This Year’s Extreme Weather Showed That the Pentagon Is Not Ready for Climate Change

Dec 20, 2018 | Dan Spinelli
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One year after President Donald Trump took office, his Defense Department released a survey cataloging the ways climate change has affected thousands of military installations across the globe. Even though Congress had asked the Pentagon to conduct the survey, it was still politically sensitive given the commander-in-chief’s well-publicized views on the subject, which include refusing to acknowledge its existence and expressing contempt for anyone who expects the government to address the problem.

Operating within this hyper-polarized political environment, staffers had quietly scrubbed nearly two dozen references to a warming planet from a draft version of the report. The startling edits, uncovered by the Washington Post weeks after a final report was made public, provided yet another example of how controversial a once-widely acknowledged matter of scientific consensus had become. Climate change was now too toxic a subject for defense officials to emphasize in a report on adapting to climate change.