Latest in Climate Change and Security
On Jan. 20, President Joe Biden signed an executive order entitled, “Protecting Public Health and the Environment and Restoring Science to Tackle the Climate Crisis.” It establishes the Biden administration’s commitment to immediately work to confront both the causes and impacts of climate change by implementing policy guided by science.
President-elect Biden is expected to initiate the process of rejoining the Paris Agreement on Inauguration Day. But the hard part will be coming up with a quantitative statement of how and by how much U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases will be reduced over time.
As the White House’s tariffs on steel and aluminum have shown, a U.S. president has all the authority he or she needs to impose a carbon border tax.
In a perfect world, the historic policy and economic changes made to adapt to the pandemic would move the world forward into a future prepared to combat the climate crisis.
Mentioning Greenland may invite laughs about President Trump’s rash interest in purchasing the island. Joking, however, overlooks the significant impact that Greenland will have on U.S. interests within the next decade.
Mid-January rains have quenched the seared Australian landscape, but the world is just beginning to come to terms with the consequences of the blazes—and what the future of fire season may hold.
Addressing the national and international economic effects of climate change has become crucial to the Fed’s mission.
During the U.N. General Assembly meeting in mid-September, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the international body for assessing climate science, released its Special Report on Oceans and the Cryosphere. The report provides the most detailed scientific review of how the world’s oceans and cryosphere—the frozen part of the planet—are responding to climate change. The results are not looking good.
For decades, China was reluctant to deem climate change a national security issue, preferring instead to view it through the lens of development. The driving concern behind China’s reticence was sovereignty; Beijing feared that crisis rhetoric about climate change would be used to legitimate interventionist actions on the part of Western powers, including forcing Beijing to curtail its economic growth.
The modern economy is built on an international transportation infrastructure that is largely invisible to the consumer. Nearly every banality of modern life, from the clothes people wear to the out-of-season food they eat, is possible only because goods can move easily by air and sea across vast distances, at a low cost.