Adaptation and mitigation are two essential parts of climate defense. Mitigation requires the United States to reduce, or at least stabilize, the current and expected damage from annual climate disasters. Doing so means reducing greenhouse gases pumped into the atmosphere as a result of fossil fuels.
On the other hand, an adaptive defense responds to climate changes viewed as inevitable by repairing the damage caused by climate disasters and preemptively hardening infrastructure so that future disasters will inflict less damage. After a flood, a road is promptly rebuilt, and its drainage system upgraded. Now the road is back in service and less vulnerable to flooding when the next storm hits. The water supply is secured before the drought because we know a drought is coming. Were every ruined building promptly rebuilt and every vulnerability strengthened, the adaptive component of our climate defense would be in perfect order.
Unfortunately, America’s adaptive defense falls far short of that ideal. In the last 30 years or so, climate catastrophes have caused more damage than we have repaired.
There’s a reason. Our principal damage control agency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is chronically underfunded. It cannot rebuild a dollar’s worth of climate damage with 30 cents.
For the whole of 2023, FEMA’s budget was $29 billion, but climate catastrophes inflicted $150 billion of damage on the territorial U.S. As a result, successive climate catastrophes are gradually degrading our civilian infrastructure. Where does that path lead if extrapolated into the future? By analogy, imagine that Germany never rebuilt the damage that Allied bombing inflicted in World War II and that it had the same infrastructure today that it had in 1947. That’s what happens if you don’t rebuild what was destroyed.
The U.S. Department of Defense is the bright spot. The D.O.D. has been aware for decades of the damage that successive climate catastrophes could inflict upon our warfighting capability. If left unrepaired, successive climate disasters would gradually degrade our military defenses. Therefore, the D.O.D. has resolutely and consistently rebuilt military bases, military installations, ports and the like that climate catastrophes damaged, and it has made sure that existing military structures are strengthened against future climate disasters. It’s been expensive, but unlike FEMA, the D.O.D. is fully funded.
While our defense department does not defend civilian infrastructure, one of its branches, the Army Corps of Engineers, does. The Army Corps, which repairs storm damage and restores aquatic ecosystems, is currently helping Louisiana deal with saline intrusion into the Mississippi Delta. But its budget is approximately 1 percent of the D.O.D.’s total annual appropriation, and the protection of civilian infrastructure is only one-third of the corps’ mission. Apart from this work, the D.O.D. does next to nothing to defend the civilian infrastructure of the United States—nor should it. Its mission is to protect the warfighting capability of the U.S. in the aftermath of climate disasters, and it is ably accomplishing that mission. But protecting the civilian infrastructure of the U.S. from climate damage is indeed the responsibility of the federal government.
Believe it or not, that’s the good news—because money could fix this oversight. If the government funded a fully adequate adaptive defense of the civilian infrastructure and population, then the U.S. would not be falling behind every year. Rectifying this civilian-military imbalance should be a matter of high-priority national security. Tell Congress.
Now the bad news. Even a fully developed adaptive defense of both civilian and military infrastructure would not represent a sufficient defense. If you are prostrate on the ground and an assailant is kicking you, protecting your vital organs won’t put you back on your feet. Unless you get onto your feet, you cannot prevent the assailant from kicking you. Likewise, if you have only an adaptative defense, the assailant will keep kicking and you will keep defending. If the assailant is kicking you harder and harder, you will have to work harder and harder to avoid taking fatal damage. Since you cannot stop the assailant from kicking you harder, your future is bleak.
The U.S. is failing to rebuild the civilian infrastructure that is annually destroyed by climate catastrophes. We are on a path of deferred maintenance or tolerated dilapidation. Alas, even if we mounted a successful adaptive defense, that would be a losing strategy if employed all by itself. A complete climate defense must stabilize the climate, not just adapt our infrastructures to its intensifying fury. That is the mitigation component. Stabilizing the climate is accomplished by phasing out fossil fuels and phasing in renewable energy as rapidly as possible. When we stabilize the climate, we are no longer prostrate on the ground, taking ever more furious kicks. We are fighting back.
Ivan Light is a retired professor of sociology from U.C.L.A. who resides in Inverness. He edits the bi-weekly Climate Defenders newsletter at https://ivanlight.substack.com.