Elizabeth Warren Presses Pentagon on Its Planning for Climate Change

One of America's major political parties may not yet be willing to acknowledge that climate change is real, but it is already having significant effects on the U.S. military. Flooding in Nebraska and a hurricane in Florida that damaged military installations led to a recent Pentagon request of $5 billion in relief money. Now Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Jack Reed, D-R.I., are calling on the Government Accountability Office to assess military contractors’ vulnerability to climate risks.

“While there has been analysis of the impact of climate change on military facilities,” they write, “there has been no comprehensive analysis of the risks of climate change on the network of military contractors that provide billions of dollars of goods, services, and research and development” to the Department of Defense. As the letter released this afternoon notes, defense companies accepted $300 billion in federal contracts in 2017 and constitute a foundational part of U.S. military operations. “This is a significant gap.”

Read the full article and more in The Intercept.