A Tale of Two Policies: Climate Change, Trump, and the US Military

Jan 19, 2018 | Sean Mowbray
View Original

The U.S. government appears to be of two minds, with utterly opposing worldviews, on climate change policy. On one hand, the Trump Administration has pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement, has proposed eliminating three vital new climate satellites, reneged on an Obama era $2 billion commitment to the Green Climate Fund, and wants to slash funding to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency domestic climate programs and State Department USAID climate programs around the globe. The President has also denounced global warming as a hoax and a Chinese plot. On the other hand, the Republican-dominated Congress has affirmed that climate change is a prominent national security threat and mandated that the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) look closely at how climate change is going to affect key installations, while also addressing the need to boost the military’s finances considerably to deal with global warming threats. When Trump’s National Security Strategy – announced in January – erased climate change as a threat to U.S. security, that decision drew the ire of a bipartisan group of congressional legislators.