The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
When it comes to climate, who are we kidding?
The Pentagon preps for harsher climate conditions for the safety or our troops and defense of our nation while at the same it worsens the conditions on a daily basis. Is there any logic in this?
The Oct. 8 headline in the newspaper caught my eye: “Pentagon climate plan: Warfighting in hotter, harsher world.”
The article opens by saying that the new Pentagon plan calls for incorporating the realities of a hotter, harsher earth at every level in the U.S. military, including training troops on how to secure their own water supplies and treat heat injury. The story concludes with the statement that the U.S. military is the single largest institutional consumer of oil in the world, and as such is a key contributor to the worsening climate globally.
At this point I’m confounded.
The Pentagon preps for harsher climate conditions for the safety or our troops and defense of our nation while at the same it worsens the conditions on a daily basis. Is there any logic in this?
Our current administration asks China to reduce its contributions to climate damage while it advocates for a Pentagon expansion that pollutes the planet. Who is kidding whom?
A few months ago, teen climate activists awakened me to the connection between climate change and U.S. militarism. The high schoolers put it in simple terms: the cost of building one nuclear submarine, estimated at $5 billion by the U.S. Budget Office, is a colossal waste. They say that the U.S. already has 66 nuclear submarines, more than all the other nations combined, and our dollars could be put to much better use. Then they give me 10 examples of how they would use our taxpayer money.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists affirms the teens’ insight. An article in the Bulletin informs me that America is building a new warhead 20 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, will be able to kill hundreds of thousands of people in a single shot, will cost roughly $100 billion to build, has already cost $13.3 billion to begin engineering, and will not be ready until roughly 2029. It adds that the U.S. Air Force plans to order more than 600 of them and concludes with this statement:
“To put that price tag in perspective, $100 billion could pay 1.24 million elementary school teacher salaries for a year, provide 2.84 million fouryear university scholarships, or cover 3.3 million hospital stays for COVID-19 patients. It’s enough to build a massive mechanical wall to protect New York City from sea level rise.”
In a November 2020 referendum, New Haven voters were asked if they wanted Congress to transfer funds from the military budget to cities for human needs, jobs and an environmentally sustainable economy. Voters responded with a resounding 83 percent yes.
Our own Sen. Chris Murphy, fierce advocate for gun control in our nation, admits that his children, like my children and grandchildren, are anxious about the future of the planet and their own future. On Sept. 9, 2021, he tweeted: “My kids don’t understand why I work on anything other than climate change. Why does anything else matter if you don’t fix this, they wonder.”
I remember a Scriptural query from my childhood in Kentucky, “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Mark 8:35), and I wonder: Is it possible for our mighty nation to have a change of heart?
Can we shift from our outdated cold war “defense” stance to a worldview that protects all life on this planet? Can our state of Connecticut and other states in the U.S. move from a Pentagon-dependent work force to industries more appropriate for the 21stcentury? In early COVID days, at the bidding of then-President Trump, General Motors switched gears — in two weeks — from producing cars to producing ventilators.
Our engineers are smart. And our nation, at its core, prides itself on caring for all.
Transforming our mindset and our workforce won’t happen in two weeks. But it can happen.
My teenage friends ask When …? What will have to happen to stop the madness?