In the United States Code, under Title 10,892, Article 92; dereliction
of duty applies to all branches of the US military when a member of the
armed services willfully refuses to perform their duties, follow a given
order, or deliberately incapacitates themselves in such a way they
cannot perform their duties. It is likely that, save treason or
sedition, there is no greater betrayal to one’s country than being
guilty of dereliction of duty.
It was prescient, then, that when President Obama
addressed graduates of the Coast Guard Academy and told them that
“denying it (climate change), or refusing to deal with it endangers our
national security. Anything less is negligence. It is a dereliction of
duty and it undermines the readiness of our forces,” he was describing
and referring to Republicans.
The President made the threat of global anthropogenic climate change the focus of his
speech
to Cadets as he should have considering they are “the first responders
of the oceans.” He went on to say, “Climate change constitutes a serious
threat to global security, an immediate risk to our national security,
and make no mistake, it will impact how our military defends our
country. And so we need to act—and we need to act now… In Miami and
Charleston, streets now flood at high tide. Along our coasts, thousands
of miles of highways, roads, railways and energy facilities are
vulnerable.” The President
said
there will be “a rise in climate change refugees” and “increased
competition for resources,” and to be ready to combat these threats, “I
guarantee the Coast Guard will have to respond … you need to be ready.”
It is why the President drove home the point that global warming “cannot
be subject to the usual politics.”
The President’s remarks about the threat to national
security from global climate change were echoed in 2012 by then-Defense
Secretary Chuck Hagel. Hagel
referenced
a Pentagon survey that assessed the increasing vulnerability of its
military installations to the effects of anthropogenic climate change.
He cited the Hampton Roads region of Virginia as an example of an area
that has both military bases and recurrent flooding, and noted that
defense officials are frantically developing plans to address the
certainty of sea-level rise in the next 20 years.
Hagel also rightly acknowledged Republican
recalcitrance in even admitting that climate change exists, much less
having even a passing interest or willingness to address it as the
national security issue that everyone but Republicans admit is pressing.
Hagel said, “Politics or ideology must not get in the way of sound
planning. Our armed forces must prepare for a future with a wide
spectrum of possible threats, weighing risks and probabilities to ensure
that we will continue to keep our country secure.”
The Pentagon certainly agrees with President Obama’s
assessment of the threat to national security of the effects of climate
change and heeded his call to action. Besides responding to Hagel’s
pleas, several current and retired military commanders
issued a call
for Congress to invest more resources in preparing for increasing
climate-related security risks. However, Republicans ignored the
Pentagon’s requests and dutifully heeded the demands of the Koch
brothers’ dirty energy cabal and instead of listening to military
commanders, House Republicans
cut spending in the Department of Defense and Central Intelligence Agency budgets related to climate change and national security.
Just two weeks ago, led by notorious climate denier
Lamar Smith (R-TX), the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee
approved a bill slashing at least three hundred million dollars from
NASA’s earth-science budget because “Earth science includes climate
science.” Smith was very disgusted that President Obama’s NASA budget
request favored earth sciences “at the expense of the other science
divisions, especially “human and robotic space exploration;” so
Republicans severely cut NASA’s Earth science funding.
What that means for the Pentagon and national
security is that not only will climate studies be completely ignored;
potentially useful defense data can never be collected. NASA’s
administrator, Charles Bolden, issued a statement complaining that the
bill “guts our Earth science program and threatens to set back
generations worth of progress in better understanding our changing
climate.” And as the President noted in his address to academy
graduates, it is necessary understanding to protect American national
security and economic stability.
The Pentagon has, for several years now, noted that climate change is what it
calls
a “threat multiplier” driving instability around the world threatening
America’s national interests and the military. There is real-world
evidence that proves the Pentagon’s predictions have been playing out in
especially sensitive parts of the world. In a speech earlier this year,
the President linked climate stress to the
rise of Boko Haram in Nigeria and the
civil war
in Syria where severe droughts and the resulting food shortages were
documented by experts as one of the “major instigators of each
conflict.”
Indeed, in a fairly recent
study
by Maplecroft, a risk analysis firm, 32 countries were identified where
climate change could “amplify” civil unrest, including China, India,
Pakistan, Yemen, and the Philippines. At the rate the Western United
States is being wracked by severe and historic droughts, the risk of
severe food shortages or at least skyrocketing prices could easily lead
to civil unrest among America’s poor and rapidly vanishing middle class.
Hunger and thirst will overwhelm any sense of civil order when a
population’s survival is at stake and America is not immune to civil
unrest over basic human needs.
These Republican tactics of defunding and thwarting
climate change’s effects are not, as former Defense Secretary Hagel
claimed, just founded in politics and ideology. They are specific to the
goals to increase the bottom line of corporations whose fossil fuels
drive the global warming that is rapidly making the Earth less habitable
and America less secure.
President Obama is not alone in ramping up the call
to address the real and present danger to America’s national security
from climate change. Secretary of State John Kerry just returned from an
overseas trip and did not fail to address the absurdity of denying the
threat of climate change to national security. Kerry said, “It’s time to
put aside discredited scientific arguments and to focus on the facts,
not just for our health and the health of our children, but for our
planet’s security as well.”
In
what is a weekly exercise by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) on the
Senate floor, he said, “Time and time again, we hear, ‘I’m not a
scientist’ from politicians refusing to acknowledge the evidence. We’re
not elected to be scientists. We’re elected to listen to them.” Members
of Congress are also elected to listen to the men and women leading the
military in the defense of the nation’s security at home and around the
globe, but they do not. Their ears and attention are too laser-focused
on their oil industry masters’ whims and demands and as the President
said, it is a dereliction of duty and they are a threat to national
security.
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