Environment or economy? It's a false antithesis. Without a sound environment, sooner or later there will be no economy. Typical media reporting that tends to pigeonhole topics rather than illuminating relationships between them reinforce this false dichotomy.
Now a grim reminder that not only the economy but the national security may be swept away by large-scale environmental disaster—by climate change—comes from comments on the Huffington Post by U.S. Sen. John Kerry. Kerry writes as news comes that the climate change legislation being written in the Senate won't be heard as early in the fall as its crafters had hoped because health care reform still dominates the agenda on Capitol Hill.
Climate change, Kerry warns, will lead to "more famine and drought, worse pandemics, more natural disasters, more resource scarcity, and human displacement on a staggering scale"—an assessment that agrees with predictions by scientists and by military and intelligence officials from the Bush administration.
If we don't deal with climate change, adds Kerry, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, we "risk fanning the flames of failed-statism, and offering glaring opportunities to the worst actors in our international system. In an interconnected world, that endangers all of us."
As an example, Kerry points out that disappearing glaciers in the Himalayas threaten to deprive a billion people in Asia of water for drinking and agriculture. Conflicts related to water shortages in one affected country, Pakistan, will not only put millions of Pakistanis at risk for hunger and disease, but will destabilize the government so that the U.S. will be hard pressed to deal with it about issues like al Qaeda, the senator explains.
A late fall vote on the legislation is especially urgent, Kerry wrote, because other nations attending the world climate summit in Copenhagen in December are expecting action from the U.S. before the meeting.
