Rove attacks Obama for addressing security issues Bush ignored
Media Matters reports that ‘On Fox News, Karl Rove criticized President Obama for elevating climate change as a national security concern.’ I’ll repost their debunking below, but first here is an extended excerpt from a September 2008, Washington Post article that makes abundantly clear that the intelligence community figured out in the Bush administration that global warming was ‘a serious security threat for the coming decades’:
An intelligence forecast being prepared for the next president on future global risks envisions a steady decline in U.S. dominance in the coming decades, as the world is reshaped by globalization, battered by climate change, and destabilized by regional upheavals over shortages of food, water and energy.
The report, previewed in a speech by Thomas Fingar, the U.S. intelligence community’s top analyst, also concludes that the one key area of continued U.S. superiority — military power — will ‘be the least significant’ asset in the increasingly competitive world of the future, because ‘nobody is going to attack us with massive conventional force.’
… The 2025 report will lay out what Fingar called the ‘dynamics, the dimensions, the drivers’ that will shape the world for the next administration and beyond. In advance of its completion, intelligence officials have begun briefing the major presidential candidates on the security threats that they would be likely to face in office. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) received an initial briefing Sept. 2….
The predicted shift toward a less U.S.-centric world will come at a time when the planet is facing a growing environmental crisis, caused largely by climate change, Fingar said. By 2025, droughts, food shortages and scarcity of fresh water will plague large swaths of the globe, from northern China to the Horn of Africa.
For poorer countries, climate change ‘could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back,’ Fingar said, while the United States will face ‘Dust Bowl’ conditions in the parched Southwest. He said U.S. intelligence agencies accepted the consensual scientific view of global warming, including the conclusion that it is too late to avert significant disruption over the next two decades. The conclusions are in line with an intelligence assessment produced this summer that characterized global warming as a serious security threat for the coming decades.
Floods and droughts will trigger mass migrations and political upheaval in many parts of the developing world.
So it is absurd for Rove to attack Obama for accepting the intelligence community’s science-based assessment. The fact is the Bush administration was too blinded by ideology to accept the science and understand the grave risks of inaction.