Concerns about "Securitizing" Climate Change

There is a growing understanding that the impacts of climate change will bring with them serious implications for U.S. national security.  The Senate Foreign Relations and Energy committees have held hearings on this topic.  The intelligence community and the Department of Defense–in the George W. Bush administration–began to examine the topic and factor it into their planning and assessments.

Some, as Bryan Bender noted this weekend in the Boston Globe, look at this growing consensus and worry that it will lead to the militarization of the response to climate change.  As Bender noted, Matthew Yglesias even blogged that linking climate and security “has a bit of a whiff of hubristic imperialism about it.”  These criticisms miss the point.

I don’t know anyone who looks at climate change through the lens of national security in order to find more things for the Department of Defense to do.  I do know a growing number of people who recognize that the impacts of climate change will be so significant that they rise to the level of a national security concern and therefore require urgent action.

I don’t want to send the Marines into some devastated land 50 years from now to solve a crisis we could have avoided now with smarter climate policies.  And that’s the point.

If you accept the science of climate change, then the time to do something about it is now, not after its impacts are being felt.

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