Former Sen. Warner Ties Climate To Security
By Amy Harder
John Warner, Former senator
In 2008, then-Sens. John Warner, R-Va., and Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., worked together to add language in the Defense Authorization bill requiring the Pentagon to consider climate change as a national security risk in the Quadrennial Defense Review. Two years later, they’re now seeing the fruits of their labor.
For the first time ever, the QDR includes climate change and energy security as national security issues, devoting four of its 128 pages to the topic. Warner, now retired from the Senate, told NationalJournal.com on Tuesday that the QDR, which was released Monday, “did a superb analysis and laid down a very encouraging framework for the department in the coming four years.” He discussed why he thinks it’s important that both the Defense Department and the CIA, which in September opened its first-ever center on climate change, are now considering climate in the realm of national security.
Warner serves a spokesman for the Pew Project on National Security, Energy and Climate, and is currently working with the group on a report detailing the military’s efforts on climate issues. Edited excerpts of the interview follow.
NJ: Why did you think DOD should consider climate and energy security as a national security risk and include it in its QDR?
Warner: Because when problems happen, particularly in remote places in the world, and the president of the United States determines that it’s in the interest of the United States to provide assistance and help to people who are suffering — whether it’s from a climactic change, an energy shortage, a water shortage, a food shortage, or in some cases the instability of their governments, as we saw in Somalia, where it’s collapsing — then guess who he points to? He simply issues orders to the United States military, and the military carries out the commander-in-chief’s — i.e., the president’s — orders. They’re often the first responders — the military. They have the ships, the aircraft, the transportation means, the stockpiles of necessary supplies, to immediately respond.
NJ: Some veterans I have spoken to have said that it’s crucial DOD become involved in climate change because of the department’s international clout and because climate change is an inherently global issue. Do you agree with that?
Warner: I don’t disagree with what they said. But I think from the public perspective of understanding, when you say that it’s their sons and daughters that operate the ships and the aircraft, who gather up the supplies of food and medicine and water, and transport them, that relates clearly to public understanding of why there is a nexus between these four entities [climate change, energy security, economic stability and national security]. To me, that’s a more clear means by which to explain it to the public.
NJ: What do you think about the CIA’s work on climate change?
Warner: I think it’s essential. There are governments that are very fragile in terms of their selected form of government — let’s say a democracy — and if they’re hit broadside as Haiti was hit, as Southeast Asia was hit with the tsunami; they need support, those governments. Because if you allow them to collapse in the wake of natural disasters and shortages of food and water and things like that, then you’re never quite certain who is going to replace that government. It may not even be a government — it could be just a group of individuals who are pillaging and ravaging the victims of these catastrophes for their own personal reasons.
The CIA, I strongly support what they’re doing. I visited their unit out there that’s working on that. The CIA has to keep our president and our defense structure, and indeed our people, informed of where there are places in the world which are fragile that could be affected and if the governments were to fall, the likelihood of people taking over whose interests are quite opposed to our interests.
So the CIA should be studying how climate change could, as a consequence of these unpredictable climate things, bring about the collapse of a government or a shortage of energy. I always try to tie climate and energy and all of it together. It’s not a simple listing of just one thing. Many factors can be brought to bear on a fragile government which will bring it down. If you cannot feed your people, if you can’t give them the warmth and the medicine that they need as a consequence of some sort of climactic change or energy shortage or water shortage, then the governments will fall in some areas of the world. The CIA should be studying that.
NJ: Some people have argued that, considering all of the national security issues that our country is facing right now, the CIA and DOD should not be focusing on climate change.
Warner: OK, well, I would tell them to go around full circle. Who are the people who deliver the first assistance? Most often, it’s the uniformed people. Should not they be entitled to a careful surveillance of situations so they can better prepare should the president order them?
It is our uniformed people who operate the equipment, which our nation has and many others don’t have, to bring about relief to human beings wherever they are in the world who are suffering and follow the orders of the president to carry out those missions. And shouldn’t they be entitled to up-to-date CIA analysis of what’s on the ground when they get there, what they should expect; is it going to be open arms of people — ‘thank you for bringing food’ — or is it going to be hostile treatment?
NJ: Why do you think senators with a military background, like John McCain, Lindsey Graham and John Kerry, are drawn to the issue of climate change?
Warner: I think you’ve got the answer to your question in your own question itself. They do draw on military backgrounds. Those three individuals by virtue of their committee assignments have responsibility for the welfare of the men and women in the armed forces.
