Via Current.com/Green (which is filling up with dumb asses so I can’t really recommend it) I noticed Treehugger had an article about one “Abu Muqawama” at Center for a New American Security posting the US Department of Defense’s Quadrennial Defense Review 2010. Scroll to pages 107-111, chapter “DoD’s Approach to Climate and Energy”, in the embedded PDF. (Whew!)
“climate change, energy security, and economic stability are inextricably linked.
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climate-related changes are already being observed in every region of the world, including the United States and its coastal waters
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Assessments conducted by the intelligence community indicate that climate change could have significant geopolitical impacts around the world, contributing to poverty, environmental degradation, and further weakening of fragile governments. Climate change will contribute to food and water scarcity, will increase the spread of disease, and may spur or exacerbate mass migration.
While climate change alone does not cause conflict, it may act as an accelerant of instability or conflict, placing a burden to respond on civilian institutions and militaries around the world. In addition, extreme weather events may lead to increased demands for defense support to civil authorities for humanitarian assistance or disaster response both within the United States and overseas.
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To support cooperative engagement in the Arctic, DoD strongly supports accession to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.”
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Energy efficiency can serve as a force multiplier, because it increases the range and endurance of forces in the field and can reduce the number of combat forces diverted to protect energy supply lines, which are vulnerable to both to both asymmetric and conventional attacks and disruptions.
There is nothing new about military assessments of climate change risks. Click the military tag for starters. Not sure I posted Australian military warns of climate conflict yet though…
“Environmental stress, caused by both climate change and a range of other factors, will act as a threat multiplier in fragile states around the world, increasing the chances of state failure. This is likely to increase demands for the ADF to be deployed on additional stabilisation, post-conflict reconstruction and disaster relief operations in the future. […] Climate change is unlikely to increase the risk of major conflict, although there is one exception: The Arctic is melting, potentially making the extraction of undersea energy deposits commercially viable. Conflict is a remote possibility if these disputes are not resolved peacefully. […] From a defence planning perspective, we don’t know how quickly these changes will occur, exactly what their impact will be, or how states and societies will react […] Nevertheless, climate change may affect security by increasing stress on fragile states, state and societal competition for resources, environmental threats to ADF infrastructure and increasing the frequency and severity of extreme weather events.”
There was actually one interesting link in one of the comments in one of the “meta” blogs delivering this: Solazyme To Develop Algae Fuels for US Navy. Very much related to my earlier The military – green or black? and to this gallery of 10 eco-friendly UAVs surveilling the heights with a clean conscience.