Right Angle: Ostriches don’t bury their heads

At the time of writing this, floods in Texas claimed 131 lives, very high for super-developed countries. Unusual floods and flash floods have become regular on all continents. Experts link these extreme events with intensive rain caused by changing weather patterns, and mindless engineering, ignoring hydrology. Interestingly, a far-right conspiracy theory came alive blaming cloud seeding as the reason for the Texas flood, an attempt to rule out climate change. By now, erudite meteorologists have debunked this theory.

On May 29, Pew Research Centre published the result of a new survey among US citizens on their perception of experiencing extreme weather events and its link to climate change. But they tabulated the result by comparing perceptions between Republican and Democrat supporters. For instance, 43 per cent of Republican respondents recognised that their community experienced ‘severe weather, like floods or intense storms’ as opposed to 53 per cent of Democrat respondents. More interestingly, among those who recognised these extreme weather events, 97 per cent of Democrats linked them to climate change as opposed to 63 per cent of Republicans. We are not surprised. It comes from the top as a doctrine of denial.

The root of this denial has gone too deep into the US system of governance.

I was glued to a live stream of the Senate intelligence committee hearing on March 25. I find these Senate hearings a brilliant post-dinner entertainment as we do not have such drama in our houses. This hearing was especially interesting as the SignalGate got public the day before. A scandal where big powerful boys [used as a gender-neutral term] of US defence and foreign policy were chatting about hitting a Houthi leader in Yemen, including details about the operation, weapon and location of the leader. It was a group chat in Signal! Moreover, I liked watching Tulsi Gabbard fielding pointed questions from the knowledgeable members of the committee. She looked like a mischievous class monitor, defending her mischievous classmates from the school principal.

But this hearing was not about SignalGate. This was Tulsi Gabbard, the US Director of National Intelligence (DNI) presenting the Annual Threat Assessment Report to the Senate Intelligence Committee, lovingly called the ATA Report. Every year, the DNI assesses US security vulnerability after compiling inputs from all units of the US intelligence community.

The juicy Q&A over SignalGate suddenly got interrupted by a question from Angus King, the independent senator from Maine. Quick research tells us that King was an independent Governor of Maine (1995-2003), an impressive feat in a two-party scenario. A law graduate and practising lawyer who founded a company in 1989 to develop projects to conserve electrical energy. He also started a wind energy company in 2007. Angus King had a pointed question for Tulsi Gabbard.

“One note… that surprised me… I’ve been on this committee; this is my 13th year. Every single one of these reports that we have had has mentioned global climate change as a significant national security threat, except this one. Has something happened? Has global climate change been solved? Why is that not in this report, and who made the decision that it should not be in the report when it has been in every one of the 11 prior reports?” King asked.

Gabbard, who hails from Hawaii and is a regular surfer, must be well aware of climate change and its implications. She fielded the question with “I can’t speak to the decisions made previously. But this annual threat assessment has been focused very directly on the threats that we deem most critical to the United States’ international security.”

King was insisting on finding out who decided to ignore climate change as an international security threat. In fact, he asked if the report had reached the Select Committee on Intelligence via White House. It is interesting that the 2019 ATA Report, during the first term of Trump administration, very clearly mentioned that climate change will cause mass migration, famine, dislocation and political violence. But Trump’s world has changed significantly in the second term, where if you deny climate change, you also deny adversities arising out of climate change.

The Council on Strategic Risks, a DC-based non-partisan and non-profit on security issues, said in a rejoinder the next day, “Omitting warnings of the security risks posed by climate change means the US national security community is operating with a blind spot, putting the country at risk.” The think tank pointed out that the section on the Russian threat in the Arctic region did not even mention climate change and glacier melting as a threat to instability and geopolitical competition in the region.

The ATA Report 2009, presented in March, mentioned climate change as a security threat for the first time. In the initial years, the threat was largely confined to issues related to energy and water. But the report also identified multilateral negotiations on climate change as an emerging issue within the traditional security narrative. In March 2009, the report predicted, “the United States will come under increasing pressure to join the international community in setting meaningful long-term goals for emissions reductions, to reduce its own emissions, and to help others mitigate and adapt to climate change through technological progress and financial assistance.” Curiously, nine months later during CoP15, Barack Obama took the US into the multilateral negotiations through the controversial Copenhagen Accord that rewrote the Kyoto Protocol. More curiously, two months later, while presenting the ATA Report 2010, Dennis Blair, the then DNI made the narrative of CoP15 as compiled by the US intelligence community, ‘classified’. What happened in Copenhagen, behind the scenes?

Before the denial this year, threats from climate change as a global security issue evolved every year in ATA Reports. They pointed out crises due to biodiversity loss, food production, water stress, along with conflicts around 50 per cent of the world’s river basins, increasing poverty and human dislocation. One report rounded up all of these with an ominous conclusion: “Domestic policy responses to such issues will become more difficult—especially for democracies—as publics become less trusting of authoritative information sources.”

The future is here. Last October, during the killer flood in Valencia that claimed more than 225 lives, an epic online campaign urged the Spanish people to overthrow the Pedro Sanchez government for its failure to protect citizens. Graphika, a US security firm, found the campaign originated from China, faking a Spanish non-profit, Safeguard Defenders. A similar disinformation campaign of fearmongering about breached floodwalls took place in Poland last September during severe floods, originating from Russia and Belarus.

A big change in the US governance system is clear in recent times. The US intelligence community used to be relatively honest in the past and reported threats factually. It was up to the political dispensation to decide which way they acted. Climate change will alter social, economic and political stabilities. The US will be harmed, and the world will be harmed too. The Trump administration has taken climate denial to a suicidal level. It may be fashionable to behave like an ostrich, but ostriches don’t bury their head in reality.