Pearls and Irritations

Australia punches well above its weight when it comes to global fossil carbon emissions. With less than one-third of one percent of the world’s population, we are responsible for about 4.5 percent of fossil carbon emissions globally, and around 80 percent of this comes from our fossil fuel exports. Our nation is thus responsible for around 14 times more emissions than our population size would predict. And even if we only consider our per-capita domestic GHG footprint, we rank among the globe’s highest emitters. Australia’s exports of fossil fuels are nearly three times those of the UAE.

The most recent climate science tells us we may have only a few years left in which meaningful action can be taken to avert the effects of climate change – effects that are direct, measurable, potentially calamitous, and almost certainly irreversible within the probable lifespan of our species.

However, far from issuing a code-red alert on global overheating, our government continues to allow many new gas and coal projects to get off the ground. Moreover, not only are we failing to wind back our fossil fuel exports and exploratory activities, we are also failing to divert every available dollar from the taxpayer’s purse into climate-related initiatives. The most alarming evidence of this negligence is the government’s apparently nonchalant commitment of hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money to AUKUS – a project that has widely been condemned for its inappropriateness to Australia’s most pressing national security and defence needs, its lack of feasibility, and the unlikelihood that it will even come to satisfactory fruition.

While sensible and sedate politicians might take considerable persuading before they accepted the wisdom of this megaproject, it’s easy to understand why anyone with even a small bone of militarism in their body would jump onto the back of the AUKUS horse that seems to be galloping ahead of us at an ever-increasing pace. Surely, any money that’s flowing into the coffers of the military establishment has to be good, right? Wrong.

In its rush to close the (wrong) gap — the national security gap between itself and the Opposition — the Labor Government seems to have completely overlooked or dismissed the serious implications of global overheating for Australia’s military capacity, personnel and infrastructure. These implications have been carefully documented by Wing Commander Amanda Gosling Clarke in her prize-winning 2023 report on the challenges posed by climate change. The prime minister also cannot have been briefed on the Australian Army Research Centre’s recent journal article, in which Albert Palazzo urges national security thinkers to “move climate change to the fore, since the greatest and most likely risk warrants the most serious attention”.

Regardless of whether Anthony Albanese and his Government have absorbed the implications of these reports, Australia’s commitment to AUKUS is clearly set against a background in which the very existence of sustainable locations in which theatres of war can be established is under threat by irreversible climate change. A presidential memorandum on the White House website dated 21 September 2016 showed that the US Government was acutely aware of the threat posed by climate change to the pursuit of its military agendas:

Climate change and associated impacts on US military and other national security-related missions and operations could adversely affect readiness, negatively affect military facilities and training, increase demands for federal support to non-federal civil authorities, and increase response requirements to support international stability and humanitarian assistance needs.

Tellingly, this memo was quietly relegated to the White House archives soon after Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2017.

In 2018, a US Department of Defence report on climate-related risk to DoD infrastructure investigated more than 3,500 DoD sites worldwide, and found that around half had already experienced unusual, extreme weather events such as drought, wind, storm and non-storm-related flooding, extreme temperatures and wildfire.

In July this year, NATO released its new Climate Change and Security Impact Assessment Report, in which it noted that accelerating climate change has “a profound impact on Allied security”, and emphasised that NATO must remain fit for purpose in a rapidly changing environment. Among other detailed warnings, the report says:

Direct hazards associated with climate change, such as heatwaves, floods, droughts, fires, erosion and extreme winds are likely to impact military equipment and weapon systems, including both armed and unarmed vehicles, crewed and uncrewed aircraft, surface and underwater vessels, protective equipment, small arms and light weapons. Military installations, fixed and mobile, and training areas are also vulnerable to climate change effects, with the level of vulnerability and exposure varying by geographic location.

These reports should ring alarm bells for those who see militarism as vital to resolving international disagreements. Anyone of dovish inclinations will most likely already see AUKUS as a moral, strategic and diplomatic disaster, particularly given that, under the current scenario, it comes at the expense of action on global overheating. But dedicated hawks should also have climate change as their top priority. For them, the future security of military infrastructure, personnel and suitable locations for establishing theatres of war should be addressed before even thinking about such quixotic megaprojects as AUKUS.

This is not to argue that the government should just shift the proposed AUKUS funding into targeted initiatives to protect Australia’s military establishments and capabilities from the impacts of climate change. Global overheating is indiscriminate: if the military infrastructure and personnel in a particular region are affected by it, so too are the even more numerous civilians, and the infrastructure that makes their lives possible.

This is, perhaps, a moment in our history when, whether they realise it or not, hawks and doves find themselves in the same boat – hopefully only metaphorically. If we forge ahead with AUKUS at all costs, those costs will doubtless include many lost opportunities.

It’s still not too late for the Government to review its priorities, and decide that, even on purely military grounds, we need to redirect funding away from submarines and into urgent action on global overheating. Climate change threatens to wreak havoc not just on civilian life, but also on the lives and livelihoods of those who find themselves part of the military and defence establishment.

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