Environment and Energy Daily: Former Sen. Warner calls on Kerry panel to be 'axle' of debate
By: Robin Bravender, E&E reporter
The Republican co-sponsor of last year’s climate change bill urged the Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday to become the “axle” in crafting a domestic cap-and-trade program and bringing other nations on board.
Former Sen. John Warner (R-Va.), who retired at the end of last year, told the Foreign Relations panel that it must be a leader on crafting federal legislation, which he called “one of the most complex issues” that Congress has ever faced.
“This is huge and this committee’s role is like fashioning and forging the axle, the centerpiece around which all the other issues and parts and spokes rotate,” Warner said. “The key to your forging this axle is working with the other nations to adopt policies, commitments and eventually binding targets … and that’s got to be a structure that’s got to work, and not to serve America, but to serve the global community.”
Without strong international cooperation, he warned, any U.S. legislation has little chance at succeeding.
“If the American public in a year or two sees that we’re going it alone in the United States and other nations and citizens aren’t bearing part of the responsibilities and the burdens and the costs, the American public will pull a plug on this legislation,” he said. “I don’t mean to threaten, but I have been around a little while.”
Warner, who previously served as secretary of the Navy and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and other national security experts also urged Congress to frame climate change as a pressing threat to national security to gain public support as the debate over legislation intensifies.
Beyond the widely cited environmental and public health concerns associated with global warming, witnesses warned that the changing climate will affect national security in a number of profound ways.
“New climate conditions will lead to further human migrations and create more climate refugees, including those who cross our own borders,” said retired Navy Vice Adm. Lee Gunn, president of the American Security Project. “The stress of changes in the environment will increasingly weaken marginal states. Failing states will incubate extremism,” he said.
And while issues such as preserving wildlife and forests are important manifestations of the problems posed by climate change, Gunn said, “I think that creating a sense of urgency about dealing with them, about appreciating and preparing for these problems is only going to come from characterizing them as important components of American security.”
Foreign Relations Chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.) has already begun to frame action on climate change as an urgent national security imperative. “Just as 9-11 taught us the painful lesson that oceans could not protect us from terror, today we are deluding ourselves if we believe that climate change will stop at our borders,” he said.
Ranking member Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) cautioned that some efforts to address climate change could exacerbate other pressing threats. For example, he said, “[E]ncouraging nuclear power overseas would produce climate change benefits, but the national security risks have to be managed very carefully.”
Thus, Lugar said, lawmakers must anticipate national security threats in addition to threats that might emerge in the future due to climate change and dependence on fossil fuels. “We have to develop timelines that compare the relative immediacy of these threats,” he said. “Then we have to make rational decisions about where and how to apply limited national security resources.”
The Foreign Relations panel is one of six working to craft Senate climate legislation. Kerry said “there will be something on national security” in the legislation slated to be introduced in early September, although he declined to elaborate on the details.
http://www.eenews.net/EEDaily/2009/07/22/
