Kaine aims to help defend Hampton Roads military readiness with Climate Security Act

Daily Press (Newport News, VA)

March 13-- Mar. 13--From storm surge swamping the runway at Langley Air Force Base in Hampton to flooding at Naval Station Norfolk, Hampton Roads military installations have been battling climate change impacts for years.

Even the U.S. Department of Defense has called climate change a "threat multiplier" that imperils military readiness here and around the globe.

But, as the Trump administration continues to question and even deny the risks posed by a changing climate, 11 Senate Democrats are co-sponsoring a bill they say is intended to keep politics out of climate science.

The Climate Security Act of 2019 would establish a "climate security envoy" within the State Department, outline how climate change data and forecasting should inform security planning, and re-establish the Special Envoy for the Arctic, a region of rapid ice melt rapidly turning into an international security challenge.

Virginia senator and co-sponsor Tim Kaine said the measure offers the new Congress the chance to "make combating climate change a core foreign policy priority."

"This bill," said Kaine, "improves our ability to address the impacts of climate change on our national security assets -- both abroad and at home -- where sea level rise is threatening military bases like Naval Station Norfolk."

Senators say their measure is especially timely given recent reports that climate change denier and National Security Council Senior Director William Happer is working on an executive order for President Donald Trump to reassess the threats posed by climate change.

Happer, an atomic physicist, is an outspoken critic of "climate change cult" scientists who claim carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels are harming the planet. He has argued that CO2 helps crops grow more efficiently and better withstand drought.

Speaking at a 2015 conference organized by the Heartland Institute, a libertarian public policy think tank, Happer said, "We've got to push back vigorously on the demonization of fossil fuels -- they're not demons at all, they're enormous servants to us."

He also said he agrees that burning fossil fuels does produce real pollutants such as oxides of sulfur and nitrogen, fly ash and heavy metals and he fully supports controlling those.

But CO2 itself is not a pollutant, he said, and stopping the use of fossil fuels to limit those emissions "would be a profoundly immoral and irrational policy."

Last week, 58 former national security and senior military leaders sent a letter to Trump noting the near-total consensus among climate scientists and expressing "deep concern" by reports that National Security Council members are considering forming a panel "to dispute and undermine military and intelligence judgments on the threat posed by climate change."

"Imposing a political test on reports issued by the science agencies and forcing a blind spot onto the national security assessments that depend on them will erode our national security," the letter reads.

"We spent our careers pledged to protect the United States from all threats, including this one."

Signers include former Secretary of State John Kerry, former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, former Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus and former NASA Administrator and retired Vice Adm. Richard Truly.

Outside of Louisiana, Hampton Roads is considered the region in the U.S. most vulnerable to sea level rise. Not only is the Atlantic warming and expanding, but the land here is sinking from groundwater extraction and a geological effect known as post-glacial rebound.

As a result, Hampton Roads communities, military bases and federal assets such as NASA Langley Research Center, sited along the Back River in Hampton, and NASA Wallops on the Eastern Shore are scrambling to adapt.

Co-sponsors of the Senate bill contend that climate change is an existential threat to national, social and economic security and urge that high-level diplomats focus on "solving the planetary emergency we are in."

"We have ceded global leadership on climate at the same time the president has put a climate denier in charge of a bogus White House panel," said Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii.

Other bill co-sponsors are Bob Menendez and Cory Booker of New Jersey, Ben Cardin of Maryland, Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Chris Coons of Delaware, Tom Udall of New Mexico, Chris Murphy of Connecticut, Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Jeff Merkley of Oregon.