I coauthored this piece with Alex Devoid.
April 24, at the Defense, National Security, and Climate Change Symposium in Washington, D.C., Brigadier General Stephen Cheney stepped up to the podium to discuss “conflict and climate change.” Although Cheney is CEO of the American Security Project think tank, he identifies first as a retired Marine who likes to talk about “war fighting.” That’s fitting for a gathering that revolved around the “war on climate change”—a phrase used by journalist Cyril Mychalejko to describe the tendency to fit the world’s coming climatological upheavals into a “national security framework.”
Denialism still holds some sway in Congress, with seven GOP senators expressing outrage in May that FEMA asked states to plan for climate change, but among the military and defense technology elites gathered at the symposium, no time was wasted on debating the science. Instead, the Obama administration’s warning in February that the warming of the planet is “an urgent and growing threat to our national security” set the agenda.
Read the rest here where it was originally published at In These Times:
http://inthesetimes.com/article/18046/a-hawks-eye-view-of-climate-change