America’s approach to climate change has always been a tug-of-war between scientific warnings, national security imperatives, and shifting political winds. Now, in the fall of 2025, that tension is clearer—and more consequential—than ever. Two major developments this October have cast a sharp spotlight on how the United States government, from its military brass to its financial regulators, is responding—or not responding—to the mounting threats posed by a warming planet.
On one front, the country’s top military officers found themselves in an awkward, telling silence last month as President Donald Trump addressed them at Quantico. According to The Hill, those who might have voiced concerns about the president’s climate stance risked losing their rank. Yet, behind closed doors and in public reports, America’s defense and intelligence communities have been sounding the alarm for years: climate change is not just an environmental issue, but a serious threat to national security.
Scientists, too, have been blunt. Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research recently warned that if global temperatures reach 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels—a milestone projected for the 2050s—“not only will there be continual extreme weather events … the result will be widespread environmental refugees, exacerbating tensions and regional conflicts that could explode to encompass many countries.” The United States itself is hardly immune. In the best-case scenario, the military could find itself engaged in humanitarian missions across the globe, responding to disasters in destabilized regions. In the worst case, the U.S. could get drawn into conflicts sparked or worsened by climate shocks.
Stanford University researchers, cited by The Hill, estimated back in 2019 that the influence of climate change on conflicts is set to more than double if the world warms by 2 degrees Celsius—the upper limit set by the Paris Climate Agreement. Yet, current policy trajectories point to a rise of up to 2.9 degrees Celsius by 2100, according to the Climate Action Tracker. This is not a hypothetical scenario; it’s a looming reality.
Warnings about climate change as a national security threat go back nearly two decades. The U.S. Military Advisory Board at the Center for Naval Analysis first labeled global warming as a “threat multiplier” in 2007, warning that it could destabilize volatile regions and add to tensions even in relatively stable ones. Subsequent reports from the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense, the White House National Security Strategy, and the National Intelligence Council have all echoed the same refrain: climate change is an urgent and growing threat to U.S. national security.
Consider the numbers. The U.S. military operates around 750 installations in 80 countries, many of them vulnerable to intensifying storms, sea-level rise, and other climate impacts. In 2018, the Department of Defense found that half of its 3,500 global sites had already been affected by extreme weather or climate-related risks. By 2019, floods, droughts, or wildfires threatened 74 out of the 79 most important U.S. military installations. “Our warfighters require bases from which to deploy, on which to train, or to live when they are not deployed. If extreme weather makes our critical facilities unusable or necessitates costly or manpower-intensive workarounds, that is an unacceptable impact,” the Pentagon concluded in its review.
But climate change isn’t just a direct threat to military infrastructure. It acts as a catalyst for instability in already fragile regions. As the National Intelligence Council put it, “Unless we invest more in supporting those communities that are on the front lines of the climate emergency, to better adapt and prepare for the unavoidable surge in extreme weather events, then there is likely to be an increase in the preconditions for conflict and violence to take place.” The logic is straightforward: when droughts, floods, or storms upend livelihoods and force mass migrations, tensions over resources like food and water can quickly escalate into violence or even war.
Despite this mountain of evidence, President Trump has repeatedly dismissed climate change as a hoax and rolled back numerous policies intended to address it. According to The Hill, he has defunded climate science, shuttered USAID, slashed billions from foreign aid, withdrawn the U.S. from the Paris Agreement (for a second time), ramped up fossil fuel production, and redirected military resources for domestic political purposes. Critics argue that in terms of national security, the real “enemy within” is not some external threat, but a refusal to confront the realities of a changing climate.
Meanwhile, another front in the climate battle has opened within America’s financial regulatory agencies. On October 16, 2025, the Federal Reserve, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) withdrew their Principles for Climate-Related Financial Risk Management for Large Financial Institutions. This guidance, established just two years ago under the Biden administration, was meant to help banks with more than $100 billion in assets identify and manage risks tied to climate change.
In a joint statement, the agencies said they no longer believed the framework was necessary, arguing that it could “distract from the management of other potential risks identified and addressed by financial institutions’ existing risk management processes and the agencies’ other risk management rules and guidance.” The principles have since vanished from the agencies’ websites, marking a sharp policy reversal.
This move follows a series of withdrawals from international climate finance coalitions. The OCC left the Network of Central Banks and Supervisors for Greening the Financial System in March, after the Fed, FDIC, and Treasury Department had already exited in January—just after Trump’s return to the White House, as reported by ESG Dive. Since then, the Trump administration has orchestrated a broad rollback of U.S. climate policy, including another exit from the Paris Agreement and a pause on federal funding for climate programs. Agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Labor have also distanced themselves from environmental, social, and governance (ESG) rules established under the previous administration.
Climate and sustainability advocates are sharply critical of these reversals. Sarah Bloom Raskin, former deputy secretary of the Treasury and a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, said in a statement to ESG Dive that the regulators’ backtracking “threatens the soundness of the country’s banks and [their] financial stability.” She added, “Pretending that climate change does not pose widespread financial consequences will not make their effects disappear. This decision leaves homeowners, businesses, and communities vulnerable as extreme weather events increase.”
Jessye Waxman, a sustainable finance campaign adviser at the Sierra Club, echoed these concerns, noting, “Climate change poses a destabilizing, systemic threat to the financial system. The science hasn’t changed, the risks have only worsened, and the best practices for banks are clearer than ever. The only relevant change is the administration in power, which shows that this reversal is a purely political move.”
As the U.S. military weighs the very real risks to its global operations and infrastructure, and as financial regulators pull back from climate risk management, the country stands at a crossroads. The consequences of these decisions will not be felt just in boardrooms or briefing rooms, but in communities across the nation and far beyond its borders. The warnings have been issued, the evidence is mounting, and the stakes are only getting higher.
Whether America’s leaders choose to act on these warnings—or continue to ignore them—will shape the nation’s security, economy, and global standing for decades to come.