ARTICLE: Pentagon faces a battle on climate change, By John Podesta and Peter Ogden, Financial Times, February 13 2008 18:47
An example of the weird, weak arguments for trying to militarize the climate change debate.
By this reasoning, why not have the Pentagon lobby a position on HIV programs, development aid, or the Doha round--all far more impactful?
The Pentagon doesn't need some clear USG position on global warming to plan for contingencies. We know where fragile states are and they were fragile before global warming and they won't be made solid by an effective response to global warming.
Articles like this are just causes in search of constituencies, like the "genocide Olympics" movement. Unable to get movement from desired parties, activists start searching farther afield, so now it's, "Why isn't the Pentagon making a U.S. stance on global warming happen?" And that's plain goofy.
You can't generate political will on that basis. You just sound frantic and alarmist.
Global warming doesn't cause weak states. No simplistic causal reasoning captures that process or that cure. Nor will you get Americans to care about global warming because it's one small bit of the many reasons why Africans kill Africans, because Americans--and everybody else--have long demonstrated a resistance to such guilt-tripping and fear-as-motivation techniques.
You gotta sell on the good they can do and their own self-interest; same with the military and reform toward SysAdmin capabilities.
Give people a positive vision to achieve and stop this weak, overly-deterministic fear-mongering.
it simply does not connect.
"Bad! Bad dog!" is not a grand strategy.
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