Austin Calls ‘Climate Crisis’ a ‘Profoundly Destabilizing Force’ in the World

April 23 , 2021 (EIRNS)—U.S. military operations, influenced and informed by the intentional misdirection of British intelligence, have directly killed 1-2 million people—maybe more—in Southwest Asia and North Africa over the last 30 years, and millions more indirectly, through simultaneously driving several of these countries into complete chaos and misery. Now, updating the older “PNAC” (Project for a New American Century) post-1989/91 “global hegemon” rationale for full spectrum dominance through perpetual war, is the use of the phony climate change as the pretext for war in the service of the “right to protect the planet.” Now, if something is not China/Russia’s fault, it’s the fault of climate change. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin stood up in front of the “Climate Change Summit” on April 22 and declared: “Today, no nation can find lasting security without addressing the climate crisis. We face all kinds of threats in our line of work, but few of them truly deserve to be called existential. The climate crisis does. ... Climate change is making the world more unsafe and we need to act.”

“The climate crisis is a profoundly destabilizing force for our world. As the Arctic melts, competition for resources and influence in the region increases. Closer to the Equator, rising temperatures and more frequent and intense extreme weather events in Africa and Central America threaten millions with drought, hunger, and displacement.” It’s a neat cover for the combined effects of U.S./NATO military campaigns and 50 years of neoliberal economics that have denied these countries their sovereign rights to economic development.

But the climate change hysteria is not separate from geopolitics. A separate story on the Department of Defense’s “Climate Action Team,” published by the DOD newsroom earlier in the day, makes that clear. “Joe Bryan, the DOD senior climate advisor, said that these impacts of climate change affect training and installations and are one of the driving factors for humanitarian crises globally,” the DOD story reports. “Climate change also factors into geopolitical and economic issues,” Bryan said. “With the ice in the Arctic Ocean melting, for example, China and Russia are looking to exploit the area both economically and militarily, and the Pentagon must develop a sound plan for how it responds. The National Defense Strategy recognizes that the U.S. is under a variety of threats, including climate change,” he said. Bryan, a special assistant to Austin, is a long time “clean energy” and decarbonization advocate.