Chapter 3
A da p t i n g M a r i t i m e
I n f r a s t ruc t u r e to
C l i m at e C h a l l e n g e s
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Dr. Ronald Filadelfo
I am pleased to convene this panel on Adapting Maritime
Infrastructure to Climate Challenges. As you will soon see, we have
three prefect people to address these issues.
By way of background on the importance of these issues, in
2008, the National Intelligence Council, in one of its periodic
National Intelligence Assessments, looked at the implications of
climate change for national security. [1] The resulting National
Intelligence Estimate (NIE) identified roughly 30 military installations
Dr. Ronald Filadelfo is the Director of the Environment and Energy
Team at CNA. He has primary responsibility for all research in the area
of national security and climate change, energy policy, and environmental studies. The CNA Environment and Energy research team is currently conducting studies in the areas of natural resources and stability,
DoD and national energy policy, climate change and state stability,
and ocean environmental issues. Dr. Filadelfo’s academic training was
in physical oceanography, where his work focused on wind-induced
sea-level variability at subtidal frequencies. He received his Ph.D. in
oceanography from the State University of New York and his master of
science degree in meteorology and oceanography from the City College
of New York. Dr. Filadelfo received his bachelor of science degree in
meteorology and oceanography from the Polytechnic Institute of New
York. He joined CNA in 1984 and worked in antisubmarine warfare
until 1992. Since that time, his research has focused on environmental
issues facing the Navy. He has led studies of military environmental
compliance, hazardous waste management, and toxic release inventories. He has also directed interagency teams in evaluation of federal regional oil spill response exercises. His current research deals
with ocean noise and the effects of military sonars on marine mammal
populations. Dr. Filadelfo was one of the authors of CNA’s report on
National Security and the Threat of Climate Change.
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that were thought to be at particular risk from rising sea levels.
Obviously, Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard facilities were
very well represented on that list.
Based on the combination of that NIE, some work we did at
CNA that looked at the links between climate change and national
security, and some other work we did looking at the implications of
the change in the Arctic for the Navy, Admiral Gary Roughead, the
Chief of Naval Operations (CNO), asked the Naval Studies Board
at the National Academy of Sciences to examine the national security implications of climate change for U.S. naval forces; I had the
honor of serving on that panel. During our deliberations we spent
quite a bit of time looking at infrastructure issues.
Going in, I thought the overall emphasis would be on operations and security. But to my surprise, infrastructure emerged as
an area of significant concern to our Navy leadership. Our final
report came out about a week ago, and the infrastructure section
naturally led with a discussion of sea-level rise. [2] Sea-level rise, as
you all know, is the real wild card of climate change because of its
inherent unpredictability. That is, we cannot predict it really with
any precision as to level or timing given the difficulties associated
with modeling ice sheet dynamics.
Recently, there has been increasing concern within the science
climate community about sea level given the growing consensus
that the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report’s prediction of sea-level
rise this century is going to have to be modified upward, and perhaps significantly upward. [3] The National Academy of Sciences
report recommended to the CNO and the Navy leadership that the
Navy use a planning factor for sea-level rise of about 0.8 meters
this century. [2] However, the report states that the rise could be as
high as 2 meters. When the Naval Studies Board began its deliberations about 18 months ago, 2 meters was pretty much out of
the question.
Of course, sea-level rise is not the only risk that our installation
plan is going to need to consider. Water supply and water rights
could be bigger issues than they are now. Of course, heat stress
could affect our ability to train at our installations. Extreme weather
Chapter 3 Adapting Infrastructure to Climate Challenges
67
could also impact our infrastructure. So, our military services are
now beginning to consider these things and look at how to meet
these coming climate challenges.
The Interagency Climate Change Adaptation Task Force, which
is run out of the White House, is co-chaired by the Council on
Environmental Quality, the Office of Science and Technology
Policy, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The Task Force is staffed with representatives from about 20 federal
agencies, including the DoD. This group recently recommended
that the federal government strengthen the nation’s capacity to plan
for coming climate changes. [4] Interestingly, the Task Force further
recommended that federal agencies make adaptation a standard
part of agency planning; the DoD is now beginning to do this.
This is going to be challenging for the department. As the Naval
Studies Board observes: “The Navy has billions of dollars in assets
exposed to the threats of climate change, and it must make strategic decisions in the face of considerable uncertainty about the
pace, magnitude and regional manifestations of climate change.”
[2] As we know, that is a point that Rear Admiral David Titley has
been hammering home to our Navy leadership for the past 2 years.
The pace is just very difficult to predict.
So, from the point of view of the DoD, several questions are
going to need to be addressed in order to support informed infrastructure planning:
• What critical infrastructure considerations associated with
climate change are applicable to DoD installations?
• At which steps in the current infrastructure planning process
should climate change considerations be inserted?
• What policy changes might we need at the DoD, Department
of the Navy level to ensure that these considerations are
properly accounted for in our installation planning process
that exists?
The panel we have assembled is well qualified to take on these
and other infrastructure issues. I have asked Brigadier General
Gerald Galloway to lead off, and he will discuss briefly some of the
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infrastructure issues he sees looming from the perspective of climate-change engineering. The Honorable Jackalyne Pfannenstiel
will then discuss issues particular to the Department of the Navy
and will comment on what the Department is doing with regard
to infrastructure planning. Finally, The Honorable John Warner will
wrap up things from the national level.
REFERENCES
1. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and
House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global
Warming: Statement for the Record by Dr. Thomas Fingar,
Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis, National
Intelligence Assessment on the National Security Implications
of Global Climate Change to 2030, 2008, http://www.dni.gov/
testimonies/20080625_testimony.pdf.
2. Naval Studies Board, National Security Implications of Climate
Change on U.S. Naval Forces, National Academies Press, 2011.
3. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Fourth Assessment
Report: Climate Change 2007, IPCC, 2007.
4. Climate Change Adaptation Task Force, Progress Report of the
Interagency Climate Change Adaptation Task Force, 2010.
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Brigadier General Gerald Galloway, Jr.
I want to start off by stipulating that certainly we can all agree
that climate change is an issue. It is all of the things you see in
Figure 1, and worst of all, it is the combination of all of these
things. Importantly, too, the chart does not include such effects
as subsidence that creates relative sea-level rise in many locations. So, we are faced with some very interesting challenges as
we move forward.
Climate change impacts are not only a U.S. problem but
also a world problem, which means that wherever our forces are
deployed and wherever we have bases and infrastructure, we will
have to keep this in mind. The other aspect of this is the way we
think about the future.
Brigadier General Gerald Galloway, Jr., is a Glenn L. Martin Institute
Professor of Engineering and Affiliate Professor of Public Policy at the
University of Maryland, where he teaches and conducts research in
national water resources policy and management, flood mitigation, and
disaster management. He has served as a consultant to national and
international government and business organizations. He is currently
an advisor to The Nature Conservancy on its Yangtze River Program,
a member of the Louisiana Governor’s commission on coastal protection, and co-chair of the World Water Assessment Programme’s Experts
Group on Policy and was recently appointed by the Secretary of State as
one of three inaugural Energy and Climate Partnership of the Americas
Fellows. He has been Presidential appointee to the Mississippi River
Commission and was assigned to the White House to lead a study of the
1993 Mississippi River Flood. He served in the U.S. Army for 38 years,
retiring as a Brigadier General and Dean of Academics at West Point.
He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow
of the National Academy of Public Administration.
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Figure 1. Stipulation: There Are Climate Challenges
I like Figure 2 a lot, because it tells the way I grew up. In the
old days, you looked at planning from the present to the future,
and you looked down a narrow tube and you saw at the end what
it might be like in 50 years. It looked almost like it did today. You
could assume that, especially in terms of climate, things would be
about the same. As a hydrologist, I had all sorts of formulas that
were based on stationarity—the concept that the future can be
based on the past.
Figure 2. Planning for Uncertainty [1]
Somebody reported 2 years ago that stationarity is dead. What
does that mean? Well, it means that the future is going to be far
different than the past. Instead of looking down a thin pipe, we
are now looking out through a cone. That total area there shown
by the cone is the space of potential variability—the broad set of
potential scenarios that might occur as the result of climate change.
Chapter 3 Adapting Infrastructure to Climate Challenges
71
Sea-level rise might be 0.8 meters, or it might be 2 or 3 meters.
Right now, we really do not know. And you can stack into that all
of the other changes that are occurring around us. So, planning
under uncertainty today has yet to be figured out.
I will give you a clue. If you want to build a levee somewhere
in the United States, you ask, well, what is the 100-year flood going
to be in 50 years? It is not going to be what it is today; it is going to
be considerably different. But we do not know yet what it is going
to be. So how do you plan under those sets of circumstances? As
you go forward the question then becomes, how do you convince
people who are used to having things the same, and who think in
terms of 4- or 5-year increments, to think about what has to be 50
or 60 years from now? It is a problem that we have to overcome in
dealing with infrastructure because truly, tomorrow’s infrastructure
will not be the same as today’s.
What is infrastructure? Well, as many of my students would tell
you, the best place to start is Wikipedia. So I pulled this definition
for what we might want to call maritime infrastructure (Figure 3).
Figure 3. Maritime Infrastructure
I think it is important to recognize that infrastructure is a lot of
things. It is the bases from which we operate. It is the places where
people live, where people work, and the locations around that particular area that provide protection–the breakwaters, the levees,
and the other sorts of facilities we have. So it is a pretty complex
undertaking when you try and pin down what infrastructure is.
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When you get into critical infrastructure, you can narrow it a bit,
but you do not really have critical infrastructure that operates in the
long term without the rest of that infrastructure.
What are the potential climate change threats to our coastal
infrastructure? Well, as you can see from Figure 4, it is not just
the coast because in most of the areas in which we operate, the
coast is the location where rivers enter the sea. So, we will have
problems with riverine flooding. We also have maritime installations on our inland waterways, and those that are very important
to our international commerce. You can take the largest port in the
United States, Southern Louisiana. How much of that is far from
the sea? So, increased riverine flooding begins to take a toll.
Figure 4. Potential Coastal Climate Change Threats
What about increased hurricanes and typhoons? They are
going to cause a problem. They are going to create surges that we
have not yet experienced, increased storm-water flooding. It turns
out that the British have been looking at their problems from water
and flooding and they have discovered that about 30% of the flood
damages do not come from riverine flooding or from coastal flooding, they come from pluvial flooding or storm-water flooding. The
problem with that is, as the intensity of rainfall increases, getting rid
of all that additional water poses an even greater challenge. And if
sea level is in fact higher, you will have that same problem of where
do you put that additional water? And if climate change results in
more frequent storms, you will have even more water to deal with.
What then do you do, what are the potential climate change
challenges that we face as we move forward? As shown in Figure 5,
Chapter 3 Adapting Infrastructure to Climate Challenges
73
certainly the inundation of developed areas will be a concern. That
is something we are already facing in many places, and it is going
to get worse from the three climate change effects that I noted earlier. If you look at downtown Washington, D.C., you will recognize
we have all of those problems there. They are not unique to just
coastal areas. Any area that is near waters that can be influenced
by tidal variations will also be affected by the problems with storm
surges and sea-level rise.
Figure 5. Impacts of Climate Change on Infrastructure
The next challenge that we will have to face is erosion. Erosion
can cause you to lose many of your important facilities. It can
degrade your protection systems; breakwaters can come apart, and
levies can be undermined. Erosion can also degrade transportation
facilities. If you cannot move cargo out of a port, then you have a
problem. If you cannot bring supplies in because of the connectivity to the mainland or other areas around, you have a significant
problem. Yet another consideration that is not often thought of as a
climate change effect is the potential impact on our wetlands and
on our groundwater. For many years, as sea level has been rising,
the West Coast has been experiencing an increasing intrusion of
salinity into groundwater supplies in that very arid region. While
there are steps that one can take, all of those require resources.
As you may have read, we are also rapidly losing wetlands.
The state of Louisiana, for example, is losing about 25–40 square
miles of coastal wetlands each year. These areas are important
because they provide barrier protection to the people who live in
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that region. They also protect the 35% of our nation’s oil and gas
industry that is located along the Gulf Coast. You can go on and
on. The point is that we need to be conscious of all of the components of the overall infrastructure.
Well, what can we do about it? I will not go through a detailed
discussion of this, but I will point out some comments that the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) made
about sea-level rise. What can you do? You can retreat, you can
move away. That is not very feasible for most of the facilities for the
services, whether it be Army, Navy, or Air Force.
You can accommodate by doing things such as elevating
homes, elevating structures, and raising the facilities you already
have and adapt in much the same way. The adaptation is different from the accommodation in the sense that you can adapt over
time—you can build a program that will let you make changes
as sea level rises. This approach, however, is not always the most
efficient from a resource standpoint.
The third way you can deal with it is to try to protect your
installations by building more levees and sea walls. As we learned
in Louisiana, that is only a risk-reduction tool, not a protection tool.
It does not guarantee you anything. All of these things are going
to cost you money, and that is the challenge. Engineers have the
ability to deal with these particular challenges, but they require
resources and large amounts of resources.
So what are we dealing with? We are dealing with the identification of risk and how we are going to deal with that risk. What are
we going to do to make risk go down as we move forward? What
sorts of things can we implement? How much risk is too much for
the Navy or for the Army or for the Air Force? How are we going to
deal with that at Joint Base Langley-Eustis? How much protection
should you provide? I think that is the challenge.
Figure 6 shows the typical description of risk. Unacceptable
risk is shown as dark blue. We all know what that is—we are not
going to fly in an airplane with no engines or one that is about to
fall apart. Acceptable risk appears at the bottom. Those of us who
drove here today determined that the risk associated with doing so
Chapter 3 Adapting Infrastructure to Climate Challenges
75
was acceptable risk or else we would have chosen to stay home.
So, we know what that level of risk means. The open question is:
What do we do with that area in the middle? Who decides where
we are in that? That level of risk applies to everything we are doing
in the risk management for installations. We are going to have to
make some tough decisions. Then, we will need to put the money
where the risk is the greatest.
Figure 6. What Do Risk Values Mean? [2]
There is another challenge that we need to address as we move
forward. We need to know where we currently stand. As a member
of the American Society of Civil Engineers, I can report that we
have a problem with our infrastructure. The report card that we
received in 2009 gave our nation a D grade for its infrastructure.
We are not doing well in maintaining what we have. Those of
us who have been in the service have experienced this over our
lifetime. It always gets to the crunch point where money has to
be diverted to operations. Where does that money come from? It
inevitably comes from maintenance. As a result, we have ended
up with infrastructure that is not as good as we would like it to be.
The second thing we need to do is identify what risks we actually have. It is amazing as you look at the coastal United States
and the related riverine flood environment, we do not really know
what our exposure is. In some cases, we do not want to know
because we are afraid that the cost of reducing that exposure will
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be too high. So what do we do about that? We need to find out
what our exposure is and then assess the risk. Once we have done
that, we can develop an action plan that will deal with the issues
over the long haul.
Why am I showing you that the population is increasing
(Figures 7 and 8)?
Figure 7. Population Growth
Figure 8. The Boom to Come [3]
Chapter 3 Adapting Infrastructure to Climate Challenges
77
We know that we are going to face an increase in population
in this country over the next 15–30 years. The Census Bureau says
that the U.S. population could increase by as much as 150 million.
That is a lot of people. They have to go somewhere. Where they
seem most likely to go are the places that they have been going
recently: our coastal areas.
Given this increase in population, we know that we are going
to have an increase in construction. We also know that roughly
40% of our nation’s existing infrastructure needs to be replaced
because it is simply too old. So, between now and 2050, we are
going to have a massive construction program going on. At the
same time, we are going to have problems from the rising sea level.
How do we deal with this nexus of problems?
Well, I think the challenge comes because what happens on
our military bases actually carries over to what happens in the
communities nearby. Similarly, what happens in those communities affects what happens on our bases. We are not independent
anymore. As much as we would like to stand on our own, there
is a connectivity there that is very important. We share utilities in
many cases. We share the same transportation networks. Although
many of our military installations have their own medical facilities,
in emergencies, they may have to rely on the resources available in
the civilian community.
Transportation includes the relevant infrastructure internal to
the immediate region as well as facilities that support transportation that extends beyond the region such as overseas shipping.
This latter component includes shipyards and related facilities that
provide the base for what we are doing. Thus, the city of Norfolk is
critically important to the overall Hampton Roads military area. If
we are dealing with these places, we have to take them with us as
we move forward. To ignore sea-level rise and the climate change
impacts on these communities is at our own peril because what
happens to them is going to happen to us. We have to figure out a
way—using our joint land use studies and some of the other things
done by the DoD—to address climate change on a win–win basis
with our local communities.
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What is my bottom line as we go forward? Climate change is
going to happen. I do not think we can avoid that. As a professor
at the University of Maryland, I frequently have students who still
do not believe in climate change; they say, “No, I have learned at
home that there is no such thing as climate change.” But gradually,
as they see and learn more about what is happening around them,
and as the number of natural disasters grows every year, they come
to believe that climate change is occurring and that it is going to
have a significant impact on our maritime infrastructure.
It is possible to deal with climate change impacts on infrastructure, so we need to start thinking about what we are going to do
and develop the appropriate plans, whether they are adaptation,
protection, or retreat. Tough decisions are going to have to be made
regarding priorities, acceptable risk, and resource levels/funding.
Installation protection is not as sexy as some of the other things
that we have heard about today, but it is just as critical for the wellbeing of our force, especially the Army and the Air Force, who are
not as used to water as the Navy and the Coast Guard are. Clearly,
something needs to be done, and we have to recognize that in
addition to the things we do for ourselves, somehow we have to
influence the things that are done for others as we move forward.
I think we have to always remember that nature bats last and
nature does not make any promises. It cannot say that we are going
to be here or there in 15, 20, or 40 years. We just know something
is happening, and we had better be ready for it.
REFERENCES
1. Malcolm Pirnie, Inc. and Denver Water (Waage), Decision Support
Planning Methods: Incorporating Climate Change Uncertainties
into Water Planning, 2010, http://www.wucaonline.org/assets/
pdf/pubs_whitepaper_012110.pdf.
2. E. Mark Lee, How Does Climate Change Affect the Assessment of
Landslide Risk?, 2006.
3. Arthur Nelson, “America Circa 2030: The Boom To Come,”
Architect, 2006, http://www.architectmagazine.com/retailprojects/america-circa-2030-the-boom-to-come.aspx.
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The Honorable Jackalyne Pfannenstiel
Let me start with a point that may be obvious to a lot of
people, namely that the Pentagon, and the whole DoD for that
matter, recognizes the importance of climate change and the need
to address it. The 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review provides a
The Honorable Jackalyne Pfannenstiel was appointed Assistant
Secretary of the Navy (Energy, Installations and Environment) in
March 2010. In this position, Secretary Pfannenstiel is responsible for
formulating department-wide policies, procedures, and advocacy and
strategic plans as well as overseeing all Department of the Navy functions and programs related to installations, safety, energy, and environment. Secretary Pfannenstiel is a former chairwoman of the State of
California Energy Commission. Secretary Pfannenstiel was appointed
by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to the commission in 2004 and
served until January 2009. Her responsibilities included licensing new
generating facilities and development of California’s integrated energy
policies. She chaired the Governor’s Climate Action Team subgroup
on energy and land use and worked on the creation of California’s
low carbon fuel standards. Prior to her role at the Energy Commission,
Secretary Pfannenstiel served as an independent energy consultant,
providing assistance to wind energy development projects as well as
helping local housing authorities manage energy costs in public housing facilities. Previously, Secretary Pfannenstiel spent 20 years at
Pacific Gas and Electric Company and its parent, PG&E Corporation.
She joined the company in 1980 and, in 1987, she was promoted to
vice president of Corporate Planning. At PG&E, she led the company’s
participation in a multiparty collaborative proceeding that produced
many of California’s innovative regulatory policies promoting energy
efficiency. Secretary Pfannenstiel is a past member of the Board of
Trustees of Clark University. She was also on the Board of Directors
of the Alliance to Save Energy and a Director of Energy Recovery, Inc.
Secretary Pfannenstiel graduated from Clark University with a B.A. in
economics and the University of Hartford with an M.A. in economics.
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good discussion of the worldwide vulnerabilities to climate change,
including the geopolitical consequences, poverty, environmental
degradation, humanitarian consequences, food and water scarcity,
spreading of diseases, mass migrations, and the physical consequences—rainfall, temperature, thawing permafrost, earlier snowmelt, and alterations in river flow. [1] Based on this, the report
concludes that these consequences can lead to increased demand
for humanitarian assistance and disaster response.
So, the whole DoD recognizes this. The Department of the
Navy is thinking along the lines of the vulnerabilities that we face.
Fundamentally, what we are thinking is that climate change may
well affect our mission readiness. The areas within the United States
that are most vulnerable to the effects of sea-level rise and storm
surge are New Orleans and the Hampton Roads area of Virginia
where we have an enormous concentration of naval bases. We
know that sea level is rising; we have documented that. We also
have the potential for flooding, for greater storm damage, and for
shoreline erosion.
Given our facilities on the coast, climate-caused changes could
have an incredible impact on our future readiness. We also know
that a hotter and drier climate in the Southwest, for example, is
going to affect water availability. We know that we can expect
weather extremes in the Southeast. All of these changes have the
potential to affect our training and our testing on our installations.
So the Navy has two ways of looking at it: mitigation strategies and
adaptation strategies.
Our mitigation strategies are fundamentally our aggressive
energy goals. I know that Rear Admiral Philip Cullom talked about
them earlier, but let me just emphasize the fact that we are viewing
energy as mission critical—it is what we need to do our mission.
We also need to protect our bases from supply shortages, from
volatility, and from grid outages, and we are doing that not just
because it is the right environmental action to take, but because it
is in the nation’s interest and is part of our national defense mission.
As you are aware, the Secretary of the Navy has set some very
aggressive energy goals, two of which I will mention because they
will make a big difference. One is that by 2020, half of the energy
Chapter 3 Adapting Infrastructure to Climate Challenges
81
that the Department of the Navy uses will come from non-fossil
fuel sources. Given the fact that 75% of the energy that we use
now is used for operations in ships, planes, and tactical vehicles,
that is a big challenge. Another goal that he has issued is that by
2020, half of our Navy and Marine installations will be zero net
energy. They will produce as much energy as they use. So what
does that mean? Well, from a fossil fuel standpoint, it means we
will use less, and it means that our contribution to greenhouse
gasses will be that much less.
So that is what we are thinking about in mitigation; that is
where we are going. Can the Department of the Navy alone make
a difference in the United States? Our greenhouse gas emissions
will not make the difference, but if we model how energy can be
used and how to build a more energy efficient base and a more
energy efficient community, then yes, we can make a difference.
The adaptation strategy is fundamentally about building sustainable infrastructure. That means continuing to build our energyefficient bases using the technologies and the practices that will
help us meet the Secretary’s goals. It also means that we need to
look at adaptation for both the long and short run.
The DoD together with the Environmental Protection Agency
and the Department of Energy has launched the Strategic Environment Research and Development Program (SERDP), which is doing
a series of studies that look at our military bases. They are looking
both at vulnerabilities and at the set of tools that our bases and
installations can use to meet certain climate events. By postulating
specific climate events such as storm surge and sea-level rise in
specific years, they are examining how base commanders may be
able to deal with those events.
When completed, those studies will give us a series of tools
that we can use for all of our bases. We have already started going
to each individual Navy and Marine Corps base to look at the
specific vulnerabilities to climate change effects and to see what
tools will be needed. One of the conclusions that we have already
drawn is that we need to be holistic. We do not stand alone. Our
bases are not separate from their communities. Our bases rely on
the local power grid; they rely on the local transportation system;
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they worry about the food supply. So, to the extent that our bases
are developing strategies, those strategies need to include the
greater community. That means sharing information back and forth
with the community, and it means preparing our infrastructure on
an expanded basis.
Task Force Climate Change draws on the talents of some 600
U.S. government employees, not just across the military but across
other parts of the government. There are other task forces that have
grown up on both the East and West Coasts with local communities working with the science community, government, business,
and academia to look at local area climate effects and adaptation
strategies. That is true in the Virginia area, and it is true on the West
Coast where this is something that has come up not because it
was required and not because it was structured by government per
se, but rather because it is the communities who are worried. The
Department of the Navy is involved in these activities and is both
providing information and helping to develop appropriate strategies.
The fact that such collaborations are happening, I think, leads
to the conclusion that communities are looking for a national
strategy and are looking for some leadership at the national level
to make sure that all of the various risks are being assessed and
that the infrastructure is being built to be adaptable. The question
then becomes: who will pay for adaptation? Who will pay to build
the levees or to move bases where we decide that they need to
be moved?
From the perspective of the Department of Navy, this investment needs to be part of our overall readiness. We need to do this
because we need to be militarily ready and so that is part of the
investment that we would make in national defense. But in fact, if
the American public does not believe that climate change is happening, should we really expect that Congress is going to fund
whatever adaptation strategies we might develop?
REFERENCE
1. Department of Defense, 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review,
2010,  http://www.defense.gov/qdr/images/QDR_as_of_
12Feb10_1000.pdf.
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The Honorable John Warner
I asked to go last not knowing that all the hot balls would be
passed down the table to end up in front of me. But I will try and
address each of those very important points. First, I am privileged
to have as a client the Pew Foundation, and they have sponsored
During his 30 years in the Senate, The Honorable John Warner focused
primarily on national security, foreign affairs, and intelligence. He
served on the Senate Armed Services Committee, at times as Chairman,
the Senate Committee on Intelligence, at times as the Vice Chairman,
and various other committees. Earlier in his career, the Senator volunteered for two periods of active military duty: the first as an enlisted
sailor in the final years of World War II (1945–1946) and the second as
a Lieutenant in the U.S. Marines, where he served as a communications
officer in the First Marine Air Wing during the Korean War (1950–1952).
After completing his law degree at the University of Virginia School of
Law, he clerked for The Honorable E. Barrett Prettyman, U.S. Federal
Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. From 1955
to 1960, he was in the Department of Justice serving as an Assistant U.S.
Attorney for the District of Columbia. He joined Hogan & Hartson as
an associate in 1961 and became a partner in 1964. He left Hogan &
Hartson in 1969 when he was appointed, and confirmed by the Senate,
as Under Secretary, and later as Secretary, of the U.S. Navy. He served
in those positions during the Vietnam War and during the Cold War. In
1974, the Senator was confirmed by the U.S. Senate as administrator for
the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration, where he administered federal programs in all 50 states and international programs with
22 foreign nations that participated in this historic 200-year anniversary
of the founding of our nation. Subsequently, he waged 2 years of political campaigning, winning election to his first of five Senate terms in
November 1978. On January 3, 2009, he completed his fifth consecutive term and retired, establishing a record of being the second longestserving U.S. Senator in the history of the Commonwealth of Virginia.
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me to travel to now 18 states to address the public. A typical visit
takes me into a community to speak with the legislative body, the
governor’s office, the chambers of commerce, and the city councils
and to have a public forum, usually at a nearby university. I want to
come back at the end and close with some of those experiences.
First, though, I want to say that the job being done by this
forum and each of you individually and collectively will eventually, hopefully, get into a book like the one produced by last year’s
symposium. On behalf of Pew, I have been to over 100 different
conferences all across the country, and this book is about as good
as it gets in writing regarding the subjects we are addressing today.
I have never seen any better.
In my judgment, the subject of the nexus between energy
and climate change and national security is gaining momentum,
and people are beginning to pay attention, as was mentioned by
General Gerald Galloway. But here is the problem. A recent Pew
report looked at the 20 major industrial nations, looked at their
GDP, looked at their job structure, and looked at the context of
what they are doing in climate and energy and the like.
Those nations that had a national energy policy were forging
ahead, just as The Honorable Jackalyne Pfannenstiel pointed out.
We, the United States, do not have such a policy, and we are falling behind. We were not up in the top four or five on that chart,
we were down at about eighth or ninth, somewhere in that area.
Those of you who like to study the economic relationships of the
subject would be well advised to look at that report.
Now I do not tend to be an expert on much in life, but I did
spend 30 years in the Senate, and I think I understand some of the
fundamentals of the legislative body. Winston Churchill once said
that the first obligation of every parliamentarian (and he was actually referring to the British Parliament) is to get himself or herself
reelected. If you can do some good along the way, that is all well
and good.
I just think that we are on the precipice; we are doing things
to this planet that could produce cataclysmic results. We have to
come to grips with that in this country. Folks, I would be less than
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honest if I did not tell you that right now I do not see, and I do not
say this in a pejorative or negative sense, that coming together in
the Congress to really consider the situation.
So we have two cataclysms crashing on this country at the
same time. We need to address climate change, we need to fund
our adaptations, and we need to engender how to get it done. At
the same time, we have this budget crisis we face. So I go back to
Churchill, he said get reelected. The only way you get reelected is
if you do things that satisfy the instincts, motivations, and desires of
your constituents. We will not be able to make any progress until
we convince hometown America, main street America, that this
subject is going to affect them or that it is going to really affect their
children and grandchildren unless we address it. The same argument has to be made about fiscal policy in this country.
So our job, the job of those of us who are interested in this subject and are willing to take the time—as Secretary Pfannenstiel and
General Galloway have done—is not only to convey our technical
knowledge and perspectives but also to help figure out how we are
going to message this to the general public and message it in a way
that they understand it.
I am going to tell a little story on myself, and I never tell a story
unless it is a story on me and it is sticking me in the ribs. I was a
very aggressive, not so bright, but energetic Secretary of the Navy
and I was visiting the Sixth Fleet. I always did my homework, and I
checked on every ship’s route there. I spotted one that I was interested in, and I said: “You know, I want to go visit that ship.”
When I arrived in the Sixth Fleet, I told the commander that I
wanted to visit this certain ship, so he directed his subordinates to
let the Secretary get aboard that ship. As it turned out, this particular ship was in the process of getting a new helo pad, so you could
not get to it by helicopter which was the way I had been traveling. So, I had to use a breach’s buoy, which is throwing two lines
to the ship from another ship going along at the same speed, and
then getting in a little canvas bucket so that a bosun’s mate could
haul you over. But that did not appeal to the senior officers one
damn bit, because if they dumped the Secretary of the Navy into
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the Mediterranean in a high-sea state, they probably would not get
their next star. But I insisted that I was going to go.
Well, the reason I went out there was because this ship had
a 1200-pound steam plant. The captain of the ship was a young
lieutenant commander. I told him that I never went aboard a ship
without going into the engine room. Because as somebody said
in the Royal Navy in World War II, all battle plans begin in the
engine room.
So I went down there because if the crew knows that the
Secretary went to the engine room, then he is one of you and he
is thinking about how you run the ship. So I went down and was
met by this big strong guy. He was covered with sweat because
the place was full of steam. I asked, “Can you get this thing up to
31 knots?” He turned to the captain and asked, “Who is this guy?”
“He is the Secretary of the Navy,” came the reply. “Should I answer
the question?” “Yes,” was the captain’s answer. So the chief said:
“I expect I could because this is one of Burke’s 31-knot beavers.”
So I went up on the bridge with the captain, and we cranked it
up to 31 knots because Admiral Arleigh “31 knot” Burke was one
of my mentors. We got it up to 31 knots, and I called the Sixth Fleet
commander up and told him what we had done. Well, I am telling
you, he keel hauled me verbally and said you bring that throttle
back down, that might blow up the steam plant and everything
else. So I always think of that story, that if we do not get this thing
right, we will have a problem on our hands in this country.
So I am going to finish up my remarks by just saying Congress
has got to look at their responsibility in terms of leverage. As part of
the good work being done by this forum and by many others elsewhere across America to deal with this message, we have got to
figure out how to convince the voters to put knowledgeable ladies
and gentlemen into the Congress and then convince those elected
to do what has to be done. If Congress passes a national policy,
then American can move ahead; it will create jobs and generate
dramatic changes to help our economy.
So therein rests the leverage. I will continue to speak on behalf
of Pew and others. Ultimately, though, we have to get our message
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into a couple of pages so that local mainstream America can
understand all your good and handy work. Let us hope that someday in the not-too-distant future that the American public and the
Congress will recognize the tremendous leverage they have to help
America get out of this dilemma.
Believe me, Secretary Robert Gates—whom I have known for
many, many years in all his iterations—has really set the course
and speed with his service secretaries. While in some instances
they are competitive, in others, they need to work together. They
have to share their thoughts. We do not always want everybody to
build their own stovepipe. In many cases we need a team effort. A
clear example, as I mentioned before, is how the President of the
United States has tried his best to address this subject.
Now we are in a different sort of a situation—the reelection
cycle is coming up. And frankly, I credit this forum for at least
bringing up climate change. You would be surprised how at many
of the forums to which I am invited to speak, they will say, “Well,
we have taken climate change off the agenda,” and I tell them, “No
way, I am going to talk about it anyway,” which I continue to do,
as General Galloway did. It has to be brought up, even though it is
a term that has now almost dropped from the lexicon of those who
are trying to address the energy and the security problems.
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Q&
A
Session with THE PANELISTS
Dr. Ronald Filadelfo: Okay, before we open it up to the floor
for questions: Secretary Pfannenstiel and General Galloway, do
you have any quick follow-up remarks?
Brigadier General Gerald Galloway, Jr.: I must say that the
only time that the Army, Navy, and Air Force are not on the same
team is when they are competing in sports. Otherwise, they are the
closest friends we have, and we are part of this common approach
to dealing with the nation’s defense.
The Honorable Jackalyne Pfannenstiel: I would just like to follow-up on a point that Senator Warner raised about which I could
not agree more: we need to find a way of messaging climate change
to the general public. Part of that is what we are doing here, talking
about the nexus among energy and climate and national security,
but all of us who are part of the discussion here need to find a way
to do that.
The Honorable John Warner: Folks, in these trips that I take,
we bring with us whenever it is possible two or three retired general or flag officers—with two, three, or four stars—from CNA’s
Military Advisory Board. I have spoken 10,000 times; and my voice
is gone now because I have flapped it so much over my lifetime,
but I go in and people perceive it as the usual senatorial blather
and they all sort of nod their heads. But when that retired admiral
or general gets up to talk, the audience is riveted because of the
credibility attached to our uniformed people and the retired people today. When they speak, America listens. And that has been
one of CNA’s greatest contributions to this whole setup.
would like to follow up on one of Secretary Pfannenstiel’s
Q: Icomments.
You mentioned the studies being made of base
vulnerabilities to climate change in that there will be expenditures
needed to adapt or mitigate. Are you also looking at energy vulnerabilities and dependencies?
Chapter 3 Adapting Infrastructure to Climate Challenges
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The Honorable John Warner: Oh, very definitely. It is an awesome subject, and I frequently address that. Our national grid is
so vulnerable, the question of the sources of the energy and the
whole thing. We are going through this despairing situation in
Japan. Folks, we cannot as a nation slip away from advancing on
the nuclear front and further looking at means by which to access
that as a part of our overall power needs. Twenty percent of our
electrical needs in America are met by nuclear power. We cannot
simply decide to let those plants go and not be replaced.
In addition, we have got to look at ways to advance the technology—of course, adopting every safety measure—and move on
into the future. How many times have I used and have you used,
Secretary Pfannenstiel, the fact that the U.S. Navy is operating
today about 60 to 70 nuclear plants on ships throughout the world
with a marvelous record?
The Honorable Jackalyne Pfannenstiel: The Senator is absolutely correct—we are looking very seriously at every one of our
bases for their energy use. I mentioned that one of the Secretary
of the Navy’s goals is 50% of the bases being zero net energy by
2020. In order to do that, we have to go to every base, because
each one is different. The ones in the Pacific Northwest have different resource availabilities and issues than the ones in the southeast, for example.
Dr. Ronald Filadelfo: I would point out that according to the
2008 Defense Science Board report on DoD energy use, one of
our great vulnerabilities is that our installations are over-reliant on
the commercial power grid. [1]
Brigadier General Gerald Galloway, Jr.: As I recall, the last
Military Advisory Board report talked about ways in which the
Department of Energy and the DoD could cooperate in dealing
with energy and getting renewable energy. [2] I would point out
that our military installations are great test beds. You have people
there who know and understand what R&D is and who are used to
using things forward. At the same time, you build your own independence by having the ability to support others. Such things as
small nuclear plants could be put on military installations, as could
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wind farms. Whatever you happen to do, you can bring it together
at a military installation and let the DoD lead the way.
The Honorable Jackalyne Pfannenstiel: That is right, we are
using the bases as test beds wherever we can, which is in quite
a few places and with quite a few technologies. I think that in
the day of smart meters and of the smart grid, it is a very different technological world than it was even a decade ago. We also
have to recognize, though, that are bases are part of communities, and they are invariably integrated with the local utility grid. In
some cases, we can generate sufficient power on our own, but we
need to make sure that it is the right thing economically and that
it is the right thing from a national security standpoint. There are a
lot of questions there that I think we are just at the early stages of
answering.
Dr. Ronald Filadelfo: At one time, we talked about islanding
our installations, making them self-reliant. We no longer seem to
do that for a couple of reasons. There are business case reasons
why we might not want to do that, but our installations tend to be
part of a community. We cannot island Naval Station Norfolk from
the surrounding community. If the surrounding community goes
down, how are our people going to get to and from work?
The Honorable Jackalyne Pfannenstiel: I think the point is
that technologically, we probably can physically island any of the
bases. At some point, we may want to have enough generating
capacity of our own that we could rely exclusively on that if it
made sense to do so. But in the greater scheme of the U.S. energy
picture, we have to be very wise in terms of how we relate to the
local community.
Dr. Ronald Filadelfo: Let me ask a question having to do with
the Navy’s ability to conduct long-range planning. Simply stated,
my question is: is there any particular science-related information
that the Navy or the DoD needs in order to develop future plans
regarding our maritime infrastructure?
The Honorable Jackalyne Pfannenstiel: The answer is yes, but I
do not think I can identify them off of the top of my head. We are
continually struggling with some of the energy technologies, for
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example. As I mentioned before, the Navy and Marine Corps have
over 100 bases, and each one is absolutely unique in terms of its
physical situation, its needs, and its mission. So yes, for each base,
there are information needs for that base for making the right economic decisions and the right national security decisions. A lot of
what we are looking at is not so much a global forecast or a U.S.
projection, but rather a regional or even a local projection.
mentioned that it is very important that we try to educate
Q: You
the public about climate change. Unfortunately, my experi-
ence has been that our leaders and our future leaders do not really have
a good grasp on climate change or energy security. Are there initiatives
underway that will ensure that these issues are addressed in our professional military education from the lowest levels to the highest?
The Honorable John Warner: I am scheduled in about a month
or so to go out to the Navy Postgraduate School. I intend to cover
it out there. After that, I will be speaking at the Army War College
at Carlisle, Pennsylvania. But, you know, again people will say,
“The old senator is blathering on.” The military has taken this challenge on ever so seriously, and I just hope that you young officers
will avail yourselves of opportunities to speak to your peer group
because that is where we are going to make the progress.
The force multiplier of Congress putting in place a law is just
enormous, and it will help the job situation and the like. I am just
concerned about the current fiscal environment because having
spent a goodly number of years in the Pentagon, you always kept
at least two budgets in your drawer, and sometimes three, because
you would find that even though you had put an entry in the service Program Objective Memorandum (POM), you now had to
take it all out. Sometimes, you kept cutting until, unfortunately,
R&D was cut. So many of the things that were described up here
on the cutting edge of technology are going to be the ones that
people can shave off by saying, “Oh, let’s do the best we can with
what we have until we can afford to go from what we have to
where we should go.”
You have to really take that argument on forcefully and keep it
in balance. While we want to modernize our bases to be energy
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efficient, the services’ first priority will invariably be weapons,
ships, and cockpits and modernization of your artillery and your
tanks and so forth. So, it is going to be hard to get energy-efficient
bases into the budget.
The Honorable Jackalyne Pfannenstiel: I absolutely agree, but
I would take it a step further and go back to where you started in
answering the question, which is make sure that everybody understands, regardless of whether you are talking about climate change
or about energy. I think that we are working in that direction. We
are working with Rear Admiral Philip Cullom to bring energy into
the curriculum everywhere we can, because we are convinced
that when people understand how critical energy is to the national
defense and our national security interests, people will make the
right decisions. They will make the right decisions about immediate use, about facilities, and about future platforms. But, we need
to make sure such considerations are included in the curriculums
at our service schools.
Dr. Ronald Filadelfo: I do not know if it is okay to plug a
book, but I will say I have nothing to do with it. At Rear Admiral
Cullom’s Energy Conference in Washington, D.C., last fall, he spoke
about Daniel Yergin’s classic book, “The Prize.” [3] Based on Rear
Admiral Cullom’s prodding, I picked up that book and just finished
it. It provided eye-opening reading about how our national security in the Middle East is inseparable from energy.
The Honorable John Warner: Let me just pick up on that.
Folks, I am 84 years old, and I have seen a lot of America and what
has transformed. People ask me what the difference is between the
Senate today and what it was when I came in some 33 years ago. It
is communications. When I came to the Senate, we were all reading newspapers and books. Now, you have to figure out how you
are going to get this on Facebook and blogs. I am telling you, that
is the way America is learning things—texting. It is a challenge to
take this and get that, but that is the way America is learning things
now.
Dr. Graeme Stephens: I am a climate scientist and I might be
the only climate scientist in this room. Today has been a real eye
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opener for me. Last week we held a special symposium at the
Jet Propulsion Laboratory on communicating climate to the public.
One of the key messages from that was to keep the message simple
and have it come from a credible messenger.
As I reflect on this, I believe that scientists are not the right
messengers for climate change because the debate about climate
and global warming has kind of partitioned the climate community
into those who believe and those who do not believe, although
the majority of the climate scientists believe that warming is real
and climate change is with us. But what has been real eye opening
for me today is the fact that the military has moved so far ahead
toward adaptation. I think that is a key message point, because the
military is a credible messenger.
I think you have an important role to play in educating the public because you actually are adapting to climate change. I think that
is a powerful message that will get across to the public more than
if we scientists say that it is happening or that it is likely to happen.
Rear Admiral David Titley: Senator Warner, you talk about
Facebook and all those kind of things. Believe it or not, both Task
Force Climate Change and Task Force Energy are on Facebook. So
we are using those types of ways of getting out the message. When
we spoke in Norfolk, the Norfolk Pilot picked it up. National Public
Radio, their current problems notwithstanding, has been very supportive of getting this message out. We have put both climate and
energy into the curriculums at the Naval Academy, at the Naval
Postgraduate School, and at the Navy War College. I know that at
both the Navy War College and the Naval Postgraduate School,
a lot of our Air Force and Army colleagues serve at those institutions. So those are just a few things that we are doing to try to get
the message out.
The Honorable John Warner: Well Admiral, I am not trying to
put anybody on report; I am just telling you what my experiences
have been in trying to deliver this message. But I would say to
you well done sir for what that communication agenda does. But
again, I come back to a basic point. I have said it three times, and
I will say it a fourth time: people are listening to the United States
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military. So when you put it on a blog, they are listening. When
you put it into the media for them to see, they will listen. I get up
there and stand on my head on a blog, and they will not listen to
me. That is where you got—and it is up to you to help carry that
message as you are doing, so well done.
REFERENCES
1. Defense Science Board, Report of the Defense Science Board
Task Force on DoD Energy Strategy, “More Fight—Less Fuel,”
2008, http://www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/reports/ADA477619.pdf.
2. The CNA Corporation, National Security and the Threat of
Climate Change, 2007.
3. Daniel Yergin, The Prize, Free Press, 1993.