{"id":6408,"date":"2022-10-07T06:03:13","date_gmt":"2022-10-07T06:03:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/euromenaenergy.com\/?p=6408"},"modified":"2022-10-07T06:03:13","modified_gmt":"2022-10-07T06:03:13","slug":"no-security-without-climate-security","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/?p=6408","title":{"rendered":"No security without climate security"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

By Anne-Marie Slaughter\/ Washington, DC<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

In July, CIA Director William Burns gave a 45-minute interview at the Aspen Security Forum. Only at the very end, following questions about the Russia-Ukraine war, China, Taiwan, Iran, and Afghanistan, was Burns asked what the CIA can do to identify where climate change is most likely to cause conflicts to erupt.
\nBurns\u2019s answer was unequivocal. First, he noted that climate change is \u201can important priority for the CIA and the US intelligence community.\u201d He then said that while he considers China \u201cthe biggest geopolitical challenge that our country faces in the 21st century,\u201d he also views climate change as the \u201cbiggest existential threat\u201d to the United States.
\nExistential risk, as the Stanford Existential Risks Initiative defines it, is a risk that \u201ccould cause the collapse of human civilisation or even the extinction of the human species.\u201d Burns probably had something less extreme in mind \u2013 perhaps a catastrophic event that would wreak irreparable harm and change life as we know it. But still, in this week-long forum dedicated to national and international security discussions, no panel focused specifically and entirely on climate change.
\nThat\u2019s not unusual. As Burns pointed out, climate change does not fit the traditional definition of a national-security threat. As such, it falls within the jurisdiction of other government departments.
\nYet if climate change poses an existential threat to the US, then the US defence apparatus must participate in the fight against it. Under Burns\u2019s leadership, the CIA has established a mission focused on helping \u201cpolicymakers in the US government understand the consequences of climate change in already fragile societies.\u201d The National Security Council, the State Department, and the Pentagon all have units that focus on climate-change-related conflicts abroad. Still, what about the direct impact of climate change on the US? Generals, after all, do not stop fighting wars when the fighting spreads from foreign to American soil.
\nScience-fiction writers have no trouble bringing the future home to the present. For example, Omar El Akkad\u2019s 2017 novel American War opens with a map of the US in 2075: Florida, New Orleans, New York City, Long Island, and Los Angeles are all underwater. Kim Stanley Robinson\u2019s 2020 novel The Ministry for the Future begins with a heatwave in India that overwhelms the power grid and kills 20mn people.
\nIn the scenario Robinson imagines, temperatures in Uttar Pradesh reach a \u201cwet bulb temperature of 42 degrees centigrade.\u201d An extreme scenario? Consider that in California\u2019s recent heatwave, temperatures in the Bay area and Sacramento Valley reached 46.6C (115.9F) and that California prepared for brownouts and blackouts. As the thermometer breaks records, the prospect of hundreds of thousands of Americans dying in a heatwave does not seem far-fetched.
\nPerhaps the problem is that an existential \u201crisk\u201d is not yet an existential \u201cthreat,\u201d whereas the war in Ukraine, Chinese militarism, and Iranian nuclear aspirations demand immediate attention. But tell that to the hurricane, fire, and flood victims who have suffered the consequences of catastrophic weather over the past decade. The Colorado River, Lake Mead, and the Great Salt Lake are disappearing now. Sea-level rise is already making itself felt in Norfolk and Miami. The future, as scientists keep telling us, is already here.
\nTo be fair, Congress and President Joe Biden have done more than any previous administration. With the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden has secured a historic legislative victory that will enable the US to meet its international obligations to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. At the most recent United Nations climate change conference, Special Presidential Envoy John Kerry negotiated a crucial deal with the Chinese to allow the world to move forward with its climate commitments.
\nMoreover, US national-security officials have their hands full. The risk that Russia will use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine is real and rising, and violating the nuclear taboo could draw Nato countries into a nuclear great-power war that could wipe out all of humanity. A nuclear conflict with China would be equally deadly, and Iran\u2019s acquisition of nuclear weapons would also lead to nuclear proliferation across the Middle East, effectively gutting the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and significantly increasing the risk of nuclear war and nuclear terrorism.
\nStill, the real measure of how much importance the American government attaches to a particular threat is the amount of time and money it invests in addressing it, and I doubt that Biden and his advisers spend more than 10% of their time on preparing for the impact of climate change. The issue is one of perspective: national-security officials operate in a world of geopolitics, competition, and co-operation among countries. They are trained to deter, prevent, and fight wars or to negotiate peace with other governments, not to deal with global threats that transcend national borders. As the adage goes, when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
\nBill Burns got it right. Climate change is an existential threat, and the Biden administration and the US national-security establishment must treat it like one. Doing so would require reallocating substantial funds from the military to government agencies that focus on building domestic resilience and civil protection. It would also require creating new security agencies whose mandate would be to address global threats.
\nMinimising the risk of climate change will not be easy, but we have no choice. To paraphrase Game of Thrones, a long and deadly summer is coming. If we do not rise to the challenge, many Americans will not survive. \u2013 Project Syndicate<\/p>\n

\u2022\u00a0Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former director of policy planning in the US State Department, is CEO of the think tank New America, Professor Emerita of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, and the author of\u00a0<\/em>Renewal: From Crisis to Transformation in Our Lives, Work, and Politics\u00a0(Princeton University Press, 2021).<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Anne-Marie Slaughter\/ Washington, DC In July, CIA Director William Burns gave a 45-minute interview at the Aspen Security Forum. Only at the very end, following questions about the Russia-Ukraine war, China,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6409,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[40,46,48,50,57,68,76,77,78,79,80,82,86,87,88,90,95,96,98,99,103,107,109,111,112,114,121,123,137,139,146,148,153,159,174,176,181,182,184,187,196,201,202,203,209,217,221,222,229,231,232,233,239,241,244,246,249,250,251,252,256,262,263,266,268,277,279,280,283,285,288],"class_list":["post-6408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-climate","tag-alleviation","tag-aramco","tag-athens","tag-athensenergydialogues","tag-baroudi","tag-carbon","tag-climate","tag-climate-change","tag-climateaction","tag-climatechange","tag-closure-of-nuclear","tag-co2","tag-cyprus","tag-decarbonising","tag-decarbonization","tag-democracy","tag-disputes","tag-doha","tag-east","tag-eastmed","tag-egypt","tag-embargo","tag-emissions","tag-energy","tag-energy-market","tag-energyindustry","tag-europe","tag-european-fuels","tag-gas","tag-gazprom","tag-greece","tag-greenenergy","tag-hydrocarbons","tag-international","tag-lebanon","tag-liquefied-natural-gas","tag-maritime","tag-maritime-boundaries","tag-maritime-disputes","tag-mediterranean","tag-natural-gas","tag-offshore","tag-oil","tag-oil-and-gas","tag-opec","tag-peace","tag-plants","tag-pollution","tag-poverty","tag-power","tag-putin","tag-qatar","tag-renewable-energy","tag-reserves","tag-rosneft","tag-roudi","tag-russia","tag-russia-in-the-european-energy-sector","tag-russian-gas","tag-russian-sanctions","tag-saudi","tag-solar","tag-solar-power","tag-straddling","tag-sustainability","tag-total","tag-trump","tag-turkey","tag-ukrain","tag-unclos","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6408"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6408\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}