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Massachusetts senator and Democratic presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren has rolled out a new proposal — the Defense Climate Resiliency and Readiness Act (DCRRA) — with the declaration that “our military can help lead the fight against climate change.” The proposal is actually a series of distinct initiatives that, in tandem, would create what she calls a “green military”: one that runs on clean energy, that monitors and reports on its environmental impacts, and one that remains “effective.” So far, the response to Warren’s proposal has largely revolved around two debates. The first simply asks whether the bill would make meaningful progress in the fight against climate change. The second asks whether it is in some sense complicit in US militarism. Both of these debates, however, have remained gridlocked in an exchange of abstractions and truisms: “militarism is incompatible with ecosocialism,” “yes but we must be pragmatic,” etc. Fortunately, both of these debates can be quickly resolved if we look at the specifics of the legislation. The language of the bill guarantees that it cannot succeed even on its own narrow terms — precisely because it includes loopholes that seek to preserve the US military’s dominant position in the world.

The Market Waiver The bill’s problems stem from two key passages. First, consider section six: “Climate Conscious Contracting of Department of Defense,” where Warren lays out her plan to bring the military-industrial complex to heel. “[I]f we’re serious about climate change,” she writes, “then industry also needs to have skin in the game.” In a Medium post last week, Warren explained how the scheme would work: contractors that haven’t achieved carbon neutrality would be charged a small fee, which would in turn be invested into a Energy and Climate Resiliency Fund. But buried in the bill, there’s a passage she doesn’t mention: WAIVER: the Secretary of Defense may waive the requirements of this section . . . [if] he determines that market conditions for a product or service make it difficult for the Department to acquire that product or service and the waiver will accelerate the Department’s acquisition of the product or service. In other words: if someone in the government decides that “market conditions” (say, prices) are making it “too difficult” to buy that electric Humvee, he can just throw Warren’s entire scheme out the window. This is the military-industrial-complex loophole par excellence — it gives contractors direct cover to argue that Warren’s eco-fee would make production too expensive. And that’s not the only way the private sector could wriggle out of the DCRRA’s eco-fee. Even if the waiver were removed entirely, capitalists have a standard strategy for dealing with this sort of fee: they simply raise their prices enough to offset it. Warren’s proposal is therefore unlikely to create the kind of market pressure on military contractors that could force them to change their energy consumption with the urgency that climate change demands. It is true that this system still provides money for Warren’s Energy and Climate Resiliency Fund (at least when contractors don’t get the government to waive the bill’s eco-fees). Yet it’s a byzantine funding scheme. Those eco-fees were paid for by inflated contracting prices charged to the DoD, which in turn got its funding from budget requests for the goods and services the contractors provide. One alternative would be to just put the ECRF into annual budget requests as a stand-alone item, which would make it clear that the fight against climate change is a funding priority. But the Warren bill doesn’t do this. Instead, funding for the ECRF would only appear in the budget in the form of funding for tanks and missiles that are suddenly, say, 1 percent more expensive.