A US Grand Strategy on Climate Change

Tell me whom I should be talking to -- and sending books -- right now

Throughline and I continue to receive great feedback on America’s New Map, but we want to take the conversation further: toward creating a community of interest in building and articulating a US grand strategy regarding climate change. We see a lot of effort out there on mitigation but not nearly enough on adaptation, and we’d like to fuel that dynamic in planning terms.

Our goal is not just capturing and enunciating the system-level view but likewise to offer “new maps” across the board: e.g., for nation states other than our own, enterprises (profit and non-profit) in general, and communities/individuals. To-date this year we’ve had the opportunity to generate “India’s New Map,” and “Dairy’s New Map,” and we want to keep that ball rolling as my speaking schedule continues to unfold across this year and beyond.

So, here’s my ask from any and all of you readers: propose 2-3 influencers whom you think should immediately receive a copy of my book. It can be your congressperson, the head of your company or NGO, the mayor of your town — whomever.

But I don’t just want people off the top of your head; we’re seeking personal connections, so somebody whom you can directly contact and thus provide POC information for our mailing purposes.

In exchange, we’ll include a note with the book saying you were the conduit.

Thus we’re seeking the answer to the question — posed directly to you — of “Who should receive this book right now as a gift from you?

Send your suggestions directly to me at tbarnett@throughline.com or deposit it in this Substack’s chat.

In the meantime, I offer this essay in support:

America Needs a Grand Strategy on Climate Change

As American generals routinely predict “inevitable” war with China, security experts feverishly debate our nation’s grand strategy vis-à-vis Beijing. [Spoiler alert: it’s a tepid reboot of a beloved franchise from the Boomer Cold-War Universe (BCU).] Meanwhile, many Americans, having endured 2023’s Summer from Hell (h/t Richard Lewis) and now the Lost Winter of 2024, are left wondering why none of our leaders are proposing a big-picture vision for the multi-decade climate crisis we’ve just entered.

The generational tension here is intense: Millennials and Gen Zs clearly want this presidential election cycle to address our planet’s climatic makeover, but Washington’s aging Boomer and Gen X leadership remain oblivious, treating it as an obscure policy issue or dismissing it as a “hoax.”

That needs to end.

Climate change already devastates our planet’s lower latitudes with megadroughts that drive multitudes off the land and into cities incapable of absorbing them. That fuels a northward migration that grows stronger and more desperate with each passing year.

These climate migrants simply mirror what’s happening throughout nature, as all species move both poleward and upward in elevation to escape increasingly stressing climes. Today we count these displaced humans in the tens of millions; by mid-century they could easily approach a billion as half of humanity is routinely confronted by temperatures and precipitation historically associated with the Saharan Desert.

Here's your glimpse of an inevitable future: hundreds of Ethiopian migrants, escaping years of a megadrought back home, being massacred by Saudi security forces as they cross into the kingdom. Or consider the Italian coast guard turning a blind eye to hundreds of migrants drowning off their shore. If you think such tragedies can’t become routine here, you’re underestimating our nation’s current animus toward migrants — on full display right now in Texas.

What would a grand strategy on climate change entail?

First, let us stipulate that all efforts to mitigate climate change’s unfolding should continue. But let’s also be realistic: despite being the focus of 90% of current investment, most of that positive impact won’t be appreciably felt for decades. The next 3-5 decades of climate crisis are already baked-into our collective future, meaning adaptation becomes the order of the day.

Across the next half-century, the world will be forced to re-settle hundreds of millions of climate migrants from the Global South to the Global North, as climate change renders inhospitable approximately two Australias-worth of livable land across lower latitudes (think Central America, Africa’s Trans-Sahel, Southeast Asia) while opening similarly vast tracts across higher latitudes (think Canada, Russia). As I noted in America’s New Map, this is the biggest real estate transaction in human history – with no money changing hands. That is likewise a recipe for disaster unless Northern powers “socialize” that geopolitical risk by extending southward new forms of state membership in larger stabilizing unions.

Too much to ask?

Consider: this is exactly what Western Europe did with Eastern Europe following the Soviet Bloc’s collapse. The European Union and NATO saw an opportunity to nip future security issues in the bud by offering rapid integration into their supranational entities. Did they succeed? Absolutely, so much as to scare Russia into invading Ukraine in response. But here’s the point: Western Europe moved that enduring flashpoint from its strategic doorstep to Moscow’s front porch – grand strategy successfully applied.

The same can be had with climate change, but it will involve North-South integration schemes of the sort long sought by the Global South.

The goal of integration schemes – be they economic, security, or political – will be two-fold: First, create sufficient certainty across portions of the Global South by encouraging the North’s foreign direct investment flows that enable resilient populations to remain in-place. Sending old-school aid is insufficient; we must mobilize a private sector that spots certain-enough profitability in hardening the South against climate change.

Second, the North must establish re-settlement schemes to accommodate a northward flow of those Southern populations not kept resiliently in-place. Given the North’s demographic collapse, this migration mitigates our rapid aging while exploiting “New North” opportunities for settlement and farming. Think of it as a 21^st century Homestead Act (h/t Abraham Lincoln).

This grand strategy may strike you as implausible, given our nation’s current anti-immigration attitudes, but that confuses friction with force. Northward migration pressures (force) will only grow far stronger with time. The fact that they already trigger anti-immigrant fervor (corresponding friction) merely confirms just how central a national security issue climate-induced migration has already become.

For example, the same Northern Triangle states (Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador) that have generated substantial flows of north-bound migrants have long suffered a climate-change-induced mega-drought along their infamous “Dry Corridor.”

This grand strategy may likewise strike you as impossible to coordinate on a global scale. But understand: each Northern superpower needs only be concerned with its immediate south and north. In this regard, the US is doubly blessed to have Latin America and Canada as neighbors.

We in the Western Hemisphere have spent the last half millennium mixing Caucasians, Africans, Asians, and indigenous Amerindians. If climate change forces a North-South mixing of the races to a degree never seen, then we Americanos can confidently embrace that future, having been pre-mixed centuries ago by Europe’s colonial empires.

Looking ahead on that score, it seems clear that the least racist superpower will win whatever competitions may ensue.

That is what a grand strategy on climate change looks like: big, ambitious, and demanding. For American Millennials and Gen Zs, allegedly bereft of national identity and purpose, it is a pragmatic fit.