The
Pentagon Sounds
The Alarm On Global Warming;
Why Isn't Bush Listening?
By Arianna Huffington
CommonDreams.org
26 February, 2004
If
he's smart enough to use it, the Democratic nominee may have just been
handed the perfect cudgel with which to pummel President Bush - and
cripple Karl Rove's attempts to position his man as America's go-to
guy on national security.
The weapon in question
is a new report on the grave and gathering threat posed by global climate
change - and the potentially cataclysmic consequences of the Bush administration's
obstinately ignorant approach to global warming.
And the thing that
makes the report so frightening - and the prospective bludgeon so crushing
- is that it wasn't authored by some crunchy granola think tank or a
band of tree-hugging EarthFirsters, but by the U.S. Department of Defense.
That's right, the
Pentagon - Rummy's playpen. In fact, the report, which was slipped to
the press earlier this month after being kept under wraps by the White
House for four months, was commissioned by Andrew Marshall, a legendary
DOD figure, nicknamed "Yoda" for his sagacity. As head of
the Pentagon's secretive Office of Net Assessment, Marshall has offered
national security assessments to every president since Richard Nixon.
And this latest
assessment pegs climate change as a far greater danger than even the
scourge of international terrorism.
Dryly entitled "An
Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States
National Security," the report reads like the plot summary of the
upcoming Dennis Quaid doomsday flick, "The Day After Tomorrow,"
in which global warming pushes the planet to the edge of anarchy and
annihilation.
But this scenario
is not science fiction. According to the Pentagon study, the question
is not if abrupt climate change will happen, but when. It could be,
according to the report's authors, as soon as the next three years,
with the most devastating fallout potentially occurring between 2010
and 2020.
At that point, we
could find ourselves in the midst of a new ice age in which mega-droughts
devastate the world's food supply, drinkable water becomes a luxury
worth going nuclear over, 400 million people are forced to migrate from
uninhabitable areas, and riots and wars for survival become commonplace.
I believe that would
qualify as a Red Alert in Tom Ridge's color-coded book.
But the Bush White
House remains unwilling to address - or even acknowledge - this looming
peril. Instead, the oiligarchs in the administration continue to fiddle
while the atmosphere starts to burn, routinely ignoring scientific evidence
and international consensus, and casting a questioning eye on the very
idea, let alone the fact, of global warming. It's a stance that has
warmed the hearts - globally, no doubt - of the Bush Pioneers and Rangers
in the oil and energy industry, making them feel very generous indeed.
As last week's release
of a scathing letter signed by 60 prominent scientists - including 20
Nobel laureates and former science advisers to both Republican and Democratic
administrations - makes clear, the Bush administration has made an art
out of ignoring science. Particularly when it comes to the issue of
global warming.
Who can forget the
president's famous CO2 flip-flop, or the way the White House tried to
force so many changes to a section of an EPA report dealing with climate
change that Christie Todd Whitman finally threw up her hands and decided
to eliminate the section on global warming altogether?
But blinding the
voters with pseudo-science may no longer be an option now that the Pentagon
report threatens to put the issue front and center - and reframe it
as a key component of our national security debate.
This is particularly
good news for John Kerry, should he prevail, given his long history
of leading the charge in the Senate to cut down on greenhouse gases
by raising fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks. The president,
of course, has done just the opposite, giving Kyoto the kiss-off, and
pushing through unconscionable loopholes that reward gas-guzzling monster
SUVs and allow carmakers to effectively reduce fuel economy for millions
of the vehicles they sell.
One of the defining
traits of leadership is the ability to see not just the crisis right
in front of you, but the one lurking around the next corner. Bush's
steadfast refusal to act upon the potential desolation that awaits us
if we do nothing to confront global warming makes him a major national
security liability.
Everyone in the
Bush administration acted shocked and surprised when 9/11 happened -
even though there had been red flags aplenty warning of al-Qaida's evil
intentions. Well, let there be no surprise this time. We have all been
warned.
While the Pentagon
is sounding the alarm on an environmental Armageddon, the president
is covering his eyes, crossing his fingers, and whistling about the
"national importance" of a constitutional amendment banning
gay marriage.
The Democratic nominee
needs to remind the White House - and the American people: It's not
nice to fool with Mother Nature.
© 2004 Arianna
Huffington