The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

by Amitav Ghosh

But strangely, the picture takes on a completely different appearance when we look to other domains of the American body politic, for example, the security establishment. There is no sign there of either denial or confusion: on the contrary, the Pentagon devotes more resources to the study of climate change than any other branch of the US government. The writer and climate activist George Marshall notes, ‘the most rational and considered response to the uncertainties of climate change can be found among military strategists. . . . As General Chuck Wald, former deputy commander of U.S. European Command puts it: “There’s a problem there and the military is going to be a part of the solution.”’ Other top-ranking officers have been equally blunt. In 2013, when Admiral Samuel J. Locklear III (then head of the US Pacific Command) was asked about the ‘biggest long-term security threat to the United States in the Pacific Region’, he pointed immediately to climate change, identifying it as the factor that was most likely to ‘cripple the security environment’. Indeed, the US military establishment’s focus on global warming is such that Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, once summed it up with these words: “The only department in . . . Washington that is clearly and completely seized with the idea that climate change is real is the Dept. of Defense.’ The seriousness of this commitment is evident in the fact that the US military—which is...