Maine has been described as a “climate haven,” a place expected to remain relatively sheltered from the most extreme and dangerous impacts of global climate change. But the Pine Tree State is far from immune.
Fossil fuel-driven climate change is intensifying heat waves, flooding and other extreme weather events. Waters in the Gulf of Maine are warming faster than nearly every other swath of ocean on the planet, threatening the future of the state’s signature lobster industry and other fisheries.
Sea levels here are forecast to rise approximately 4 feet by the end of the century, forcing coastal communities, shipyards and military installations to prepare and adapt.
“This is a guaranteed threat,” said Amy Eshoo, director of Maine Climate Action Now. “It’s not one we can negotiate with. It’s not one that we can put tariffs on. It’s not one we can go to the table with. We unleashed it. It’s here. We’re feeling its effects. Maine is definitely feeling them.”
For more than a decade, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence included the mounting impacts of climate change in its annual reports on global and regional threats to U.S. national security.
Those reports have historically covered everything from terrorist groups, foreign adversaries like Iran and North Korea, drug trafficking and organized crime, nuclear weapons, cyber threats and, yes, climate change, which is already supercharging natural disasters, threatening energy and military infrastructure, and fueling food and water shortages that often lead to interstate conflict and migration.
But the U.S. intelligence community’s fact-based, nonpolitical streak came to a screeching halt last month.
The 2025 threat assessment, which the Trump administration released on March 18, makes no mention of climate change or other environmental threats, part of a broader administrative effort to scrub such references from government websites and documents.
At a Senate hearing last week, U.S. Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, used part of his allotted time to interrogate Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard about the sudden change.
“Every single one of these reports that we have had has mentioned global climate change as a significant national security threat, except this one,” King said. “Has something happened? Has global climate change been solved? Why is that not in this report? And who made the decision that it should not be in the report, when it’s been in every one of the 11 prior reports?”
Gabbard told King that the report focuses on the “most extreme and critical” national security threats.
“Obviously, we’re aware of occurrences within the environment and how they may impact operations, but we’re focused on the direct threats to Americans’ safety, well-being, and security,” she said.
To argue that climate change isn’t a direct threat to safety and security flies in the face of an ever-growing mountain of science — research that Gabbard and even intelligence officials in the first Trump administration once embraced. Before leaving the Democratic party and joining President Donald Trump’s orbit, Gabbard described climate change as a “global crisis” and called for global action to safeguard communities around the world.
The 2019 threat assessment from the first Trump administration, which King referenced in his exchange with Gabbard, notes, “Global environmental and ecological degradation, as well as climate change, are likely to fuel competition for resources, economic distress, and social discontent through 2019 and beyond. Climate hazards such as extreme weather, higher temperatures, droughts, floods, wildfires, storms, sea level rise, soil degradation, and acidifying oceans are intensifying, threatening infrastructure, health, and water and food security.”
Gabbard stuck close to her initial answer when King pressed her about the link between climate change and mass migration, famine and political violence. She said she did not recall instructing the report’s authors to exclude climate.
Erin Sikorsky is director of the Center for Climate and Security, a Washington D.C.-based think tank, and spent more than a decade working in the U.S. intelligence community. The erasure of climate change from the latest assessment “suggests some kind of political change,” she told The Maine Monitor, noting that climate hazards have only gotten worse in the decade since climate began appearing in the annual reports.
“I think it’s a narrowing of the definition of ‘U.S. national security.’ It’s refusing to look at the facts,” Sikorsky said.
“[Gabbard] said, ‘We’re focused on the direct threats to Americans’ safety, well-being and security.’ I think if you asked Mainers about their safety, well-being and security, they’d point to the extreme storms they faced last year in January that caused millions of dollars in damage.”
King’s office did not make the senator available for an interview this week, but a spokesperson told The Monitor his exchange with Gabbard was “fairly fulsome.”
Eshoo and Anya Fetcher, federal policy advocate at the Natural Resource Council of Maine, both likened the latest U.S. threat assessment to an ostrich burying its head in the sand.
“The story of the ostrich sticking its head in the sand to avoid danger is a myth, but it’s not one we should emulate, because the threats and risks of climate change are very real, for Maine and the United States,” Fetcher wrote in an email, adding that she appreciates King raising the issue and holding the Trump administration accountable.
Sikorsky worries that the recent change could have a chilling effect within intelligence agencies, ultimately putting national security at greater risk.
“When your leadership says, ‘Don’t talk about this stuff, we’re going to take this down from all our websites, we’re not going to mention climate at all,’ no one wants to lean forward to be the one to put their head up when people are getting fired right and left,” she said. “It doesn’t create a culture where people will be forward leaning to make sure they get this right.”
This story was originally published by The Maine Monitor, a nonprofit and nonpartisan news organization. To get regular coverage from the Monitor, sign up for a free Monitor newsletter here.
