liberation

Liberation.
Vol.52 N.4 September 2009

Much of the public and political debate on global warming has focused on finding substitutes for fossil fuels, reducing emissions that contribute to greenhouse gases and furthering negotiations toward
an international climate treaty — not potential security challenges.

But a growing number of policy makers say that the world’s rising temperatures, surging seas and melting glaciers are a direct threat
to the American national interest.

The changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and intelligence analysts say.

The conflict in southern Sudan, which has killed and displaced tens
of thousands of people, is partly a result of drought in Darfur.

Such climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions, say the analysts, experts at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies who for the first time are taking a serious look at the national security implications of climate change.

Recent war games and intelligence studies conclude that over the
next 20 to 30 years, vulnerable regions, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia, will face the prospect of food shortages, water crises and catastrophic flooding driven by climate change that could demand an American
humanitarian relief or military response.

An exercise last December at the National Defence University, an educational institute that is overseen by the military, explored the potential impact of a destructive flood in Bangladesh that sent hundreds of thousands of refugees streaming into neighbouring India, touching off religious conflict, the spread of contagious diseases and vast damage to infrastructure.

“It gets real complicated real quickly,” said Amanda J. Dory, the deputy assistant secretary of defence for strategy, who is working with a Pentagon group assigned to incorporate climate change into national security strategy planning.

If the United States does not lead the world in reducing fossil-fuel consumption and thus emissions of global warming gases, proponents of this view say, a series of global environmental, social, political and possibly military crises loom that the nation will urgently have to address

This argument could prove a fulcrum for debate in the Senate next month when it takes up climate and energy legislation passed
in June by the House.

Lawmakers leading the debate before Congress are only now beginning to make the national security argument for approving the legislation.

Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who is the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and a leading advocate
for the climate legislation, said he hoped to sway Senate sceptics by pressing that issue to pass a meaningful bill.

Mr. Kerry said he did not know whether he would succeed but had spoken with 30 undecided senators on the matter.

He did not identify those Senators, but the list of undecided includes many from coal and manufacturing states and from the South and Southeast, which will face the sharpest energy price increases from any carbon emissions control program.

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Vol. 53 N.3 July 2010 /Vol. 53 N.2 May 2010/Vol. 53 N.1 March2010 /Vol. 53 N.1 March2010/Vol. 52 N.6 January 2010/
Vol. 52 N.5 November 2009 / Vol. 52 N.3 July 2009 / Vol.52 N.2 May 2009 / Vol.52 N.1 March 2009 /
Vol.51 N.6 December/January 2009 / Archives

Incorporating the Movement for Colonial Freedom