Green Security: A Secret Transition

Who benefits from going green in a brown world?

After interviewing former Under Secretary for Defence on Environmental Security, Sherri Goodman, one thing she said kept rattling around my brain:

“Today, [the military] is deploying micro grids on most major military bases. And that micro grid enables you to put distributed energy resources on it. At the first net zero military base in the US in Albany, Georgia, they've put on their micro-grid a waste-to-energy plant. They're actually extracting methane from an old landfill and using that to convert that waste to energy.”

The reasoning for micro-grids is that military bases have to be able to operate independently of power outages for up to two weeks and, thanks to climate events like hurricanes, or even the fact that more power is surging through the grid due to increasing energy demand, that grid is liable to fail.

The military, in response to the climate crisis, is deploying decentralised, low-carbon energy systems, exactly the kinds of systems that are being actively undermined and underfunded by the wider political and economic system. Yet, the reasons for doing so are not due to recognising the intrinsic value of going greener, but out of a question of security in a rapidly changing world. In sum, the very things that need to be done to safeguard a better future are being mostly blocked in the public realm and carried out elsewhere because the world has already changed.

This got me wondering: Who else is shoring up renewable power out of security—not climate—concerns?

Collapse

“Collapse” is a loaded word and, as James Dyke said on the show a few weeks ago, the future is too uncertain to proclaim that civilisation will end this century. However, we can also see that things are collapsing: social orders, international relations, ecosystems, supply chains, even infrastructure under the weight of devastating climate events like Hurricane Milton. The world has changed dramatically in the past few decades and the only people denying those changes are those who make a fortune selling lies, those who make a fortune from the lies, and the folk who have no good reason not to believe the lies.

I find it impossible to believe that people in positions of power, who are briefed by scientists and policy makers, are unaware of the dangers of the present and the worsening future we’re hurtling towards. They may not grasp the relationships between all of the moving parts, but the fact of the problem is too large now to ignore or deny—hence why even those who sell lies have shifted from a tactic of climate denial to climate action delay. We also have enough reports now of millionaires and billionaires shoring up their own personal resources in bunkers in more rural parts of New Zealand to know the belief in a different and dangerous world has reached even the groups who benefit the most from ignoring those changes. What’s interesting is what they’re choosing to do with their resources—and why.

Population

There is plenty of work showing human civilisation is in overshoot—consuming more than the planet has to offer—and that to survive we will need to curb out appetite. There are also plenty of sanguine suggestions that managing a global decline in population would protect the earth’s carrying capacity and that the best way to do so is invest in girls’ education.

This argument is disputed by those who fear the resurgence of eugenic regimes, which the West only just saw the back of. Degrowth scholars insist that if we reduce our appetites, we will be able to support 10 billion people whilst also conserving enough of the planet for sustainable use and protecting the more-than-human world.

However, in the third corner we have useful idiots like Elon Musk blaring about population collapse being the biggest threat to society this century. His involvement in long-termism which also promotes an exponentially booming population (with a focus on privileged babies), his investments in reproductive technologies, and now his outright alignment with the Presidential candidate who actively worked to strip American women of their reproductive rights is evidence of him putting his money where his big-fucking-mouth-that-won’t-shut-up is.

However, I suspect Elon represents a minority within elite circles. The opposing argument is as popular as it is silent: less people means more resources to play with. Given we live in a world in which territories and peoples and species are seen as sacrifices to larger ideological, political and economic goals, it is by no means a stretch of the imagination to think that, perhaps, some are harkening this planetary crisis in the hope it will wipe out a few billion people and free up those resources for personal consumption. By taking up so much space in the public square squalling about population collapse, Elon serves as a useful idiot, distracting from the possibility that some would welcome that very event.

Energy

In the event of systems collapse which would see the fracturing of our energy systems, food systems, supply chains, and the very building blocks of human society which keep most of us alive, decentralised, renewable energy sources would be critical to survival. These energy systems would provide heating, electricity, possibly even water desalination, and a food source. It’s a no-brainer in a world on the brink.

Equally, if you’re the type of person more worried about protecting your material footprint than reducing it, so is blocking the international growth of these same energy systems. By impinging a just transition and forcing the current system to its breaking point—and shoring up your own resources, power supply, and social networks in the interim—you may well be stacking the odds in your favour even better than if you were to compete in the system that granted your wealth to begin with.

This may sound fanciful, but these are narratives myself and my colleagues have heard over the years, often told bare-faced and shameless. They are also mere evolutions of the narratives we already live in, in which entire peoples and lands have been sacrificed to the economic maw or a single mad man’s thirst for power. We are all currently witness to a genocide that our governments fund and deny. We are not witness to the genocide in West Papua and Sudan which barely make the news. An extractive system of endless growth demarcates that which is valuable and that which is not; that which is valuable is used up and produces waste; that which is not is destroyed to make room for value or waste.

And we know, in this system, resources are valued over life—just remember the international bank bail out after the 2008 crash.

What would make this time any different?