Sherri Goodman on the climate "threat multiplier" and her keys to a successful career in defense, policy and government
Sherri talks about how the changing climate has become a national security focus and her leadership at the Pentagon, Senate Armed Services Committee, and the private sector.
“We have an adage in the defense sector — we say decisions move at the speed of trust. You have to trust the people that you're working with, and that happens by developing the human side of the relationships. Many of the generals and admirals I worked with became my very dear personal friends. It's by developing those friendships and that trust that you are able to deal with tough matters as well as things that are easy.”
Sherri Goodman currently serves in a number of senior defense policy roles including as Secretary General of the International Military Council on Climate & Security and Senior Strategist at the Center for Climate and Security. She served as the first Deputy Undersecretary of Defense (Environmental Security) and twice received the DoD medal for Distinguished Public Service. Sherri also served on the staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee and practiced law at Goodwin Procter, RAND and SAIC. She has recently published her new book, Threat Multiplier: Climate, Military Leadership, and the Fight for Global Security. A summa cum laude graduate of Amherst College, she earned a law degree from Harvard Law School and a masters in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
Transition Leads profiles top policymakers — like Sherri Goodman, as well as investors, entrepreneurs, scientists and executives in the energy & decarbonization transitions who share their insights, personal stories and career advice for the new generation of leaders.
Rob Griffen
James and I are delighted to be here with Sherri Goodman, who has been at the forefront of defense policy, strategy and the environment. We’ll ask Sherri about her distinguished career at the Pentagon and other defense organizations, where she sees opportunities today, and her new book — Threat Multiplier — which takes the reader, “onto the battlefield and inside the Pentagon to show how the US military is confronting the biggest security risk in global history: climate change.”
Sherri, it’s great to see you again, and can we begin with a bit about your background?
Sherri Goodman
Thanks Rob, and I’ll start at the beginning. My parents are Holocaust refugees who were born in Germany in the early 1930s and were among the fortunate few who were able to escape, just before Kristallnacht in 1938. My mother was born in Berlin and my father in Cologne. They were fortunate to get out and make it to the US. I was born in New York, where my parents met, and I spent my early years in New York City, and then grew up in Westchester. I went to Scarsdale High School, and then to Amherst College. I was in the second class of women at Amherst College at the time, and I spent my junior year at the London School of Economics. During my four years at those two schools, I really fell in love with international affairs and international security.
Given my family background, I felt that it was important to focus on a purposeful activity in life, to give back, to ensure that never again should people be in such peril as my parents were. I started working on what was the major security issue of that time, which was nuclear weapons. In fact, I wrote a book — that had begun as my senior thesis in college — on the neutron bomb; it was a case study in alliance politics.
I spent a couple years after college working at SAIC, a defense consulting firm in Washington, DC. I had tried to get a job on Capitol Hill, but I didn't know anybody or have any particular family connections, and at the time that was very hard to do without a network. So I ended up in the private sector for a couple of years. I sometimes joke that if I was business savvy, I should have stayed at SAIC where I was an early employee, in an employee-owned company that became a very successful public company.
But instead I got a joint degree at Harvard Law School and Harvard Kennedy School to continue my defense and defense security policymaking journey.
After graduating, I joined the Senate Armed Services Committee working with Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, who was the esteemed and powerful chairman of the committee. I had oversight of the nuclear weapons complex in the Department of Energy. Those operations were where we processed the plutonium used for bombs. And during those years in the 1980s when I was on the committee, all those facilities failed for environment, safety and health lapses.
I often say my career went from weapons to waste. From overseeing actively productive facilities, we went to developing environmental management, environmental cleanup and environmental safety programs for the vast nuclear weapons complex. Some of that is still in place today. One of things I did in my role was to draft legislation to create a sort of mini-NRC [Nuclear Regulatory Agency] called the Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board.
Then my career path took me into the private sector again to practice law at a large law firm where I was doing environmental work, including working on the Superfund litigation during the early 1990s. I think there are some very interesting parallels to some of the laws being passed today to create a climate Superfund law. New York and Vermont have recently passed those type of laws and others may follow.
Rob
What brought you back to government and shifted your focus to climate and security?
Sherri
In 1992 I was asked by President Clinton to serve as his first Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Environmental Security, a position I held at the Pentagon for eight years. I was the Pentagon's first chief environmental officer, a “chief sustainability officer” as we would now call it. That gave me the opportunity to help lead the Department of Defense from laggard to leader. When I started we were seen as an environmental laggard because we had a vast number of bases we needed to clean up to comply with environmental laws and to protect endangered species. But we got it done, and so we became known as an energy and environmental leader, even working with other militaries around the world to share our practices.
From there, after eight years of service in the Pentagon, I joined a defense research organization called the Center for Naval Analysis, where I served for 14 years. During that time, I established the CNA Military Advisory Board, which was the first group of US generals and admirals to assess the national security implications of climate change. In 2007, our first report characterized climate change as a “threat multiplier” — a threat multiplier for instability in volatile reaches of the world — and that report really framed what is now the field known as “climate security.”
The CNA Board continued its work for well over a decade, putting out roughly a report a year. It then helped spawn the creation of what is now the Center for Climate and Security and the International Military Council on Climate & Security, which I today lead as the Secretary General.
Rob
That’s an impressive range of leadership. Putting it all together, could you give a short summary of your book which came out of those experiences. I've read it and listened to you speak, and I am also proud to say that Island Press [leading non-profit publisher of books on the environment and climate], where James and I are on the board, is the publisher. So this can be a shameless promotion!
Sherri Goodman
Oh, thank you and let me try to give a short summary.
Threat Multiplier takes you on my journey and that of other military leaders from the Pentagon to the battlefield on the front lines of a changing climate. I show how leaders, both civilian and military, are adapting to those changing conditions, what it means for our national security and what it means for how we operate around the world, both with allies and partners everywhere from the Arctic to the Pacific, from Latin America to Africa.
I use the term “multiplier” because those changing climate conditions are not the source of a problem but they intensify problems, exacerbate threats. People have used the term “force multiplier” in the military for a long time, and we bring that same idea over to the climate context. Those changing conditions may open up new areas for conflict, like what is happening in the Arctic with reduced sea ice leading to new sea lanes and transport changes and potentially heightened tensions with Russia and China.
Or they may be in places that are already fragile, already facing political or socio-economic stress. As the planet warms, you have longer and more intense droughts, you have lower quality soil with lower crop yields, you have less land for livestock, you have less drinking water. Scarcity of resources means more tension over those resources. It also leads to displacement, and it can lead to less political stability if the state or local government — or an adjacent community — is handed the blame. Situations that might have been more easily controlled now become dangerous or can escalate in new ways. From a military standpoint we need to be aware of and prepared for those effects.
Rob
That’s a great summary. Let me go back to your days at the Pentagon, because in the book you also cover what it took to be a pioneer in pushing the Pentagon to start addressing climate and security issues, but also as one of the first senior women in the Pentagon. It would be great if you could talk a little bit about your experiences changing one of the largest bureaucracies in the world.
Sherri
I learned a lot of lessons about leadership during those eight years in the Pentagon. And some I learned the hard way!
I tell a story in my book about my first budget failure, about how I didn't understand how to coordinate and put forward an environmental budget and get it supported all the way up the ranks. You learn from the tough lessons, as well as the ones where you succeed.
I also had the privilege of working with many great leaders, both military and civilian, and I learned about how you set goals, set performance objectives and help people achieve them, how you create teams and bring them along, how you set a vision and then how you work towards it.
Because I served at the Pentagon for eight years, I could see what we set out to do with the President and the Secretary of Defense in the early days, and then I could see it all the way through. Most politically appointed officials leave after one or two years. And the joke in the Pentagon from the committed staff is that we’re just going to wait you out. We're going to wait out the political appointees. And sometimes we’re even going to wait out the military officials, who rotate every two to three years to different posts, different assignments.
Cultures in big institutions don't change overnight. They’re like aircraft carriers — you can't change their direction on a dime. We see today lots of efforts to try to change cultures of large institutions. And these efforts are sometimes in ways that we like, and sometimes it's in ways that we don't like or don't respect or don't think reflect American values. There are good and bad things about institutional resistance and the staying power of a great institution. But we also know that the military and our greatest leaders really stand to serve the Constitution, to serve our country.
There was a time when I started, and well before, where it was thought that you couldn't both protect the environment and practice conservation and also be a militarily ready force. Historically there's been a lot of pollution associated with weapons and making weapons. Take tanks. General Wes Clark, former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, told me the running joke from his early days as a young Army soldier was that a tank was just an oil spill waiting to happen. [The Abrams Main Battle tank has a 500 gallon fuel tank and gets .6 MPG].
But we've learned that doesn't have to be the case. You can be ready to fight an adversary and have a lethal force, and you can be energy efficient. You can reduce your waste. You also want to have clean water for your soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines. We want to protect the health and wellness of our troops and their families and the communities in which they live.
James Socas
Thanks for that overview, Sherri. One question on where we are today — how do you see the energy transition or climate security as a priority in defense policy? Is it getting more attention or less attention?
Sherri
To start, the evidence on the rapidity with which our world is changing on every parameter is being scientifically confirmed, and of course we can see it. And in a defense or a military security context, you have to be able to operate in and through all kinds of changing conditions. You have to be resilient. It doesn't matter what the cause of the change is. You still have to prepare your forces and your troops so that work continues. Take Hampton Roads [one of the two largest US naval bases] as an example — you have rising ocean levels that threaten that critical infrastructure and fighting readiness, so you have no choice but to do something about it.
It’s also true that today framing the military’s actions as “responding to climate change” and climate change assessments and climate security, of course, is not a favorite of the current administration. So it's not that work will not continue, but it's being reframed away from a climate-specific positioning.
Let’s take the energy transition. The energy needs in defense are vast. It’s the nation's single largest energy user. And with the nation's growth — and global growth in energy demand for AI — the demand for power is increasing rapidly. We're seeing a lot of technology innovation and investment to meet the demand. We are restarting our efforts to make nuclear energy safer and more affordable — civilian nuclear energy, advanced reactors, next generation small nuclear reactors. We’re tapping into geothermal energy using techniques originally pioneered by the fracking industry. We’re looking at hydrogen. And that’s on top of the need to continue to invest and innovate in wind and solar, and of course, batteries. Everything has to be in the mix to meet the skyrocketing demand.
We’re living in the electrify-everything era. And that’s true in the military. We’ve seen it in Ukraine, with the electrified battlefield and new technologies. Drones are the primary weapon of choice, with operators controlling drones from great distance, and that really has changed the way of war. And that means we also have to change the way we supply and field and fuel those weapon systems. So there's a lot of opportunity in the military and government, and in the civilian sector as well, to work in energy and energy topics which also overlap with being climate-related areas.
If I'm talking to an audience of the next generation of staff or officials or writers and scholars in the military policy field, I say it's a good time to reorient in the same way, into adjacent areas that are getting attention. My own career has been navigating across different domains to get things done, and I think that's how you learn leadership and management and different skill sets.
James
That’s encouraging advice and very practical about how to adapt to changing conditions. Anything that you worry about in terms of current policy?
Sherri
One of the things that's made America a global leader has been our great knowledge and capabilities in science and technology. And here I'm going to emphasize the science. As we are underfunding or disinvesting in science across many of our federal agencies and even universities, talented researchers may be thinking to go elsewhere, which is going to be just a generational loss for America.
So I would say to young people, stay in the field, and even if you think you have to go somewhere else for a while, do that, but come back. Come back, because we're in a particular historical moment, a very tough, intense historical moment. But when I think about my own family's journey, and put in a historical context, we know those moments aren’t forever, and so you have to think about surviving through and thriving into the next era.
James
That’s great advice. Sherri, you went to Amherst, the London School of Economics, have two advanced degrees from Harvard, an incredibly impressive background. I suspect you could have done anything you wanted to do.
If you were advising a younger person interested in the energy transition or decarbonization, how would you compare going into policy and government work versus the private sector?
Sherri
I think there is less of a difference than before and it's certainly been true that over the course of my career the private sector has become more important in national and global decision making. Even if you don't want to work in a big company or be a banker, most of the major banking and corporate firms today have large sustainability operations. I'm going to speak later this week to a sustainability conference organized by The Economist with 80 Chief Sustainability officers from corporations around the world. Many are in the financial sector in New York and other places. Leading companies like JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and others have global climate advisory services for their clients as well as the firms themselves. In fact, NOAA’ s chief scientist, Sarah Kapnick, has gone back to JP Morgan, where she leads a whole climate advisory service there.
So I think it's not really an either/or anymore because every government and private organization today, in some ways, touches the changing environment and climate. Now as I said before you have to be aware of today’s reality. “ESG” as a rubric is not so favored at the moment, but that doesn't mean that many companies aren't still thinking about how to be efficient in their energy use and procurement, in whatever line of business they’re in. If you are in food, you need to address climate issues in agriculture to be successful financially. So it does, in many ways, come down to the bottom line.
James
Any areas in the intersection of defense and the transitions that you think are particularly interesting today?
Sherri
One specific area that I think is really exciting is improved predictive technology. There's obviously the energy side of renewables and battery storage and the like. But there's also a sector within climate tech which is predicting how fast, at a very local level, changes are occurring from hurricanes, floods, fires and other climate-related events. Some of that can be done today in terms of satellite feeds that give you real time data and have a downlink so you get the right information to the right people at the right time. And there's a growing larger field of climate intelligence or call it “earth system intelligence.”
That whole field is very exciting because we are living in a world that's already a couple of degrees higher in temperature than the baseline, and we're not on a path to curb emissions, and emissions appear to be on a path to continue to increase at a rapid rate. So we will have to become resilient and adapt to the changing conditions and manage to what we might say is the unthinkable. One of the important ways we do that is by improving our early warning systems, our predictive capability. If we can provide better tools to our firefighters, they can get to the scene faster. And we can be smarter about where we place, or how we make things resilient, everything from military bases to new civilian houses. Some of the needed improvements will come from science, some from technology. AI and quantum computing can supercharge a lot of that and put it in the hands of the user.
I think another area that is under-appreciated today, and that I'm very passionate about, is our oceans and ocean science and research. Unfortunately, some of that at the federal level is being defunded today, but on the other hand, it continues to be an area of great importance and opportunity.
James
Thanks and unfortunately we are running out of time. So to shift to our last questions — was there some advice, maybe from your parents or mentors, that you found particularly helpful in your career? Sort of the Ben Franklin, “early to bed, early to rise,” type of advice?
Sherri
Yes. “Don’t give up.” If you feel like you're hitting a brick wall or you got a “no” for an answer, try another tack. Persistence can lead to payoff — that’s been part of my ethos my whole life. I got an early rejection when I wanted to spend my junior year at the London School of Economics. So I just went to the admissions office in London, knowing nobody, and walked the halls in the summer and tried to find somebody who would support my case, and I did and convinced them to let me in. As my kids sometimes say, “Mom doesn't take no for an answer.”
It is also so important to be able to work with lots of different people and cultivate and maintain good relationships. We have an adage in the defense sector — we say decisions move at the speed of trust. You have to trust the people that you're working with, and that happens by developing the human side of the relationships. Many of the generals and admirals I worked with became my very dear personal friends. It's by developing those friendships and that trust that you are able to deal with tough matters as well as things that are easy.
James
Thanks Sherri. And to finish, we always ask people to recommend a book. Of course, we are going to recommend your book to everyone — but is there another book that you have found particularly meaningful or relevant, even from an early time in your life?
Sherri
I read so many different kinds of works these days. I must say two of my childhood favorites were The Phantom Tollbooth and all the Wizard of Oz series. It's good to imagine. I love those books. And I must also say — since you allowed me to think back to my childhood, and it's the time of year when birds are hatching, and I just saw a mother duck with three little ducklings walking down the side of the street in Georgetown — I thought of Make Way for Ducklings. And that in a way represents the human side, the relationships that drive the world. I'm a hard security person who's been working in the military. But I also think the humanity of it all matters.
On policy and science topics, I love reading Admiral Stavridis' books. He's so creative and such a good thinker, and he's now writing a series of novels on different futures, including cyber futures, and one of them is going to be on climate futures. So I would also recommend his works. And — last one — I recently travelled to Greenland and was fascinated by what is happening there as the climate changes and would recommend The Ice at the End of the World as a great book on that topic.
Rob
Sherri, that’s a very interesting mix of titles. And your interview is going to be a great guide to for younger professionals as they think about their careers and keys to success. We really appreciate your taking the time. And of course, we’ll put in a final plug for Threat Multiplier!
Sherri
Thank you so much, Rob and James. Thank you for talking with me today.