The Pentagon’s Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

A Proposed Navy Innovation Center Draws Fire
Environmentalists Against War 

MONTEREY, Calif. (September 13, 2024) — In December 2022, US Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro announced plans to build a Naval Innovation Center in Monterey, California, at the site of the existing Naval Postgraduate School. The proposed three-story building would offer 289,916 square feet with a basement spreading over half of the building’s footprint as the Navy continues its plans to militarized the seas.

The Navy announced the 62-foot-tall research center would be constructed in compliance with Green Building Council standards. But critics of the project are not just concerned about what goes into construction of the NIC but what goes on inside and what will travel beyond the NIC’s walls and laboratories.

The US Navy is notorious for ranking as the largest single consumer of petroleum fuel and the world’s major emitter of climate-warming greenhouse gases—exceeding the output of 100 countries combined. The Navy has a long historic of killing whales (through ship strikes and sonar pollution of the ocean environment) and recruiting dolphins (to be trained to search for underseas military targets). The death of whales is compounding the carbon pollution of the world’s seas since massive numbers of feeding whales are capable of sequestering as much as 2 billion metric tons of CO2 a year.

Meanwhile, as Eco Watch revealed in 2028, the Pentagon’s “naval innovations” have included a disturbing plan “to militarize ocean life” by creating “genetically modified marine organisms that can be used as underwater spies.”

The California Chapter of the global peace organization, World BEYOND War, was among a group of civilian critics opposed to the Navy’s expansion plans. Here is the Environmental Assessment notification filed by the activists during the comment period for the Navy’s planned expansion.

“We Urge that the Project Be Denied”
World BEYOND War / California Chapter

MONTEREY, Calif. — These comments are submitted on behalf of the California Chapter of World Beyond War and Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace (ICUJP) on the Environmental Assessment (EA) for the proposed Navy Innovation Center (NIC) at Monterey. We have reviewed the EA and find that the EA contains several deficiencies, and believe it does not fully comply with CEQ. For the reasons detailed below, we urge that the project be denied, or at a minimum, the EA must be revised and recirculated as a full environmental impact study to remedy these deficiencies.

World BEYOND War is a global nonviolent movement to end war and establish a just and sustainable peace. Finding a way to transition to a global security system that is supported by international law, diplomacy, collaboration, and human rights, and defending those things with nonviolent action rather than the threat of violence, is the heart of WBW.  Our work includes education that dispels myths, like “War is natural” or “We have always had war,” and shows people not only that war should be abolished, but also that it actually can be. Our work includes all variety of nonviolent activism that moves the world in the direction of ending all war.

ICUJP is a 22-year-old group of religious and secular leaders who came together to seek an alternative to the fear-mongering and vengefulness sweeping much of our nation. ICUJP believes “Religious Communities Must Stop Blessing War and Violence.” All of our peace workers are committed to four core ICUJP principles:

• the power of love to overcome hatred;
• the power of mercy to conquer vengeance;
• the celebration of our common humanity and the sacredness of human life;
• and our calling to build a just, equitable, and peaceful world.

CEQ regulations, at Section 1508.27, define the word “significantly” as used when the Act refers to “major Federal action significantly affecting the quality of the human environment.” Since it is such actions that require preparation of an EIS, the definition of “significantly” indicates how the significance of impacts should be measured in an EA. The definition is framed in terms of “context” and “intensity.”

Context means the geographic, social, and environmental contexts within which the project may have effects. The regulations refer to:

• Society as a whole, defined as including all human society and the society of the nation
• The affected region
• Affected interests, such as those of a community, Indian tribe, or other group
• The immediate locality

“Intensity” is the severity of the potential impact considered in context. The regulations direct agencies to consider:

• Both beneficial and adverse impacts
• Impacts on human health and safety
• Impacts on an area’s unique characteristics, such as historic or cultural resources, park lands, prime farmlands, wetlands, wild and scenic rivers, and ecologically critical areas

The regulations also say that both short-term and long-term impacts must be considered – in other words, impacts must also be considered in the context of time.

With the above descriptions of significance of impact in mind, we find deficiencies in the EA due to the following factors:

1. The Navy contributes to the climate crisis, which puts all humans and non-humans at risk, through its high use of fossil fuels.  Data from the Department of Defense showed that the Navy and Marine Corps accounted for 30% of all energy used for operations by the military in 2014. Sea and air assets made up almost equal portions of that figure. Given the history of severe environmental destruction of the environment by the Navy, this Environmental Assessment should have addressed all potential impacts of the Navy directly or indirectly caused by the work that would be carried out at the proposed Project and a full environmental impact study should be carried out.
2. History of environmental destruction by the Navy: The U.S. military is responsible for 69% of the super-fund environmental disaster sites in the United States, and is the third leading polluter of U.S. waterways. As one example, the Navy’s Dahlgren support facility, the Navy illegally polluted the Potomac River with toxic substances found in cannon shells, bullets and other munitions after more than a century of unchecked weapons testing in the Potomac River, in violation of the Clean Water Act, having an impact on the water quality and the aquatic life, including species listed as threatened, such as the Atlantic sturgeon.   The Navy’s own estimates suggest it discharged around 33 million pounds of munitions into the Potomac River in the first 90 years of the facility’s operation. Those estimates included 255 tons of various explosives, 225 tons of the toxic heavy metal manganese and 15,000 tons of iron.
3. In addition to carrying out around 200 detonations annually, the Navy fired 4,700 projectiles a year on average into the river using land, sea and airborne platforms such as boats, drones and gun batteries.  The Navy has never done any water quality sampling or done any testing of sediments.  The intense weapons testing on the Potomac River Test Range also caused frequent closures of the waterways, irking watermen and oystermen operating commercial vessels and recreational boaters. Fishing nets routinely caught spent cannon shells, rockets and projectiles in the water near the Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren, the court documents said, leaving those who work on the water concerned about potential harm. Many of these contaminants have been shown to be concentrated in aquatic food webs, Frankel said, and there is a concern that they may pose a risk to both wildlife and humans through consumption of contaminated organisms.

Given the history of severe environmental destruction of the environment by the Navy, this Environmental Assessment should have addressed all potential impacts of the Navy directly or indirectly caused by the work that would be carried out at the proposed Project and a full environmental impact study should be carried out.

Additional examples of the destruction
caused by war and preparations for war:

• Conflict pollution, washed-up landmines and military emissions – here’s how war trashes the environment
• Environmental Costs | Costs of War
• How does war damage the environment? – CEOBS
• The Impact of War on Our Natural Environment

3. Existential threat to humanity with activities to be carried out at the proposed Project including:

• Artificial intelligence
• Additive manufacturing
• Quantum computing
• Next generation wireless
• Autonomous systems
• Space-based capabilities
• Joint all-domain command and control systems

Robotic weapons. including autonomous killer robots and autonomous drones and drone swarms, make it possible to take human lives without human control.  One example of how this threat to humanity is already taking place: On March 21, 2024, Commondreams.org reported that days earlier, Al Jazeera on Thursday aired footage of what the news outlet reported was an Israeli drone targeting four Palestinians in Khan Younis last month. Those killed by the unmanned aerial vehicle in the rubble of the southern Gaza city appear to be unarmed teenagers or young men.  Further development of robotic weapons/AI and other war-related technologies that would take place at the NIC will contribute to indiscriminate killing of civilians, which affects society as a whole.

In May 2023, tech company executives and computer scientists issued a letter calling for an immediate six-month pause on the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4, so that the risks of AI could be better understood. That letter was followed by a statement which stated:  “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” The pause was rejected by the Department of Defense, with the Pentagon Chief Information Officer stating: “If we stop, guess who’s not going to stop; potential adversaries overseas.  We’ve got to keep moving.”

“It is my goal to provide our  men and women with an unfair advantage over the enemy.”  Michael Callahan, Program Manager of DARPA’s Defense Science Office. (The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military.) This constitutes the development of an arms race that will affect society as a whole.

The ‘Godfather of AI’, Geoffrey Hinton, resigned from  Google and warns over dangers of misinformation, the possibility for AI to upend the job market, and the “existential risk” posed by the creation of a true digital intelligence.

The February 2024 Gladstone AI report to the US State Department reported that the developments in AI “pose an extinction-level threat to the human species.”  https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/12/business/artificial-intelligence-ai-report-extinction/index.html and concluded that unless properly managed, AI systems increase the likelihood of the risk of global and WMD-scale fatal accidents, interstate conflict and escalation.

Given the extreme danger that AI poses to society as a whole and the community that surrounds the proposed project, this Environmental Assessment should have addressed all potential impacts of the Navy directly or indirectly caused by the work that would be carried out at the proposed Project and a full environmental impact study should be carried out.

Robotic Warfare:
The Dangerous New Artificial Intelligence Race

4. Use of resources by AI computing utilized by the NIC: AI computing, which NIC will depend on, uses massive amounts of:

• Electricity:  Global data centers (which numbered, in 2021, 8,000 globally) consumed 190 terawatt hours of electricity in 2021, four times the amount of electricity estimated to be consumed by New York City in 2027
• Water: A large data center uses between 1 million and 5 million gallons of water a day.

Given the use of water, electricity and other resources of the environment by the Navy, this Environmental Assessment should have addressed all potential impacts of the Navy directly or indirectly caused by the work that would be carried out at the proposed Project and a full environmental impact study should be carried out.

5. Placing the NIC on this site would not comply with the Navy Policy on Reducing Footprint. This would need to be accomplished through other actions at NSAM, actions that are not defined or guaranteed through the EA process. This is not acceptable.
6. Economic impact -Wars and militarism make us less safe rather than protect us, they kill, injure and traumatize adults, children and infants, severely damage the natural environment, erode civil liberties, and drain our economies, siphoning resources for life-affirming activities. According to a study by the Political Economy Research Institute, investments in healthcare, education, and clean energy create more jobs — and in many cases, better-paying jobs — than military sector spending. We want our tax dollars used to benefit human and environmental needs, not to fuel more war-making. We need innovation for peace, not war.
7. In addition, in the Environmental Assessment (EA) of the Naval Innovation Center (NIC) in Monterey, California, certain resource areas were not evaluated based on the anticipation that potential impacts in these areas would be negligible or nonexistent. However, highlighting potential considerations or impacts within these areas could provide a more comprehensive understanding of the overall environmental and community impact. Here’s a detailed point on each of the areas not included in the EA:

• Coastal Zone Management**: The construction and operation of the NIC could affect coastal ecosystems through increased runoff or alteration of natural habitats. Given Monterey’s proximity to the coast, it’s important to consider how the project might align with state and local coastal management plans, including potential impacts on coastal erosion, sedimentation, and marine habitats.
• Hazardous Materials and Waste**: The construction phase might involve the use and disposal of hazardous materials, such as construction adhesives, paints, and solvents. Operation of the NIC could also generate hazardous waste, including electronic waste and chemicals used in research. Proper handling, storage, and disposal methods are crucial to prevent contamination of soil, water, and air.
• Public Health and Safety**: The project could have indirect impacts on public health and safety, particularly during construction. Issues such as construction noise, increased traffic, and potential accidents on-site could pose risks. Additionally, the nature of research conducted within the NIC might necessitate considerations for biosafety and chemical safety protocols to protect workers and the surrounding community.
• Recreation**: Construction and operation of the NIC could impact local recreational areas, especially if any part of the campus is currently used or accessed by the public for recreation. The project could potentially limit access to these areas or degrade the quality of recreational experiences through increased noise or restricted access to natural landscapes.
• Socioeconomics and Environmental Justice**: The development of the NIC could have socioeconomic impacts, including changes in employment opportunities and potentially influencing local housing markets. It’s important to consider how these changes might affect different segments of the community, especially low-income or marginalized groups. Ensuring that the benefits of the project are equitably distributed and do not disproportionately impact certain communities is crucial for upholding principles of environmental justice.

While the EA concluded that potential impacts in these areas were negligible or nonexistent, incorporating a thorough analysis and mitigation strategies for these considerations should be included in a complete environmental impact study.