Earlier this month, the Obama administration released its latest blast on climate change: A cut-and-paste job from its own reports proclaiming that climate change has serious national security implications. This is embarrassingly shoddy stuff. But it’s shoddy for a reason.
Now, nothing says credibility like a pile of old federal reports. But these reports do seem like scary stuff: rising sea levels, wildfires, refugees, and a lot more. It reminds me of the scene in “Ghostbusters,” when Bill Murray tells the mayor that, if he doesn’t let the team go, dogs and cats will be living together.
But get serious. Just for the sake of it, I’m going to assume that climate change is really happening, and that it’s really caused by people. Even if that’s true, climate change still isn’t a national security issue.
Here’s why: National security problems aren’t caused by climate, changing or not. They’re caused by what people do. And people don’t do things because it’s getting hotter, or colder. They do things because of what they believe. The problem is never weather: It’s always ideology.
The White House’s report argues that climate change is “contributing”—note the weasel word—to “conflicts over basic resources like food and water.” There’s no evidence of this. But fundamentally, wars aren’t caused by natural resources like food, water, or even oil.
Did Japan decide to attack Pearl Harbor because it was running out of oil? No. It waged war because it believed that war was the way to get what it wanted. What drove Japan wasn’t a shortage of oil. It was a surplus of fanaticism.
Saying natural resources cause conflicts isn’t merely shallow. It’s wrong. It deprives people of their moral agency. It attributes the decisions they make to outside forces beyond their control. Like crime, wars are caused by people. Banks don’t cause bank robberies: Bank robbers cause bank robberies.
