Climate Disinformation vs. National Security: The Pentagon's $15 Billion Blind Spot

The organized campaign to suppress climate science traces to a specific, documented origin — earlier than long assumed. A peer-reviewed 2021 analysis by Stanford researcher Benjamin Franta, published in Environmental Politics, found that the American Petroleum Institute was publicly promoting false and misleading information about climate change as early as 1980 — through a public policy booklet, "Two Energy Futures: A National Choice for the 80s," which insisted scientists were split on global warming even as API's own internal task force had been briefed otherwise. That predates by nearly a decade the 1989 founding of the Global Climate Coalition, previously considered the origin point of organized industry denial. ^[15]

The industry's internal knowledge predates even the 1980 campaign. In 1959, nuclear scientist Edward Teller explained at an American Petroleum Institute symposium that CO2 emissions from burning oil would melt ice caps and raise sea levels. In 1977, ExxonMobil senior scientist James Black briefed the company's management committee: "there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels." ^[5] A 2023 Harvard-led analysis published in Science confirmed that ExxonMobil's internal models predicted global warming with an average skill score of 72% (plus or minus 6 percentage points, with the best models scoring 99%) — while the company's public communications simultaneously promoted uncertainty. ^[2]

In 1989, ExxonMobil, Mobil, Chevron, BP, Shell, and other fossil fuel companies co-founded the Global Climate Coalition (GCC) explicitly to oppose emissions reductions and cast doubt on climate science. The GCC operated as the primary organized denial vehicle through the 1990s. When it dissolved in 2002 as the science became undeniable, the strategy evolved — pivoting from outright denial to delay tactics, greenwashing, false solution promotion, and what a 2024 congressional investigation called "doublespeak." ^[4]

A 2024 joint bicameral staff report by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Representative Jamie Raskin documented that a 2016 internal BP presentation contained "no fewer than eight statements contradicting BP's own public ad campaigns." ExxonMobil's 2025 Climate Report again failed independent scientific review, per the Union of Concerned Scientists, which called it "not a roadmap for climate action" but "a distraction." Shell funded $25 million over five years for the Energy Biosciences Institute at UC Berkeley while lobbying against climate regulations, and BP budgeted $2.5–$4.5 million for "hard persuasion" television-advertising tactics targeting Washington state specifically. ^{[1] [3] [4]}

Naval Station Norfolk is the world's largest naval base and among the most climate-vulnerable pieces of military infrastructure on earth. Sea levels at Norfolk are rising roughly 5.6 millimeters per year, and land subsidence — driven by glacial rebound and groundwater withdrawal from the Potomac aquifer — is compounding the problem, with the ground sinking roughly twice as fast as the sea is rising. ^[29] Today, tidal flooding affects the area 9 times per year on average. Under intermediate sea-level rise projections, by 2050 that figure reaches 280 flood events per year. ^[9]

Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida was devastated by Hurricane Michael in October 2018. The Category 5 storm, with sustained winds up to 155–160 mph, damaged 95% of the buildings on the installation. Seventeen F-22 Raptors that could not be evacuated in time rode out the storm; several were damaged. The rebuild — initially estimated at $4.9 billion in late 2018 — has run to roughly $5 billion. AFIMSC is using the rebuild as a template for climate-resilient base design across all installations, with new construction built to withstand a minimum of 165 mph winds. ^[20]

Andersen Air Force Base in Guam — the U.S. military's critical hub for Indo-Pacific Command operations — sustained approximately $10 billion in damage and hardening costs from Typhoon Mawar in 2023. ^[10] Camp Lejeune in North Carolina and Tyndall together absorbed more than $8 billion in hurricane damage in 2018 alone, according to Senate Armed Services Committee Democrats. ^[28] Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska — headquarters of U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), which oversees the nation's nuclear forces — was inundated by a 500-year Missouri River flood in March 2019, with floodwaters covering runways and pouring into operations buildings; the damage has cost more than $1 billion to date. Former Army Climate Advisor Will Rogers has pointed to Offutt as evidence that climate-driven extreme weather now threatens command-and-control infrastructure for America's strategic deterrent. ^{[23] [28]} More than 10,000 troops have been sidelined by heat-related illnesses since 2018, with the annual rate of heat exhaustion among service members rising 52% between 2020 and 2024. ^[10]

Climate denial has undergone a structural transformation. Research by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which analyzed transcripts from over 12,000 climate-related YouTube videos, found that "New Denial" claims — those attacking climate solutions (renewable energy, electric vehicles, emissions policy) rather than the underlying science — now constitute 70% of all climate denial content on YouTube, up from 35% roughly six years earlier. Popularized by figures with millions of subscribers, this pivot is strategically sophisticated: attacking solutions rather than settled science is harder to debunk because it operates in the legitimately contested space of policy tradeoffs rather than empirical fact. ^[16]

The disinformation infrastructure operates through overlapping layers. The fossil fuel industry channels money through 501(c)(4) nonprofits not required to disclose donors, shell companies, and political action committees. Think tanks including the Heritage Foundation, Heartland Institute, and Cato Institute receive fossil fuel funding and produce congressional testimony and media commentary aimed at manufacturing uncertainty. In Ohio, FirstEnergy admitted to paying roughly $60 million in bribes to then-House Speaker Larry Householder to secure a $1.3 billion ratepayer bailout for two nuclear plants. In the Southeast, an investigation found utilities including Alabama Power funneled $900,000-plus through a consulting firm to news outlets that produced favorable coverage. ^[17]

Generative AI has lowered the cost of producing misleading content, enabling industrial-scale output of climate denial material. Meta discontinued its U.S. fact-checking program in 2025. Platform enforcement of climate misinformation policies remains inconsistent. The structural advantages of disinformation — cheap to produce, simple to consume, politically pre-sorted — have only widened as accuracy-oriented journalism becomes more expensive and politically risky in fossil-fuel-dependent markets. ^[16]

On March 20, 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signed a memorandum directing termination of over $580 million in programs, contracts, and grants deemed misaligned with DoD priorities, including climate research, social-science studies, COVID-19 response work, and DEI-related programs. The memo is a primary source document, available directly from the Defense Department's official servers. ^[22]

The memo contains a legally and operationally significant internal contradiction. While calling for eliminating "references to climate change and related subjects" from planning, it simultaneously makes exceptions for "efforts to harden U.S. military installations against extreme weather" and directs installations to continue "assessing weather-related impacts on operations" and "mitigating weather-related risks." This effectively bans the scientific framework — climate science, climate models, climate risk assessment — that military planners need to execute what the memo still requires them to do. Days after the memo, Hegseth wrote on social media that "the Department of Defense does not do climate change crap. We do training and warfighting." ^{[22] [26] [30]}

Context for the scale of the reversal: the 2008 National Intelligence Assessment concluded that climate "will have wide-ranging implications for US national security interests over the next 20 years." Its lead author, Dr. Thomas Fingar, former Deputy Director of National Intelligence, has said of the document: "there's no secret stuff in here… just good analysts working with publicly available information and applying good methodological tradecraft." The document remains classified, some 18 years after its completion. ^[14]

Climate disinformation has metastasized beyond fossil fuel industry funding into foreign adversary information operations. A Polish military intelligence report examined by DeSmog in February 2025 found Russia had been intensifying climate disinformation campaigns since invading Ukraine, using tactics that include discrediting climate scientists and research, elevating friendly politicians as faux "experts" over actual scientists, and spreading conspiracy theories to erode trust in public institutions — specifically targeting the EU's Emissions Trading Scheme, the European Green Deal, and the Fit for 55 legislative package. ^[27]

After the 2023 Maui wildfires, which killed more than 100 people, China- and Russia-linked accounts amplified false claims that the U.S. government had deliberately caused the fires or was more focused on aiding Ukraine than its own citizens — messaging Hawaii's governor publicly dismissed. ^[12] After major floods struck Spain, Poland, and the United States in late 2024, Russian state media ran coordinated campaigns claiming Western support for Ukraine had left those nations unable to respond to disasters. ^[11]

Russia does not need to manufacture climate denial content from scratch — it amplifies existing domestic narratives generated by industry-funded American think tanks and media outlets, making attribution to a foreign source difficult and deniable. Former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff, a George W. Bush appointee, warned in a March 2026 op-ed that "the United States is less able to protect itself from these threats when it relies on false or distorted information, whether it comes from foreign adversaries, industry or dysfunctional social media dynamics," adding that "reliable information is a requirement for tackling any risk, whether a Florida hurricane or a terrorist plot." ^[11]

The accountability reckoning for decades of climate disinformation is now playing out in American courtrooms — and has drawn an extraordinary federal government intervention on behalf of fossil fuel companies.

In May 2025, the State of Hawaii filed suit in state court against seven groups of affiliated fossil fuel companies and the American Petroleum Institute for climate deception, failure to warn, public nuisance, trespass, negligence, and civil aiding and abetting. The lawsuit was filed the day after the U.S. Department of Justice filed a preemptive suit in federal court seeking to block Hawaii's action before it was even filed. Columbia Law's Michael Gerrard, founder of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, called the DOJ maneuver unprecedented: "I've never heard of the federal government — or anyone — filing a lawsuit seeking an injunction to block someone from filing a lawsuit against a third party. The usual procedure is to wait until the lawsuit is filed and then move to intervene in that lawsuit." ^[21]

On April 30, 2025, the DOJ also sued Michigan to preemptively block state climate-damages claims; the next day it sued New York and Vermont over their climate superfund laws. The legal basis: that state climate actions are preempted by the Clean Air Act and are otherwise unconstitutional. ^[25] The April 8, 2025 executive order "Protecting American Energy from State Overreach" directed DOJ to identify and challenge state laws "burdening" domestic energy production, providing the framework for these suits. ^[25]

In February 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the Boulder County, Colorado climate accountability case — Suncor Energy v. Boulder County, at stake in industry framed as Boulder v. Suncor/ExxonMobil — with oral arguments set for October 5, 2026, the first day of the Court's new term, and a decision expected by mid-2027. The Court will decide whether federal law shields fossil fuel companies from state and local damages claims for climate change-related harms. At stake: lawsuits filed by 11 states (California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Vermont) plus dozens of cities, counties, and tribes. ^[24]

The 2025 Annual Threat Assessment released under DNI Tulsi Gabbard in March 2025 was the first Annual Threat Assessment in roughly a decade to contain no mention of climate change — a departure from a long bipartisan pattern in intelligence community threat assessments dating back to at least 2009. At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Sen. Angus King noted that every report he had reviewed in 13 years on the committee had mentioned climate change as a security threat except this one; Gabbard said she directed ODNI staff to "focus on the most extreme and critical national security threats," but told King she didn't recall specifically ordering climate's exclusion. ^{[6] [13]}

The chilling effect on military expert opinion is documented. Active military leaders cannot publicly contradict the commander-in-chief; the climate-readiness warning has therefore shifted heavily toward retired generals, admirals, and former officials. Senator Tammy Duckworth and Senate Armed Services Committee Democratic colleagues wrote to Secretary Hegseth on March 11, 2025, warning that ending DoD climate programs "threatens national security, puts American lives at risk, and wastes billions of taxpayer dollars." ^[28]

Former Army Climate Advisor Will Rogers has explicitly called on Congress to mandate that the military use the best available science in its planning through defense authorization legislation — independent of executive branch direction — arguing that relying on a politically captured executive branch to voluntarily conduct climate risk assessment is no longer a viable strategy. ^[23]

The chain of evidence is unusually complete. In 1959, fossil fuel executives were told that their products would melt ice caps and raise seas. By 1977, ExxonMobil's own scientists had modeled the warming trajectory with documented accuracy. By 1980, the American Petroleum Institute was publicly promoting misleading claims about the state of climate science. By 1989, a formal industry coalition existed specifically to obstruct climate policy. By 2002, the coalition disbanded — not because it had succeeded in disproving climate science, but because the science had become too solid for the old arguments to work. By 2024, a joint bicameral congressional investigation had documented decades of industry deception using the industry's own internal documents. And by March 2025, that legacy had helped produce a Defense Secretary who declared the Department of Defense "does not do climate change crap" — while the same policy directive still ordered installations to assess "weather-related impacts." ^{[30] [22]}

The downstream consequences are no longer theoretical. The GAO has confirmed at least $15 billion in military installation damage over the past decade. The world's largest naval base faces roughly 280 flood events per year within 25 years. The headquarters of U.S. Strategic Command has already been inundated by floodwater. The nation's F-22 fleet was exposed to a Category 5 hurricane. More than 10,000 troops have been sidelined by heat. And the intelligence community's own annual threat assessment — the document that tells the United States what to prepare for — no longer mentions the threat at all.

Meanwhile, the legal accountability reckoning for this campaign is approaching a constitutional inflection point. The Supreme Court's 2026–27 decision in the Boulder climate case will determine whether decades of documented industry deception can result in financial liability, or whether federal preemption arguments effectively shield fossil fuel companies from accountability for the harm their disinformation campaign caused.

TRUE — a documented, ongoing national security harm. The fossil fuel industry's climate disinformation campaign is among the most thoroughly documented cases of deliberate public deception in American history, substantiated here by a federal watchdog report, a Pentagon memo, congressional letters and investigations, court filings, peer-reviewed research, and direct on-the-record quotes. Its downstream effect — delayed climate policy, degraded military readiness, and foreign-adversary exploitation of the resulting blind spots — constitutes a quantifiable, ongoing national security harm. The March 2025 policy reversal at DoD does not eliminate the physical threat; it eliminates the institutional capacity to prepare for it.