May 2007
Beckett: Threat of Climate Change akin to Soviet Menace
This month Margaret Beckett compared our struggle against climate change to the Cold War. Building upon a litany of reports on climate change and national security, the Foreign Secretary warned of the world being “engulfed” by the problem unless action was taken.
Hers is not the first voice of warning to be sounded over the security implications of climate change, which threaten to exacerbate the problems we already face in combating the danger. In 2004, US defence chiefs attempted to suppress a leaked report which warned of major European cities being sunk beneath rising seas as the world would be swept with nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine, disease and widespread rioting.
The report indicated that abrupt climate changes could induce near anarchy internationally as nations developed nuclear weapons to defend diminishing food, water and energy supplies. Indeed, the dangers of terrorism would be far eclipsed by this new catastrophe where "disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life [and] once again, warfare would define human life". An embarrassment at the time for the Bush administration who denied the very existence of climate change, it seems that even the most urgent calls by its authors - which include CIA consultant and former head of planning at Shell, Peter Schwartz - to "elevate [climate change] beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern" are still going unheeded.
Now, the United Kingdom is seeking to provide international leadership where the US has fallen by the wayside. The Foreign Secretary chaired the UN Security Council’s first debate on global warming in April, in spite of opposition from India and China who both argue that the issue is outside the council’s remit of maintaining international peace - a statement contested by Mrs Beckett. Adding mass migration to the list of foreseeable ills, she went on to analogise the potential effects to the economic destruction wrought by World War II. She also quoted from remarks made by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni who called global warming "an act of aggression by the rich against the poor". Using the forum to promote discussion and debate, reactions from large developing industrial nations such as well as the United States were unfavourable, despite especially susceptible nations like Bangladesh and the Maldives pleading for action.
John Ashton - the Foreign Secretary’s special representative for climate change and visiting professor at Imperial College London - has stated that governments need to accept the changing dynamics of the world:
"Governments have traditionally invested in instruments of hard power as a backstop against the consequences of political and diplomatic failure.
But there is no hard power option either for mitigating climate change or for dealing with its direct impacts. You cannot use military force to make everyone else on the planet reduce their carbon emissions. No weapon system can halt the advance of a hurricane bearing down on a city, or stem the rising sea, or stop the glaciers melting."
This was a message made more acute by a recent statement made by a panel of 11 retired US generals, who warned that climate change caused severe problems in its own right as well as acting as a multiplier to already existing problems, including the war in Iraq and the US "War on Terror".
Thus Mrs Beckett’s speech at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) was not only a repeated wake up call, but one directed towards a group of people previously at the periphery of the debate. The Foreign Secretary believes that the security community has much to offer in the way of input. Noting the "quantatively different" terms in which problems are addressed, it is hoped that like security, climate change is "seen as an imperative not an option", whereby people take action rather than talk about action. Moreover, attitudes towards planning are also regarded as key, where "you prepare for the worst case scenario, you don’t sit around and hope for the best."
Re-emphasising the moral commitment to combat climate change, not just the economic one, the RUSI address was finished on a note of hope. However, commendable as it may be to use security matters to take a new approach to the issue, one has to wonder if hearing about the grim Hobbesian vision of the future from a general as opposed to a scientist or an economist will really make any difference?
Print this page