation. And the countries that are able to roll with the punches and the militaries that are able to roll with the climate punches better will be in a better competitive position. That'll be true here in the homeland without vis-a-vis China. It will be true in the Indo-Pacific as we continue to project power forward into the Indo-Pacific. It's also true of the resilience of our allies and partners around the world. And frankly, our ace in the hole vis-a-vis China is the fact that we have a global network of allies and partners and they don't. And so there's a big piece of that. And then the last piece is that on issues like supply chain and logistics, the things we're doing to make our supply chains more resilient and to make those changes in operational energy to make us less vulnerable and more resilient. Frankly, we need to be doing all of those things even if climate change wasn't happening, largely because of the challenge that countries like China pose now to our critical infrastructure and to our logistics in the event of certain contingencies. So we don't see any trade-off between the investments that we need to make on the climate front and the challenges that we need to address on that front and making sure that we remain laser focused on China as our pacing challenge. You mentioned allies and partners and so did you, Joe. We have a number of questions coming in from Bob Barnes, Jeff DeBelko, a lot of people with a lot of expertise in this space about allies and partners and how, first of all, is what you're doing at the department something that you are doing as also with allies and partners about how this effort affects them or engages them. Is there anything on that that you can talk to both of you? I would just say as a general matter, a lot of the risk assessment tools that we are trying to develop to bring the best science and data to bear to identify those pieces, you know, parts of our infrastructure, our installations, they're at risk and some of the changes that we can make to make them more resilient. So the risk identification piece, but then the risk mitigation piece are all skill sets, technologies, data resources that can be done in collaboration with, in some cases transferred to help our allies and partners become more resilient too. And no NATO has made a big push on this. So, Joe, anything else on how we work with allies and partners on these issues? No, I think Colin said it well. We obviously are engaged with NATO and all the climate planning they're doing. I think it's really important work, engage regularly in bilateral conversations, not mostly me, it's mostly Colin and his team who do that, but climate is a prominent topic in that. And the one of note, I think most folks on the list and in here probably paid attention this April when the secretary actually assembled a bunch of ministers' offense from around the world as part of the president's climate leaders summit and talked about as a group what the implications of climate are for their own militaries and ministries of defense. And one thing that I thought was really striking during that conversation, it was something that the Iraqi minister defense said. And he said that in his country, climate-induced drought contributes to unrest and quote, undermines our stability and poses an existential threat to national security in his country. And so I think the recognition that climate is a threat, that drought is a threat. I mean, the Iraqi minister of defense said that ISIS understands the risk to the government of drought and the lack of water and is targeting things like the Mosul Dam for the very purposes of impacting the government. So the idea that these changes we're seeing in the climate don't have impact on countries around the world and our security environment is just mistaken. This is a really good, the Iraqi example is a good one because whether it's Iraq or Syria or Yemen or countries in the Horn of Africa or in the Sahel, the places where we are seeing violent extremist organizations get the most traction, frankly, are in a lot of the countries that are at greatest risk for already experiencing climate stress and are at the greatest risk moving forward. I think that's a great point. And so not only is it important for understanding instability and where it comes from, which is again, something that you've been meeting the charge on it for a long time, it's also really necessary for constructing peace. And so a lot of the work that might come out of your risk analysis might be your civilian counterparts that will have to carry it out. That's just my editorial comment. One of the other really smart comments we got in here, I mean, the questions are amazing, but one of them is from David Titley who's a retired two-star Navy admiral, former meteorologist and oceanographer of the Navy. And he asked a very pointed question, which is who are your three and four-star and SES champions? In other words, how do you make it difficult to go backwards on this kind of work that you're talking about? I might actually ask Joe to start, since he has to interact day-to-day on these issues within the department. I do think as just a, I think we need to do more to build these champions that part of the effort is to build organizations and instill in our planning documents and in our service priorities and other things, a set of directives, but also a set of organizations and incentive structures, precisely so we generate champions over time. But Joe, you have to grapple with it on a daily basis. And just to throw in there that Andrea Cameron from the Naval Academy asked precisely that, Colin, which is how do you institutionalize at the combatant commands and elsewhere? So that's a great point. And if you want to elaborate on it, but Joe, what do you see as far as your champions and how do you actually make this something that sticks? Yeah, so I'll give a lot of credit to the services. I know they're all working on their own plans to integrate climate into how it impacts their operations to make sure that they can address the challenges that it poses to their forces. I mean, look, we have one of the things we've done, which I think has been quite useful is bringing people to the table for a conversation about why climate matters. And the secretary in one of the first things he did actually when I first came on board was to establish a climate working group. And the climate working group includes representation from all the Department of Defense OSD components, but it also includes the services and includes the military and includes the joint staff. And so everybody comes to the table and we have a common understanding or at least a common presentation and a way to engage on climate at a senior level. So people understand kind of some of the things that we've talked about today, some of the challenges that we are aware of and things that maybe they're not always exposed to. I think another thing that we've done and the way we talk about this is to talk about how climate aligns with operational requirements. You gotta take, we gotta be able to take away the view that there's a competition somehow here between what we're doing with respect to climate and advanced energy and what we do with respect to mission. And I think we need to educate across the department on why that's the case. But I mean, I think it's, we have the fundamental advantage of it being true. And so the persuasion case is one of just getting people around the table to listen. So we're working hard at that across the OSD components but also with each of the services. And as you know, Sharon, you come to work every day and you'll work at it. And so that's what we're doing. We show up, we're showing up and we're having this conversation. Sometimes it's easy and sometimes it's not so easy but that doesn't prevent us from having it. I'll just say a couple of things. And I think we've made some meaningful progress. I think we probably have more to go to identify an institutionalized champions for this but I'll just give you a couple of things. First, I think the service secretaries are seized with this issue because they understand the impact on training, readiness, our infrastructure, installations, all of that. And it frankly, there's a whole host of resiliency measures of which climate is only a piece that really have to be at the heart of a lot of what the services are doing. We also have, so the service secretaries will need to be champions. Our OSD component that focuses on acquisition and sustainment is where a lot of the climate and operational issues have traditionally lived. They continue to be active advocates for this inside the building to make sure we're prioritizing this right. I think one place where we haven't done enough frankly is my own organization where we have not had a designated point person in OSD policy. For those of you who don't know very much about the Pentagon, like what is this OSD policy thing? I mean, one way to think about it is that OSD policy is kind of like the National Security Council staff for the Secretary of Defense. And so if we're gonna say that this is a national priority and it's a priority for the department then it needs to be a priority for my organization too. So we're gonna be making some organizational changes in the coming weeks and months to make sure that we have an organization that champions these issues and that it is resourced to champion these issues to make sure that it gets integrated into all of the various documents that we oversee, national defense strategy, but also the contingency planning guidance, the combatant command campaign plans. There's a whole bunch of ways in which policy can drive prioritization. And then after a number of years as we keep ramping up, people will need to look at the scorecard and keep us accountable for the commitments we're making. So that was a very tantalizing detail you threw in there that you're gonna create a new position for climate and Arctic. I assume that's what you were saying. Any more specific on when we might see that person emerge? I will let the criminal analogist read between the lines since I have not rolled out my reorganization yet, but we will have a senior person who deals with a whole range of these issues and we'll probably announce that in the coming in the next few weeks. I think you have criminology. We have two questions here, one from Andy Roberts at IDA and one that's an anonymous person who's foot stomping this question, which is you talked about Russia and China and about climate change as an exacerbating factor, but is there also the possibility that it gives us a way to cooperate with Russia and China? It's an interesting question. Any thoughts on that? Yeah, I think the answer is probably different for the two countries. I think that it's absolutely essential that both countries take steps to substantially reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. There's no doubt about that. Russia is economy is almost entirely reliant on fossil fuels. So they have a vested interest in in some cases slowing down a transition to a more renewable and energy efficient world. I think in the context of high oil and gas prices right now in Europe, for example, I think that puts Russia in the catbird seat geopolitically in a lot of ways. It gives it a lot of levers to pull. I think that Vladimir Putin likes that framework. So in the competitive scheme, I think Russia may have its own incentives to do some things on climate, but I also think they have some incentives to push in the other direction. China is a little different because I think first of all, the implications for climate change on China could be quite profound. They also have extraordinary energy needs that over the long term cannot be met if they continue to be reliant on fossil fuels. They also, frankly, they see a world in which China competes to be the leader in renewable energy technologies as a way in which they assert global leadership. So we need to compete with China so that we have a race to the top on renewable energy technology as opposed to a race to the bottom in prolonging a high carbon economy. I think that as it relates to the China relationship, we have an intensely competitive relationship with them. We may be able to compartmentalize areas of cooperation in things like climate change, but I actually think this is a place where competition and cooperation can work in tandem. Where China is willing to cooperate with us, we should be willing to cooperate with them on climate change issues, but we should also compete to put pressure on China to make a transition in its own economy and the way that it does business and the way that it finances projects through the Belt and Road Initiative, for example. So I think actually cooperation and competition can be mutually reinforcing in the climate domain as it relates to China. And of course, all eyes will be on China next week at the Conference of Parties where the climate negotiation. And I bring it up partly just because there was a Defense One article, I think yesterday or the day before about with a very alarmist headline that the DOD is not sending anybody to the COP26. Any comment on that? Is that something to be concerned about? No. Okay. I mean, we are seized with this issue. I mean, I hope at least some of our comments and some of the documents we've put out in recent weeks and months are, we are seized with this. It's just the fact that COP26 is not focused on the military and defense dimensions of this. And so you can expect the Department of Defense to be there when the agenda suits the topics where our expertise I think can be most brought to bear. And I think you can also expect that in our bilateral and multilateral defense engagements, that climate will be on the table in a way that it hasn't previously been. Great. And Joe, I'm gonna come back over to you before we ask one final big picture question, I guess. But we have from Kevin Johnson. He asked about at the installation level, what's DOD doing differently to accelerate the adoption of clean energy technologies? And Richard Moss asked a sort of related question about how the department looks at vulnerabilities at the communities where your assets are located. So both of those are kind of interesting questions about how we conduct, how DOD conducts itself at home especially. Sure. And Kevin, if you're out there, thanks for the question. So look, first of all, I wanna say the idea that the department is not leaning forward on climate is sort of evidence of even today's discussion where I'm not sure there's ever been an undersecretary defense for policy or maybe there has been, maybe I'm just missed it that's done this kind of thing and never your secretary has taken such a leadership role on climate. So I think that's pretty clear where we are on this. In terms of our installation, what we're doing to improve the resilience of our installations and deploy clean energy. I mean, first of all, one, it's absolutely necessary, right? It's, renewables can play a critical role in providing us power when the grid goes down. We already talked through that. The executive order that the president put out earlier this year, set some pretty clear objectives for the department and across the government on what he expects on clean energy. And that's moving towards 100% renewable energy. That's also moving towards clean zero mission electric vehicle fleet. And so we are doing a lot internally right now to plan for how you do that. Look, I mean, for some agencies that might not be that big of a deal but the department of defense is a pretty big complicated place. We, outside the postal service, we have the largest fleet of non-tactical vehicles in the country. I think it's about 180,000 vehicles. And what we all know is that you gotta plug those in somewhere and you gotta put an infrastructure on our basis to do that. So some of these questions similar to, you know the scale at which we buy power is just dwarfs every other federal agency. So we have to do a lot internally to get ready for that transition. And we're doing that now. We're engaged in really aggressive but deliberative planning to make sure that we can move out on the president's objectives. The other thing is, I mean, if you look at last year's budget request, one of the first things we did when we came into the department and this was led by Deputy Secretary Hicks is to take a look at the budget and see what do we need to do immediately on climate given even the constraints of a very short cycle and looking back at the fiscal year 22 budget. And we put in, you know the number is escaping me about a couple of hundred million dollars extra for energy resilience and conservation improvement program which is a program which is specifically designed to help improve the resilience of our installations and associated with that is certainly efficiency and clean energy. So there's a lot we got going on. We could spend a whole hour talking about it but I know we're, we got about a minute here Sharon. So we're Let me sneak in a really quick one more question which is industry and your defense partners in the private sector should they expect new requirements for them on their own emissions and on the emissions of the products that they produce? Yeah. So first of all I think we're sending a demand signal across the defense industrial base to look we want to improve the efficiency of our existing platforms and we want to make sure that we get efficient platforms in the future. And this is something the deputy has been really clear on and that's good for the climate again but it's also absolutely critical to contested logistics and so our requirements process should reflect that imperative and our conversations with the defense industrial base are there already in terms of requirements on their own supply chains as you know, we put out a federal register notice asking for folks to tell us in the defense industrial base what do you do as far as tracking your own your own, I don't want to get too technical scope one scope two scope three emissions what do you do to measure your own supply chain greenhouse gas emissions and are you disclosing that already and how can you work with us to make sure that we know as the Department of Defense what our defense industrial base is standing on greenhouse gas emissions and so I think you can expect more activity in that area not just from the Department of Defense but from the interagency I think you're gonna see it out of the White House for me that it should be a competitive advantage last question for you on secretary call and then we'll let you gentlemen go back to keeping the nation safe which is, we got a couple of questions about this do you think that this prioritization of climate change, particularly as a strategic driver as mission risk will continue after the next presidential election no matter what the outcome is? It's a great question, you know obviously there's no guarantees and we've been kind of whipsawed in the last to say the least over the last decade in American politics but I actually think if you look underneath the hood and Joe would know this even better there was a lot of stuff continuing at the Pentagon even in the last administration which was at the very top quite skeptical of climate change to say the least and in fact you couldn't, you know and so you might not always see the words climate change in documents but if you look at the Arctic strategies that the department put out that OSD and all the services put out climate change is all over those documents whether the words are used or not so I think there's some of it is it was built into and Sharon I give you some credit in the civilian space for helping a lot of these ideas kind of populate and proliferate among OSD staff but I think a lot of it will also depend on what gets done in the next couple of years and you know there was the question toward the beginning of our conversation about who the champions are and I think there are a bunch of places but the ultimate champions in our building are the Secretary of Defense and the Deputy Secretary of Defense and they have been laser focused on the climate issue since day one and so they are keen to make sure that other senior leaders in the department make this a priority and that we're putting our money where our mouth is and so I am confident that we can build something in the next few years that is not only good for our security and good for the nation but will outlast us as officials even if we have some changes in administration. That is a great place to wrap it up and I think you both very much for your time and all the work you're doing on this and for taking the time today to explain it to people and engage with an audience of very interested in forward leaning people. So we wish you well and take care. Thank you everybody for joining us today. Thanks everybody. Thanks Sharon.