the aff’s epistemology is flawed, militarized representations of environmental ‘security’ issues reinforces gender hierarchies & prevents solutions to climate change [link to sequester, geo-engineering, modeling, etc.]

A preponderance of largely male governments and male-dominated economic interests protecting the unequal status quo can be understood mainly as hindrances to successful climate negotiations. But they are not the only important gendered features of the international system responsible for influencing climate change policy. As we saw above, the military is another gendered institution intimately related to national governments and economies. National militaries are less responsible for stalling organized responses to climate change; they are critical articulators of climate change hazards and advocates for defining climate change as a problem not of controlling carbon emissions, but of protecting national security. Despite the end of the Cold War (characterized by a large-scale U.S.-USSR arms race) in 1990, in 2010 world military expenditures were higher than in any year since the end of the Second World War in 1945. The United States far outpaces other countries in military expenditures. The U.S. accounted for thirty-nine percent of global military expenditures in 2012, when military expenditures consumed more than four percent of the U.S. gross domestic product. The United States is among a handful of the most militarized countries in the world, as measured by military expenditures per capita, including Israel, South Sudan, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Russia, Jordan, Algeria, and Azerbaijan. Even the world’s poorest countries sport national armies whose weapons and training are subsidized by or purchased from the world’s major arms dealers, most notably the U.S., Russia, France, United Kingdom, and China. The world’s militaries are historically hyper-masculine institutions with cultures embracing honor, bravery, loyalty, strength, and violence. Men dominate the ranks and leadership of military institutions just as they dominate national politics and economics around the world. In the United States, the military plays a critical role in scientific research, including climate change research. The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) has a basic scientific research and development budget that is two and a half times greater than the National Science Foundation (NSF) — the agency tasked with funding basic research across the sciences, mathematics, and engineering. The NSF has a broad mission of supporting transformative research on all topics and issues across disciplines. The DOD’s much narrower mission is to protect national security. This focus on security — food security, energy security, water security, and environmental security — determines the research projects it supports. As a result, the DOD has been a powerful voice in emphasizing national security dangers from and defenses against climate change and in shaping the work of the many researchers it supports in universities, industry, and national labs and research facilities. The DOD’s agenda reflects classical military/masculine tactics for attacking climate change: large-scale geo-engineering approaches to manage solar radiation or sequester carbon, energy research focused on military missions, conflict scenario planning, climate forecasting and modeling, and global resource assessments. The DOD has very limited interest in funding “softer” (feminine) research topics on the health, social, racial, gender, or age disparities in climate change impacts, factors that promote community resilience in the face of disasters, or strategies for reducing the carbon emissions causing climate change. Another important gendered feature of the climate change policy landscape is the funding and organization of climate change denialism. Major disinformation campaigns have been orchestrated by mainly male climate change skeptics in the U.S. Their message has been embraced by powerful partisan climate denialists in congress who have obstructed federal governmental efforts to regulate or aggressively reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Despite scientific agreement about the causes of climate change and the necessary actions to slow the rise of global temperatures and sea levels, climate skeptics have managed to create political gridlock around climate change mitigation and adaptation. The U.S. military’s emphasis on security threats tends to set it above the fray, and the political vacuum created by denialists and their industry supporters has opened the door for research and planning on the conflict potential for climate change and the need to prioritize defending our borders, resources, and way of life. Women’s relatively greater vulnerability to the effects of climate change is not on their agenda.