‘We’re not going fast enough’: Sherri Goodman on climate change as security threat

In September 1987, when Sherri Goodman joined the US Senate Committee on Armed Services, she was its youngest professional staff member and the only woman. Goodman would go on to help forge the nascent fields of environmental and climate security. In her new book, Threat Multiplier: Climate, Military Leadership, and the Fight for Global Security, she tells the inside story of what she calls the “military’s environmental awakening.”

One of Goodman’s first responsibilities was overseeing the nation’s nuclear weapons plants at a particularly fraught moment. Within a year of joining the Armed Services Committee, the New York Times was running front-page stories about safety lapses at nuclear weapons plants on an almost weekly basis. Goodman’s work was thrust into the Congressional hot seat. She was tasked with drafting legislation for a new oversight mechanism, which eventually became (after a legislative wrestling match with the Governmental Affairs Committee) the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board.

In 1993, Goodman was appointed the first-ever deputy undersecretary of defense (environmental security). She oversaw the Defense Department’s environmental programs, including the projects to clean up pollution at the roughly 100 military bases on the list of toxic Superfund sites. Many of the stories from this period of her career are about fighting tooth and nail for barely adequate funding from defense officials who would rather spend dollars on more equipment or weapons than on cleaning up their messes—even if those messes posed environmental health threats to American citizens. “There always seemed to be a faction who saw environmental stewardship and military readiness as opposing forces, instead of two sides of the same coin,” Goodman writes.

While at the Pentagon, she had a front-row seat to the political fight over whether the United States would sign on to the Kyoto Protocol, the first international treaty to set legally binding targets for greenhouse gas emissions. Climate change had become a fraught, polarizing issue in American politics. (President Bill Clinton signed the treaty but Congress never ratified it, and President George W. Bush later withdrew that signature.)

Goodman led the development of the Defense Department’s first climate change strategy, focusing on achieving emissions reductions without compromising military might and readiness. When she left the Pentagon in January 2001, her team fêted her with gag gifts like a plaque that said, “Mother of Environmental Security” (she was eight-and-a-half months pregnant at the time).

Goodman’s work in that arena was far from over. While working at the Center for Naval Analyses, she convened the CNA Military Advisory Board, a group of former senior (three- and four- star) military leaders, to study the security implications of climate change. It was in a meeting of this group that Goodman suggested “threat multiplier” as a way of describing how climate interacts with security concerns, and the phrase was included in the 2007 report, “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change.”

In the following interview, Sherri Goodman discusses that legacy, the military’s mixed record on climate and environmental issues, the need for strong and enforceable environmental regulations, and the extent to which the United States is prepared for climate disasters.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Jessica McKenzie: I want to start with the title of the book, Threat Multiplier, which is a term you coined and has since become one of those phrases that policymakers and NGOs and journalists often use when talking about global climate risks. What has it been like seeing that term take on a life of its own, and what do you think of it now?

Sherri Goodman: I think it’s forged a whole new field, and I’m very pleased and proud of that. It’s given scholars and practitioners and policy makers a way to see and understand climate risk as it relates to security. As John Kerry said in his blurb on my book, it’s “[a] must read for everyone who wants to understand why climate imperatives aren’t just for environmentalists.” Prior to 2007, when people talked about climate change, it was mostly seen as something to be concerned about if you cared about the environment, but not if your focus was on security, and now we understand that both are true. That obviously we care about the environment, but if you care about national security, you also have to understand and care about climate risks, because they act as a threat multiplier for instability in fragile regions of the world and even in stable regions.

McKenzie: One observation that struck me while reading it was how decision-making and leadership in the face of climate uncertainties is like decision-making in the fog of war. Can you talk a bit about how you saw that dynamic play out over your career?

Goodman: The phrase that best captures that is a statement made by former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Gordon Sullivan, who was the first chairman of the military advisory board where we coined the phrase ‘threat multiplier.’ And he said “you can’t wait for 100 percent certainty on the battlefield. If you do, something bad will happen.”

So military leaders and warfighters are always assessing risk. That’s the job, right? To assess: What’s the risk?

Historically, [that might be determining the likelihood of a Soviet] invasion over the Fulda Gap in Germany during the Cold War, or the risk of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. So we always are assessing probabilities. In the Cold War, it was the risk of a bolt out of the blue nuclear attack by the Soviet Union, and so we assess that risk to be low probability but high consequence—and worth investing billions of American GDP to defend and deter.

And we were successful. The Cold War ended.

Now we have climate risk, which is high probability with very high consequences already around the world. And so those risks need to be understood. They need to be understood at every level of security, from the strategic to the military operational and then to the tactical on the battlefield.

McKenzie: I really liked where you wrote it was “the very uncertainty of climate change that created the urgency for action.” But I wasn’t quite sure that that’s what I saw in the book—I’m not sure I always felt that the urgency was there.

I’ll give you a specific example. You wrote that for many, “Superstorm Sandy was an inflection point,” a kind of wake-up call for many people in the military. And to me that just felt very late—2012 feels like a very late time to be newly worried about climate impacts to military installations, because it’s already happened. And the response was addressing something that happened already, not in anticipation of climate threats.

Goodman: Sure. I understand how you think about that, Jessica. If you think back historically, back to 2007, when I coined the phrase ‘threat multiplier’ with the first group of generals and admirals assessing the national security risk of climate change, we were talking about projected climate change—because it wasn’t felt to be at our front doorstep at that time. Now, of course, that’s changed, because every year now is hotter than the [previous year], and we have the wet bulb temperatures [a measurement of heat stress that factors in temperature and other climactic conditions]. Black Flag days [when the wet bulb index is over 90 degrees Fahrenheit and nonessential physical activity on military installations is halted] are increasing, and wildfire knows no season. So, now we live in that urgency, but we didn’t feel it as much in 2007-8.

By 2012, five years later, certainly it was better understood. But I’d say that it’s got much more widespread recognition today, even 12 years from 2012. But you’re right; as it’s often said, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. So Sandy was a real wake-up call for that part of the country.

You know, Hurricane Katrina, that’s back in 2005, should we have recognized that? Or even earlier, in the 90s, we had Hurricane Andrew, which wiped out Homestead Air Force Base in southern Florida. But I would not say that that [Hurricane Andrew] was a wake-up call. You know, that was still considered sort of a once-in-a-generational event. But now, with devastating hurricanes hitting Florida and the Southeast and Puerto Rico between the 2017, to ‘18, ‘19, ‘20 seasons—Michael and Irma and those other hurricanes—now, I think it’s widely recognized. And we’re also boiling the ocean off the coast of Florida with temperatures approaching 100 degrees.

McKenzie: Related to that, I feel the introduction is very optimistic. There’s this narrative framing that the military has gotten so much better at this: The military didn’t initially want to do this stuff with the environment or climate, but they’ve come around, and now they’re leading on it.

But I really felt that many of the stories showed a dynamic where the military is either being dragged kicking and screaming to do stuff about climate and the environment, or responding to specific EPA demands or legislation that forces them to clean something up—to outside pressure. Did you think about what a more critical book might look like?

Goodman: Embedded in there is a good question which is: What’s the right way to make change? And I think of myself as someone—I’ve spent my career changing institutions from within. I consider myself a change maker from within. There are plenty of people in the climate space who are change makers from the outside, putting pressure on the institution. When I came into the Department of Defense in the 1990s I was kind of at the fulcrum of that, because there were many lawsuits against the Department of Defense for either not adequately cleaning up a military base or not protecting endangered species, a variety of things. So how did we deal with that?

This has kind of been my approach. It’s a through line in my career, which is: I opened the doors and let people in. I understood there was valid criticism. There’s still valid criticism.

And embedded in what you’re saying is, well, we’re not going fast enough. And you’re right. We are not. No part of society is accelerating into climate action at the pace of the climate risks that are mounting every day. We’re all behind the rate of change. So I’ll put that out there.

But on the other hand, by opening the doors, bringing critics in, understanding their views, putting yourself in the shoes of other people, allowing the institution—the Department of Defense is a very large institution, like an aircraft carrier. It doesn’t necessarily change on a dime. You need a lot of coordination. People think of the military as a top-down organization, and it is in some ways, but on the other hand, there’s so much coordination to get any change done that can take a while.

But once you put in place a directive—by the end of my eight years in the Department of Defense, we had put in place a slew of environmental security directives. Those could not be repealed. Those have a 10-year lifespan. So institutionalizing change is equally important in allowing it to be enduring. So you have to kind of do both, you have to work from the outside and from the inside to affect enduring change. And I respect both types of change. I’ve tried to sort of harness the pressure that comes from the outside and mobilize that as a way to make change from the inside.

McKenzie: That’s what I assumed. Because the book starts out as very reflective, looking back at the start of your career, and telling a chronological story. But by the end, it seemed apparent that you’re not really done yet—you’re still working to make change, you’re still advancing policy proposals.

Two of your suggestions stood out to me: The first was the need to improve climate intelligence, for example, and then the second was making an argument for climate finance for smaller, poorer nations as a way of gaining leverage over Russia and China. My understanding is that there’s been some resistance to climate finance because some people think the United States can’t afford to help smaller island nations, for example, adapt because that’s really expensive. But you’re providing a justification for that that I haven’t seen widely shared elsewhere: If the United States doesn’t help these nations out, then China and Russia might swoop in with their own assistance, with different strings attached, and that might not be in the best interest of the United States, or the climate and environment.

Goodman: Let me underscore how important I think climate reform and climate finance is in America’s security interests, particularly for our strategically located allies and partners in places like the Pacific—small Pacific Island nations which are at existential risk from climate threats.

In my first public event on the book with the Secretary of the Navy, Carlos Del Toro, and John Kerry, the former climate negotiator, Secretary Del Toro underscored how our Pacific allies and partners are so important in a future, potential fight in the Pacific with China, but their frontline risk is climate. They’re losing land today to sea level rise and loss of fresh water. Their fishing areas are being encroached on. They’re losing their food sources from illegal fishing.

We have to meet our allies and partners where they are and understand how they think about it, and being able to make resilient their infrastructure is important for our own security. Because if we want to have them as allies and partners or operate from their locations in the future, we need to understand what they need. So I’d say that’s an important part of why climate finance is important.

And then climate intelligence is also important to be able to operate, and to move from short-term weather to near-term climate. That’s what I’m calling climate intelligence, or precision climate prediction. Today, the Navy, for example, is providing climate dashboards to some of our Pacific allies and partners so that they can better understand what climate risks they face in the near-term—over the next year to five years, not out 100 years. We need to have things that are happening in real-time planning timescales.

McKenzie: Were there any other changes that you’re hoping your book will set into motion that you want to single out?

Goodman: I think we need to accelerate into the energy transition. That’s clear. That’s how we’re going to really mitigate and begin to move faster towards meeting climate goals.

And there are some specific ways in which the military can lead, by example, whether it’s installing micro grids or designing weapon systems that are more efficient. Even using existing fuels, hybrid vehicles that have better batteries can go farther—not only can these operate in contested logistics environments, but they are quieter, so they provide competitive advantages on the battlefield.

But some of these examples, these dual-use examples of benefits from efficiency and energy transition apply in the commercial and the civilian sector as well. We will all be better off when we have more charging infrastructure, when we have more micro grids that allow us not to be as reliant on a vulnerable national grid. So these are all transitions that are important to celebrate and advance.

McKenzie: Back to the question of whether the military is leading on environmental issues or not: I think one of the more troubling examples that has come out since you wrote the book—so there’s no way you could have anticipated this—is the Air Force saying that they don’t want to clean up PFAS, forever chemicals, in the water system in Phoenix, Arizona, because the Supreme Court’s overturning of the Chevron Doctrine has made it so the EPA can’t demand the Air Force do this. I find it troubling to think about the Air Force polluting waterways and then saying: “We don’t want to clean that up.” I was wondering what your thoughts were.

Goodman: Well, one of the great tools I had in my arsenal in my day was the strength of the environmental laws, the requirements under the Chevron Doctrine, and then under our environmental laws—air, water, waste, Superfund, RCRA [the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act], all the major environmental laws that had criminal and civil penalties for noncompliance. Because it is true, when you’re faced with making budget trade-offs, the green eyeshade types in the Pentagon are always going to turn their investment to where they think they’re going to get the greatest return. And in the military, it’s about the mission, right?

But if you’re going to be fined or subject to a criminal penalty, well, okay, you’ve got to address that, right? You can’t ignore it. The more we put into legal requirements that can be enforced, the better off we are as a society.

That’s why the Chevron Doctrine repeal is so troubling, because there’s no real substitute for environmental professionalism. That’s why we have an EPA. That’s why Richard Nixon, [a] Republican President, established the EPA, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act [Nixon vetoed the water bill but Congress overrode him]… this was seen, historically, as an area of importance for all Americans and an area of bipartisan cooperation. That’s not, unfortunately, the case today, in today’s Supreme Court or in today’s Congress. So that is deeply troubling. We need to work on the source of that problem, and that’s going to be at the voting booth.

McKenzie: While I absolutely agree that it’s important for the Defense Department to take care of their own house—decarbonize, make energy and fuel sources more diverse, etcetera—I wonder if the military or the Defense Department is the best agency for the job for other things. For example, you wrote about a grant from the Defense Department to help fund biodiversity research in Panama. I think that’s great, I love biodiversity research, that’s wonderful, but it did have me wondering about the Defense Department’s purview: Whether the agency that is in charge of security is the best possible leader for climate and environmental issues.

And to what extent has this dynamic happened, where we need the Defense Department to lead on climate and environmental issues because security gets funding and more latitude with budgets than agencies focused on health or environmental safety?

Goodman: Both things are true. First of all, many other agencies of the US government are leading in this area, and they should be, and the Department of Defense, in foreign policy and in development, is really supporting those agencies: the State Department, USAID, our development finance agencies, ExIm Bank, the Millennium Challenge Corporation.

So the military is often a supporting partner in our broad foreign policy and engagement strategy—and that is appropriate, and that’s where it should be.

We have foreign assistance programs and we have security assistance programs and security cooperation programs. They’re related, but the authorities are different between the agencies.

So under the Defense Security Cooperation programs, there are opportunities sometimes—and you’re right, sometimes it’s easier to get funding in the defense budget because it’s a must-pass annual bill and because there’s still more broad-based support for it than other budgets. You take it where you could get it. But you also make it very interagency—I mean the first Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program—that is a multi-agency program with the Department of Energy, EPA, NOAA, and the Department of Defense. The funding’s in the defense budget, but it involves all those agencies, and they’re all involved.

You have to be practical. You want to get the support and the resources and the authorities where you can get it. But it is very much a whole of US government approach.

What I like about what I see happening today by people in this working in this space in government today, is that they’re highly collaborative. They believe that this is something that we all have to do together. There are many interagency working groups working on climate security, climate finance, climate resilience, climate intelligence, and data and information.

As we say, “You can’t surge trust.” You have to have trust, both in the interagency people working together, but also with allies and partners. And you need to build that now. You need to build that before there is a conflict, before there’s a contest, so you have those relationships upon which you can draw when there is more stress and tension.

McKenzie: I think it was Hurricane Sandy where you wrote that the only agency big enough to help provide relief was the Defense Department. But we have the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, and these other agencies that should maybe be better empowered and funded and equipped enough to do that without necessarily relying on people, resources, and money from the military.

You also wrote about the number of firefighters that are needed now compared to just a decade ago. [According to Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks: “The number of personnel days the National Guard spent on firefighting increased from 14,000 in fiscal year 2016 to 176,000 days in fiscal 2021.”] So that’s definitely a drain on military resources.

What happens when this becomes almost a distraction for the military? Shouldn’t other agencies be funded enough to be able to deal with these emergencies?

Goodman: Right, they should be. FEMA and the Coast Guard are two of our federal agencies on the front line of working with local and state first responders: the firefighters, the emergency health officials, and other forces. They’re on the front lines but the fact is, they’re often underfunded and under-resourced.

So that’s the challenge. We need to shift funding. FEMA and the Coast Guard both need more resources, and they need more resources in prevention as well as response. FEMA comes in after the disaster strikes, but FEMA can also be investing to improve resilience through like, for example, improved flood standards, which were something the Obama administration issued that accounted for climate risk but then they were withdrawn in the next administration. Now they’re put back in. Those changes affect people’s lives on a regular basis and affect our resilience, to a flood, for example. We increasingly have floods from stronger hurricanes, more intense rain derechos, and other climate-induced events.

What we should have is a national adaptation strategy, and plan as a nation. We have climate plans, but we also need a national adaptation plan. That’s hard to come by, it involves many agencies. It’s not in the purview of any one agency.

We don’t have a national energy strategy. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Act and the Inflation Reduction Act have provided historic generational changes in advancing the energy transition, but we need to keep going on the things that we are able to put in place, recognizing that somehow, when you look at something comprehensively and strategically, you never get a perfect situation. So you want to do what you can to protect people’s lives as much as possible.

McKenzie: You cite former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta in the part of the book discussing whether the nation is prepared for widespread climate disaster. And I have to say that he did not make me feel overwhelmingly confident that we’re ready to deal with multiple days of power outages or transportation systems cut off in the aftermath of a disaster. What are your thoughts on the nation’s ability to respond to widespread natural disasters right now?

Goodman: Panetta did articulate the possibility of widespread natural disasters, climate-fueled disasters, combined with potentially a cyber threat or other widespread power outages. We’ve seen that in localized cases—for example, in Texas, with strong storms knocking out power, followed by either very intense heat or very intense cold, and we know that those regions are not prepared adequately. The challenge is that any particular crisis leads to some localized investments and preparation on a national scale. There’s always more that could be done.

I think that our federal agencies, in recent years, especially in the military, have done a lot to understand climate risks and put it into war games and scenarios that apply both to how we operate overseas, with allies and partners, but also understanding how that could affect us here at home—and what kind of capabilities we need to respond to natural disasters that occur here at home, particularly as our women and men in uniform are called upon more often to respond to fires, floods, and hurricanes. We need to understand what capabilities they need and then translate that into requirements more for local first responders, so they are better equipped to be on the front lines. Ultimately, we need to make all our communities more resilient by advancing the energy transition and then understanding how to improve various weaknesses we have in our energy and built infrastructure today.

McKenzie: What is the primary takeaway you hope people leave this book with?

Goodman: I think many who follow the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists certainly are very aware of nuclear risks. That’s how this field got started. But many are increasingly also aware of climate risks. I want people to understand how and why climate acts as a threat multiplier, but also what we’re trying to do about it today. What are the practical steps one can take—both in your own life, but also what our military is doing today to lead by example and hopefully leave a better future for your generation and for future generations.