“The Age of Consequences”

AP / Climate Affects Security

Climate change could be one of the greatest national security challenges ever faced by U.S. policy makers, according to a new joint study by two U.S. think tanks.

Center For American Progress: Global Warning - The Security Challenges of Climate Change (press release)

During the course of the past year, a high-level working group of foreign policy experts, climate scientists, historians, and other specialists has met regularly to investigate the national security and foreign policy implications of climate change. Many of the key findings of this task force, which was directed by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Center for a New American Security, are presented in the new report.

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• Intensifying intra- and inter-state competition for food, water, and other resources, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa.


• Heightened risk of state failure and regional conflagration.


• Increased U.S. border stress due to the severe effects of climate change in parts of Mexico and the Caribbean.


• Strain on the capacity of the United States—and in particular the U.S. military—to act as a “first responder” to international disasters and humanitarian crises due to their increased frequency, complexity, and danger.


• Growing demand for international institutions to play new and expanded roles in the management of refugee crises and in providing forums for the negotiation of climate agreements.

A War Game Supposes Scarce and Risky Oil

New York Times report from a role-playing game about US national security and oil dependency. Roles played by former White House staff.

The military advisers urged redeployment of the bulk of America’s naval and air power to the Persian Gulf in anticipation of war, and urged reinstatement of the draft for young men and women.

Australian man killed in water-rage attack

A man has been charged with murder in Australia after an elderly man who was watering his garden was bashed to death in an apparent case of suburban water-rage.

Another frontier in Wars on Terror and Drugs

The US is currently pressuring a reluctant Afghan government for permission to do aerial spraying of poppy fields.

As heroin exports rise and battlefield successes become rarer, the US intends to start doing what they have been doing in Colombia for years: Carpet bombing the drug crop fields with Monsanto-made glyphosate, Roundup Ultra. What could seem like a win-win strategy has many darker sides to it though.

"Aerial spraying is a bad idea, first because the Afghans have to do the eradication if it is to avoid a backlash from farmers and play into the hands of Taliban propaganda. Western aircraft spraying Afghan fields doesn't look like the government is responsible. There are also bound to be charges that people's health or animals have been affected and there is sure to be collateral damage to legal crops." - European counter-narcotics official in the Telegraph article

Read Telegraph / US officials push to spray Afghan drug crops, thepeoplesvoice.org/ United States to begin Chemical Warfare operations in Afghanistan.

So, how has the Chemical War on Drugs fared in Colombia? Well, most biologically interesting is the appearance of a glyphosate resistant - "Roundup Ready" - variety of the coca bush (source: Wired, Wikipedia)! And yes, there has been reports of health problems in farmer populations and damage to legal crops. One lengthy, thorough and critical look at Plan Colombia is CorpWatch.org's Toxic Drift: Monsanto and the Drug War in Colombia (2001). From that article:

"The twelve indigenous peoples have been suffering under this plague as if it were a government decree to exterminate our culture and our very survival. Our legal crops -- our only sustenance -- manioc, banana, palms, sugar cane, and corn have been fumigated. Our sources of water, creeks, rivers, lakes, have been poisoned, killing our fish and other living things. Today, hunger is our daily bread. In the name of the Amazonian Indigenous people I ask that the fumigations be immediately suspended." - José Francisco Tenorio.

Of course, there is also a lot of information on Wikipedia: see entries Plan Colombia and Coca eradication.

A short, short summary is billions of tax payer's money have been spent, wide stretches of Colombian biosphere scorched, coca production is up, cocaine prices are down and abuse on the rise, the civil war is still raging and the Monsanto stock price is up and climbing. Of course, each of these results have been influenced by numerous factors, not just Roundup. But personally I fail to see the big success worth copying.

Experts: Climate change threatens peace

"Climate change is and will be a significant threat to our national security and in a larger sense to life on Earth as we know it to be"

- retired Gen. Gordon R. Sullivan, former U.S. Army chief of staff.

"[climate change] could potentially destabilize the geopolitical environment, leading to skirmishes, battles, and even war due to resource constraints."

- Pentagon report.