Conservatives would rather say the military is stupid than accept that climate change is real
by David Atkins
We already know that the Pentagon has considered climate change a serious threat for years. Now another military report confirms the same:
The accelerating rate of climate change poses a severe risk to national security and acts as a catalyst for global political conflict, a report published Tuesday by a leading government-funded military research organization concluded.
The Center for Naval Analyses Military Advisory Board found that climate change-induced drought in the Middle East and Africa is leading to conflicts over food and water and escalating longstanding regional and ethnic tensions into violent clashes. The report also found that rising sea levels are putting people and food supplies in vulnerable coastal regions like eastern India, Bangladesh and the Mekong Delta in Vietnam at risk and could lead to a new wave of refugees.
In addition, the report predicted that an increase in catastrophic weather events around the world will create more demand for American troops, even as flooding and extreme weather events at home could damage naval ports and military bases.
In an interview, Secretary of State John Kerry signaled that the report’s findings would influence American foreign policy.
“Tribes are killing each other over water today,” Mr. Kerry said. “Think of what happens if you have massive dislocation, or the drying up of the waters of the Nile, of the major rivers in China and India. The intelligence community takes it seriously, and it’s translated into action.”
But that won’t change anything for the conservative base. The politics of climate change have become completely tribalized.
One reason for that is that Republicans are hugely dependent on fossil fuel money, including and especially from the Koch brothers.
Another potentially larger reason is that climate change is a problem that cannot be solved by free markets, which are inherently reactive rather than proactive in dealing with problems. Insofar as markets do self-regulate, they do so by companies causing damage, then consumers and lawsuits punishing those companies. There are all sorts of reasons that society cannot be run by that model, but in the case of climate change the problem is simply that by the time consumers and lawsuits start reacting adequately to the problem, it will be entirely too late to fix.
That in turn creates an existential threat to conservative dogma. It’s not just that government regulation threatens fossil fuel profits. It’s that the very existence of climate change, and its gigantic importance to the fate of humanity, entirely negates the validity of the libertarian economic worldview.
The military, of course, has to deal with strategic threats. And climate change is potentially the greatest strategic threat we face.
What we’ve learned from conservatives and Republicans is that as much as they worship the military, they worship Ayn Rand more. They would rather insult the intelligence and priorities of the military than call into question their radical economic beliefs.
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