Federal spending on the military far outstrips U.S. expenditures for dealing with climate change – even though the Defense Department itself has identified the global changing climate as a looming national security danger, according to a report published Thursday by the Institute for Policy Studies. “As the comparison of the budgets for traditional military force and for climate security make clear, climate change does not occupy space in the federal budget commensurate with the threat it poses to our security,” the report says.
The report finds that military funding rose from $566 billion in fiscal 2015 to $588 billion in the government’s fiscal 2017 budget request. In comparison, U.S. climate funding in 2015 was $18 million and the 2017 request calls for $21 billion. “The imbalance between spending to deal with conflict by means of military force and spending to prevent the massive conflict-multiplier of climate change from emerging has improved slightly: from 30:1 in FY 2015 and FY 2016, to 28:1 in the request for FY 2017. But spending 28 times as much on traditional military security as on climate security is hardly commensurate with the magnitude of this ‘urgent and growing threat to national security,’ as the military has defined it,” the report says.