climate and national security

Climate Change and the Hard-Headed Realist

Henry Kissinger showed that you don’t have to have a shred of idealism to favor climate action.

It’s not surprising that Bernie Sanders said, rather emphatically, that he was not a friend of Kissinger’s.  Yet there was one issue where they did agree:  climate change. If there was one thing that Henry Kissinger stood for, it was the hard-headed “realist” view of foreign policy — a view that prioritizes national interest at …

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Not Just About the Climate

The benefits of the energy transition transcend climate.

The main reason to control carbon is to protect the climate. But cleaning up the energy system has plenty of other benefits. Those benefits will flow to people in rural areas as well as urban ones, to national security and international development, and to nature itself. To begin with, there are the health benefits of …

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Syria: The Wages of Climate Change

In considering the complex and painful question of whether to intervene in Syria, policymakers should take a close look at the memorandum published Monday on the Atlantic Monthly’s website by William R. Polk, a State Department Policy Planning Staff member during the Kennedy Administration.  I don’t agree with everything Polk says, but it is one …

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Should Environmentalists Worry About Chuck Hagel?

Reports out today indicate that within the next few days, President Obama will appoint former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel to succeed Leon Panetta as Defense Secretary.  Even though Hagel himself is a Republican, the GOP has already promised a fight, ostensibly on the entirely specious grounds that Hagel is anti-Israel. Hagel…hmmm…where have environmentalists heard that …

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