Global-warming policies and the threat to U.S.
Posted by African Press International on May 27, 2012
Contrary to what Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told an environmental organization earlier this month, the threat to America’s geopolitical standing comes not from global warming but from anti-energy global warming policies, according to free market policy analysts and national security advocates.
During an annual reception held for the Environmental Defense Fund at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., Panetta described how abrupt environmental changes could unsettle populated areas and create international tension.
“The area of climate change has a dramatic impact on national security,” Panetta said at the reception. “Rising sea levels, severe droughts, the melting of the polar caps, the more frequent and devastating natural disasters all raise demand for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief.”
While it is possible for climate change to foster instability in certain areas of the world, updated scientific research indicates that the claims are greatly exaggerated and must be carefully weighed, Marlo Lewis, a senior fellow with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has warned.
He cites a detailed study published in the official journal for the British Science Association that finds there has not been a single instance of a declared war fought over international fresh water sources over a period of five decades. Instead of fighting over water, the countries collaborate and import “virtual water” in the form of grain, the report says.
Get the truth about global warming, from “The Greatest Hoax: How the global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future” by Sen. James Inhofe and “Eco-Tyranny: How the Left’s Green Agenda will Dismantle America and “Climategate: A Veteran Meteorologist Exposes the Global Warming Scam” by Brian Sussman.
In response to Panetta’s talk, Marc Morano, the editor of Climate Depot, points out that the scientific rationale for restrictive energy policies has been greatly discredited in the past few years. He cites the unfolding “climategate” scandal, that has implicated the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain. Emails leaked from CRU demonstrate how researchers manipulated and distorted scientific data when they could find no evidence of man-made global warming.
“Aside from the fact that the ‘national security’ angle rests on speculative doomsday scenarios, perhaps the biggest whopper of the new movement is the implication that we must pass the congressional climate bill to ‘address’ or ‘remedy’ the problem and thus ‘avoid’ future wars and loss of life,” Morano said. “Left unanswered in this argument is how a climate bill that will have no detectable impact on global temperatures will help ‘solve’ the alleged looming national security threat.”
Instead of fixating on dubious environmental claims, the CEI scholar Lewis has suggested that Defense officials shift their focus over to the national risks that could result from climate change policies.
“Today’s U.S. Army is the most fuel-intensive in history, and the Defense Department is the nation’s largest consumer of fossil fuels,” Lewis wrote in a policy paper.
Therefore, he said, it should interest the Defense Department that cap-and-trade programs are designed to “make fossil fuels more costly.”
The policies green pressure groups have advanced on Capitol Hill, and at the state level, are rooted in a regulatory concept known as the “Precautionary Principle,” Lawrence Kogan, CEO of the Institute for Trade Standards and Sustainable Development, a non-profit legal research group, explained in an interview.
The Precautionary Principle, as it is defined by environmental groups within the European Union and the United Nations, calls for the suspension of any proposed activity or enterprise until after environmental allegations are satisfied, even if a cause-and-effect relationship has not been scientifically established.
In his explosive new book of that title, Sussman details how what he calls “green authoritarianism” was inevitable from the beginning. He explains that Richard Nixon, who “wanted to be liked,” according to one of his well-known former advisers, created the Environmental Protection Agency as an olive branch to the hard left. As Sussman jokes, “Needless to say, it was not returned.” Click here to read more about Eco-Tyranny.
“The same fear-based, anti-corporate and luddite mindset that has been so destructive to European companies and economies has been incorporated into the EU Commission international trade policy and systematically exported to America and the world,” Kogan said. “Nothing less than America’s free enterprise system, individual freedoms and international interests – its core political and economic values – are at stake.”
Nowhere is the Precautionary Principle more entrenched and deeply embedded than within the Law of Sea Treaty. Secretary Panetta made the case for ratification during his talk.
“We are the only industrialized nation that has not approved that treaty,” he lamented.
Panetta views the treaty as a way to clear up disputes concerning navigation rights.
But opponents like Kogan and Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy, are concerned that the treaty will transfer U.S. sovereignty to the authority of foreign tribunals, which will rule on U.S. seabed mining and military transportation.
“The innocent passage of U.S. nuclear-powered military vessels,” write Kogan and former Navy secretary J. William Middendorf, could be stymied by lawyers claiming hypothetical environmental risks.
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source WND
