Our core belief here at Planet Restart is that climate change is about more than climate, more than just statistics or trends. It is about the problems we face today: legal and illegal migrations, water shortages, disease outbreaks and pandemics, severe weather, oil shortages, overpopulation.
It is about people, all 7 billion of us. It is about our heavy footprint on the globe and our efforts to cope with changes that threaten their very way of life.
It is about places, whether on the land or in the air or sea. Glaciers are melting away. Arable land is turning into desert. Rain forests are being removed to make pastures and farms. The oceans are rising.
It is about politics, either as an instrument of reform or as a tool to preserve the status quo, business as usual.
It is about power, both the kind that stems from the barrel of a gun and the kind that you plug into. It is about preserving wealth either through draining every last bit of fossil fuel or emphasizing innovation and creativity to come up with new sustainable forms of energy.
You can see why the military understands the strategic implications of uncontained climate change. This is nothing new, yet every time a new report comes out about the military looking at the problem of climate change you hear the same sort of arguments from those who benefit by maintaining the status quo.
To me, the military is just being prudent. Let's make it easy and imagine a world where the idea that climate change caused by human activity hasn't entered the public debate. Now, imagine you are a military planner who knows nothing about weather or climate, who just looks at people and places as they are right now. What do you see?
You would see a world where certain populations are facing enormous strains because of shifting patterns of monsoons, diminished water supplies, irregular crop returns, rising incidences of disease, a steadily diminishing supply of vital energy sources.
In short, the classic ingredients for local and regional tensions that unresolved lead to conflicts and wars. That's why the military planners are turning their attention to this problem. And this is nothing new. Papers on this subject go back over many years. The issue of transnational water alone is enough to raise red flags in war rooms all across the globe.
So it is a good thing our military retains that old-fashioned virtue of prudence, a virtue once closely associated with conservatism, but which has been largely thrown under the bus in favor of a foolish ideological consistency
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