President Bush supported South Korea’s Ban Ki-moon last year to succeed Kofi Annan as UN Secretary General. This weekend, Ban highlighted a consequence of climate change that a distinguished group of retired senior U.S. admirals and generals already warned us about – it worsens instability and conflict in volatile parts of the world, something witnessed most recently in the current tragedy in Darfur.
According to a report issued by these top U.S. military leaders:
“Climate change acts as a threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world. Economic and environmental conditions in already fragile areas will further erode as food production declines, diseases increase, clean water becomes increasingly scarce, and large populations move in search of resources. The U.S. may be drawn more frequently into these situations, either alone or with allies, to help provide stability before conditions worsen and are exploited by extremists.”
And later in their report they specifically state:
“Darfur, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Angola, Nigeria, Cameroon, Western Sahara – all have been hit hard by tensions that can be traced in part to environmental causes.”
America has already been drawn into the situation in Darfur. I personally believe President Bush should be commended for the leadership he’s shown on the situation. But as the retired admirals and generals make clear in their report, worsening climate change could draw the U.S into more Darfurs in the future, and it could involve more than financial assistance. It could necessitate sending in troops.
Better to take steps to reduce climate change before these security threats arise, don’t you think?
This entry was posted on Monday, June 18th, 2007 at 1:34 pm and is filed under Climate Change, International Environmental News, National Security . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
June 19th, 2007 at 8:28 am
Why is it better to take ineffectual steps to “reduce climate change” now? I’d like to see some steps that do something, but the problem is that anything that will reduce climate change is very, very expensive. Energy prices are already up 25 percent in Germany and 15 percent in the UK and it isn’t helping them comply with their Kyoto commitments. These higher prices are helping jobs leave Europe and yet they are doing nothing environmentally. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/08/AR2007040800758.html
Worst of all, Kyoto does nothing to reduce climate change because all of the real emission growth will come from the Developing world. Data out in the last week shows that China’s CO2 emissions will surpass the CO2 emissions from the United States.
Currently cap and trade is Europe is not achieving results and even if it were, and the US had agreed to commitments under Kyoto, Kyoto doesn’t affect climate in any measurable way (it will reduce the rate of increase by 0.07 C by 2050).
Furthermore, how will we convince the developing world to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions?
Dafur is sad, but it isn’t a result of climate change. Climate change may exacerbated the problem, but the real problem is poor legal/politician institutions. Ban Ki Moon puts the horse before the cart. You can’t have real economic development in Dafur before you have the good legal/political institutions. If there are quality institutions, climate change does not matter because people can adapt to a changing climate. The generals would have been better served to work on institutional climate than argue for expensive and ineffectual climate change programs.