By Nick Simeone, AFPS
WASHINGTON, May 3, 2012 – Climate and environmental change are emerging as national security threats that weigh heavily in the Pentagon’s new strategy, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta told an environmental group last night.
“The area of climate change has a dramatic impact on national security,” Panetta said here at a reception hosted by the Environmental Defense Fund to honor the Defense Department in advancing clean energy initiatives. “Rising sea levels, severe droughts, the melting of the polar caps, the more frequent and devastating natural disasters all raise demand for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief,” Panetta said. [WOTN Editor comments in bold/brackets: These scenes have played out numerous times in movies and Al Gore sci-fi documentaries, but natural disasters continue to unaffected by man, and moderate compared to long-term geological records.]
Among other things, the convention would guarantee various aspects of passage and overflight for the U.S. military. Panetta urged his audience to use their influence to push for treaty ratification. “We are the only industrialized nation that has not approved that treaty,” he said. [The treaty would also give up significant American sovereignity.]
The secretary also said he has great concern about energy-related threats to homeland security that are not driven by climate change.
“I have a deep interest in working to try to ensure from a security perspective that we take measures that will help facilitate and maintain power in the event of an interruption of the commercial grid that could be caused, for example, by a cyber attack which is a reality that we have to confront,” he said.
Budget considerations compound the issue, the secretary said. The Defense Department spent about $15 billion on fuel for military operations last year. In Afghanistan alone, the Pentagon uses more than 50 million gallons of fuel each month on average. Combined with rising gas prices, this creates new budget issues for the department, Panetta said. [The cost of fuel in Afghanistan has increased significantly since the Obama Administration alienated Pakistani Allies to the point that they shut down transport through that country.]
“We now face a budget shortfall exceeding $3 billion because of higher-than-expected fuel costs this year,” he told the audience. [This is in part due to Obama Admin policies of paying more than $20/gallon for bio-diesels, rather than less than $4/gallon for standard fuels. When "clean energy" generation systems are deployed to Afghanistan, not only does the cost of fuel go up, but the amount of fuel and hence convoys to deliver also go up.]
Having grown up in pristine Monterey, Calif., Panetta said, he has a lifelong interest in protecting the nation’s resources. He pledged to continue to keep the Defense Department on the cutting edge in the push for clean energy and environmental friendly initiatives, a chief reason why the Environmental Defense Fund honored the department. [Under the current administration, DoD budgets have been shifted from purchasing warfighting equipment to purchasing "clean energy" systems at 20x the cost of energy production, with an expected lifespan that will not compensate for use of working generation systems.]
“In the next fiscal year, we are going to be investing more than a billion dollars in more efficient aircraft and aircraft engines, in hybrid electric drives for our ships, in improved generators, in microgrids for combat bases and combat vehicle energy-efficient programs,” he said. “We are investing another billion dollars to make our installations here at home more energy-efficient, and we are using them as the test bed to demonstrate next-generation energy technologies.” [Under Obama & Panetta, the DoD budget has been converted into a "green energy" subsidy which purchases systems at above market prices, for unproven systems, in order to benefit non-defense related industries.]
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