In this episode of Shaping The Future, I am speaking to Global Security expert, Dr Chad Briggs at the University of Alaska Anchorage.
Chad advises many global organisations on the intersection between climate change and national and regional security issues. His clients include the US State Department, US Air Force, the Swedish Armed Forces, the European Union, as well as US Dept of Energy, among others.
Chad explains the linkages between climate change and hybrid warfare situations that are going on now and will continue to pose a massive threat to societies around the world. These include government level sources of disinformation, such as the Global Warming Policy Foundation in the UK or the Heartland Institute in the US, who are funded by fossil fuel interest groups to sow doubt and chaos that drive us further down the road of climate catastrophe.
I want to thank the Global Military Advisory Council on Climate Change (GMACCC) for their help in organising this series of interviews with security experts. The next interview will be with former Obama White House advisor and Head of the US National Security Council for Climate, Alice Hill about her new book due out in September.
Additional segments on Geoengineering and models versus first-hand knowledge from this interview with Chad will be available later this week to Patreon backers via GENN.cc. This will be accompanied by an overview of the forthcoming interviews and reflections on key points that are emerging from the series.
Thanks for listening to Shaping The Future – you can subscribe on Youtube or any podcast channel and sign up for email updates on GENN.cc.I will also be covering COP26 in Glasgow and conducting interviews with a wide range of participants. So do stay tuned and if you can, please support my work via Patreon.
Contents with Timestamps
- Hybrid Warfare 01:35
- Resilience targeting 4:35
- Politics, economics and fossil fuel interests 5:30
- Sources of disinformation are a national security threat 8:00
- Cyber Aggression 9:00
- Climate migrants and nationalist politics 10:30
- Tackling societal breakdown due to climate resilience failure at source 12:40
- Local knowledge versus models and remote assessments – CUT
- Dependency on fossil fuel supports regimes responsible for disinformation 14:40
- Geoengineering, risk and attribution – CUT
- A UN Security Council Specifically for Climate Change 17:35
- Opportunities for positive diplomatic solutions | Building trust in time 19:10
- Planning a pragmatic route to the future from Phase Zero 21:08
It would be interesting to learn about the military industry and their lobbying. I’m guessing that they would gain with true information about climate change consequences but not by mitigation and not by talking about the fossil fuel industry. In Sweden there is a think tank that’s part of Atlantic Council that gets finance from both military and fossil fuel industry but also from governments. I think they acknowledge climate risks and consequences but don’t talk much about mitigation, climate as a crises and the fossil fuel industry.
Thanks Nick a great interview/discussion. First off we must co-opt the world’s militaries, or we’re lost. How much time do we have(?). We must stop stalling on that question as a society and get on with the physical preparations for what’s coming (we need all the militaries), for what’s already evident in the global north. The global south has been experiencing crises and emergencies for decades and they know (we must help each other). We know what’s coming. I’m a regular person, retired merchant banker and uni lecturer and I know what’s coming, I’ve known for years. Knowing what’s coming is one thing, taking boots on the ground action is another. The problem is that what we thought was democracy isn’t. It’s long ago been hi jacked and it’s the mega corporations running the show along with the mega banks, the complicity of politicians and the central banks. And the examples set by the USA and UK are appalling. The tragedy of AR6 is that it still doesn’t include permafrost thaw, wild fires, and wetland GHG releases under high emission scenarios, and they are an unknown quantity. It also looks as though we are pushing the old RCP8.5 and are at the crossroads now, not in 2030. By 2030 we’ll be passed the point of no return. The IPCC has always been super conservative, profit driven and politically geared to the mega corps. Consensus science, if that’s what we want to call it, hasn’t worked. We could have trusted scientists like Peter Wadhams, but it went against the political and economic status quo. Now it’s killing us, and what dystopian future are we bequeathing our kids? We should be on our feet, not our knees in front of these mafia politicians and oligarchs. They should be afraid of us. We can’t vote our way out of this existential emergency, We are the ones who will have to manage, mitigate and find the pathways that allow our survival in some kind of recognisable form.
Nick, your interviews are always an education, that’s a real talent.