The Weekend Wonk: Susan Rice on Climate and Security October 16, 2015

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Speaking to an audience at Stanford, U.S. national security adviser Susan Rice called for global and U.S. action on climate change. Extreme weather is an urgent and growing threat to America’s security, contributing to warfare, refugee flows and conflicts over basic resources like food and water, said Rice, who is the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. It is especially challenging for less developed countries where resources are already scarce, she said. “Today, we face no greater long-term challenge than climate change,” said Rice, adding that it is not a distant problem that humanity can avoid tackling any longer. “The science is not up for debate.”

The threat to national and global security that climate change represents is invisible to climate deniers, when its not the subject of open ridicule. GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush opined recently that climate was not in his “top ten” list of security issues. But serious people in government and business know better. I recently posted the remarks of Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, to the Insurance group Lloyds of London, on climate change’s threat to the global economy.

Carney’s warning was seconded in a column in the so-very-not-greenpeace Financial Times.

Martin Wolf in the Financial Times:

Is the Bank of England right to take climate risks seriously? The answer is: absolutely. This would be true even if one were sceptical of the underlying science. Those who are engaged in making long-term decisions, including investors and businesses, must take the physical and policy risks into account. Their regulators, such as the BoE, have a duty to ensure they do. In an important speech, Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England, stated that climate entails a “tragedy of the horizon” in addition to the more familiar “tragedy of the commons”. The tragedy of the horizon arises because the likely effects lie beyond the time horizons of most decision makers. This is almost as true of businesses as of politicians. Yet the risks do exist. By the time they come true it may be too late. It is the job of regulators to help decision makers become aware of those risks.