Clinton Global Initiative

"Promoting Prosperity with Climate Change Policy"

Climate Change Policy in the United States

Video received July 10, 2006
(Transcript begins after introduction of panel)

PRESIDENT JOSÉ MARÍA FIGUERES: General Clark, your leadership is widely recognized in many, many fields, and of course one in which you are an absolute expert is in the field of national security. What are the linkages between climate change and national security? And if we were to continue on the course on which we now are, what would be the unintended consequences in terms of a national security policy?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, thank you very much for the question, President Figueres. Let me just say how pleased I am to be here in this group and on this panel, especially with Senator Clinton. We go back to the 1980s in talking about the Mediterranean Basin. And I remember ecological discussions there.

But President Figueres and I ... when you were the President of Costa Rica and I was the Commander in Chief for the Southern Command, we had a conference down in Bariloche, Argentina. And I flew down on an aircraft one afternoon with Senator Bob Graham and his wife. And we flew down the ... we landed in Peru, we refueled and we flew down the coast. And we looked at the Andes Mountains from the west as the sun was setting. It was absolutely spectacular.

And you know, the Andes are very, very high. Much higher than the Rockies. They're 18, 19, 22,000 foot peaks. And then, we noticed that most of these peaks had no snowfall. None. And we were just coming out of the southern hemisphere's winter. And that's when I first began to take very seriously the discussions of global warming. Because before you see it, it looks academic.

We were at conferences. We went around South America which seems to have been affected more quickly, even than North America. And we learned about the impact of global warming and the ozone hole and the ultraviolet radiation in places like Uruguay, where people were warned not to be on the beach during daylight, during noon, between 11 and 2 p.m., because of extreme ultraviolet due to the movement of the ozone hole over Uruguay.

And when you see these things, you realize that man made conditions do impact the environment and how we live. So I take global warming very seriously. And if you look at all the scientific projections on where it's headed, you have to view the consequences of it as potentially so severe, it has to be considered a national security problem. There's just no other way to deal with it.

And we've probably discussed this in previous panels, but there are two possible scenarios. There's a gradual change and there's the abrupt change scenario. But one of those two scenarios is almost certain to happen, because carbon stays suspended in the atmosphere for a hundred years or more. And so even if the United States right now were to adopt to something akin to Kyoto, we would have the effects with us and carried forward for a century or more.

So global warming is not likely to be reversed ... the question is, through the right policies, can we slow its pace? Can we cause it to be more gradual and can we avoid an abrupt climate change which results in something like the thermohaline circulating current in the North Atlantic shutting down and plunging western Europe into much colder and dryer weather conditions?

So whether you subscribe to the slow and gradual model or the abrupt change model, there are profound implications that you can see coming our way. And I look at three of them. First of all, there's displacement. If water levels rise in the gradual model over the next hundred years by less than a meter, a hundred million people living in low lying areas around the world are going to have to move. They're going to be affected.

And if you consider that the rise in ocean temperatures with global warming affects the severity of storms, then you get some appreciation that it's much more severe than simply gradually each year, the water goes up a half inch. These are catastrophic storm potentials the likes of which we're just starting to experience. So Katrina would be not a once in a hundred years storm, but a once in five years storm. And it wouldn't be just on the gulf coast of the United States. It could be in the Pacific. It could be in southeast Asia or elsewhere. So it's the displacement of people.

Gradual warming also means that rainfall patterns change. So the Pacific northwest gets drier. In Alaska, there are forest fires. Agriculture suffers. People can't ... especially in the lesser developed countries, they can sustain the traditional living patterns. They're going to move. So populations shift and move. That causes national security concerns for governments.

Then beyond the displacements, you have the potential for these catastrophes like Katrina. Now, we had to pull troops out of Iraq to come home to help. National Guard troops. And it wasn't just the numbers of the troops. It was these two brigades, Mississippi and Louisiana brigades ... those brigades had practiced for the kinds of civil emergencies that actually occurred, and then they were in Iraq, so the state didn't have their leadership.

It wasn't can you produce another 4,000 troops. You could have. But you couldn't produce the command control and the experienced leadership that had been through this. So when you have a catastrophe, the first thing you need is command and control. And that command and control is extraordinary. It's not what you have every day in place because nations can't afford it. And the place you get it is from the armed forces.

And you need manpower. And you can't have standing levees of people who are waiting for disasters. At least we haven't found it affordable to do so. And the place where you get them, then is the National Guard and the reserves. And this impacts national security.

And if you want to do this right in the recovery from a catastrophe, you have to prepare for it and practice for it and exercise for it. And so it means you've got to devote the same kind of attention to this response that in the Cold War, we might have had the President and the Secretary of Defense exercising what would happen if there was a sudden alert and there was a warning that Russian missiles were on the way to the United States.

Wouldn't it have been better if President Bush and the Homeland Security Secretary and the Secretary of Defense and maybe the Secretary of State had sat together and presented this scenario and run through these experiences, and say, "Well, how do we get in touch? How do we call the Governor? What does the Governor need? How do we know how much the Governor needs? How does the Governor know that? How do we communicate with him? How many hotlines do we have? Does it need to be secure? What public affairs pronouncements do we have?"

This all has to be worked out not on paper in advance by young staff people. It has to be worked out by experienced leaders who are going through practical exercises. It's the way we built the United States Armed Forces, the Department of Defense. It's the way we do our planning for national security. And what I'm suggesting is if we don't do this in preparation for climactic catastrophes like Katrina, we're always going to be disturbed by the response. It takes the right organization and structure and it takes dedicated exercise. And you can't get it unless you call it a national security problem. And the third thing ... and it is a national security problem, because it takes national security resources.

And the third thing, of course, is as a consequence of global warming, whether it's gradual or abrupt, you will change agriculture. You'll change fisheries. You'll change water flows. Nations will find they have different resources available. And those resource needs and migrant flows and other things will cause tensions and changes in alliances and border controls and problems and issues.

So we've got to work these impacts of climate change as national security problems. I'm all in favor of trying to prevent climate change. But I guess the bottom line of my message would be that it's going to be with us no matter how much we do. We can ameliorate the impact, but we've got to start right now thinking about it. And so you've got to promote sustainable development.

You've got to organize internationally so you can smooth out international flows. And you've got to take in the United States a national security approach to dealing with the consequences of climate change. Thank you.

(Applause)

Question and Answer Session

FIGUERES: General Clark. Should a US climate change policy provide incentives for the construction of nuclear power plants?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, here's the perfect case to illustrate what Senator Clinton is just talking about. Because when you put a nuclear power plant in, there are two things that you're producing that impact the public, other than power. One of them is risk. And no matter what you do with nuclear power, there is always some inherent degree of risk that's different than let's say, a natural gas fired power plant.

And secondly, you're producing a byproduct. A radioactive waste which lasts for tens of thousands of years, and which we still haven't quite figured out how to encapsulate and store safely without further environmental damage. So I would be in favor of continuing to work nuclear energy. It's already there. We're producing these waste products now and we know we can make it safer.

But you've got to put it in a larger context. So you've got to look at the overall systems problems and cost, risk, radioactive waste. And you've got to compare nuclear energy against the renewable sources of energy like wind and solar and wave energy, which are already practical, which can be used, and which I would personally prefer to see us put our first incentives there. Because there, we can get a huge slug of energy for much less social byproduct cost than with nuclear.

(Applause)

FIGUERES: Now, here's a question that kind of contradicts what we had already agreed upon in the previous session, which is that the US should take the lead. And the question is the following: Should the US wait to establish mandatory greenhouse gas emission limits if both China and India establish such limits?

SENATOR HILLARY CLINTON: No.

FIGUERES: No?

CLINTON: No. (Laughter) However, let me quickly follow up by saying that there is, in my view, an unlikely political prospect of the United States taking adequate action, let alone whatever the maximum amount of action that our political system could permit, unless there is some process by which one would see China, India and other developing countries begin to be part of some international agreement.

Now, Kyoto's time frame is till about I guess 2012, when its authorized limits begin to, I guess, end, I guess is the easiest way to say it. It's a complicated process. But in any event, I would hope that our government, perhaps in conjunction with others, would begin right now a second process. We need an international process. We frankly need to give the current American administration a way to save face by getting into another process. And that process will include China, India, Indonesia, Philippines, others who are you know, increasing their greenhouse gas emissions as they increase their economic output.

And so I think the United States should not wait. We should be responsible. We should take action. But I would like to see it within the context of a process where we would be bringing in other countries that are now and going to continue to be major players in this area.

FIGUERES: General Clark?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Can I just second what Senator is saying? Because what you can see in the United States dialogue over the last four or five years is we've been necking down (sic) the breadth of our dialogue to very narrow economic issues or terrorism. And especially, this is true in dealing with APEC. We've lost the broad vision that we had during the previous administration on dealing with issues in Asia. And we need to get that broad vision back and I think working on a second Kyoto protocol ...

CLINTON: (Overlap) Well, probably something else.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: ... would be a way ... something else? (Laughter) Would be a great way to do it. But I think, you know, the best way to make it understandable to the American people is again, we've got to think about climate change. It's not something that belongs ... it's not an EPA problem. It's really a national security problem.

And if we can label it that way and make it understandable, we can remove it from the EPA and make it much bigger and broader for Americans.

(Applause)

FIGUERES:: Well, certainly some innovative and creative responses here. General Clark, sir, should we go to you first for comments on these?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: I think these are all very helpful. But let me say first, if there's just one thing that you would take from what I'm trying to contribute up here, it's this: That for all that we're trying to do to remediate the carbon that's in the atmosphere right now and to prevent an acceleration of global warming, we still have global warming right now. And we have to deal with the consequences.

And we need to be preparing our government organizations, our command and control, our exercise programs to deal with the effects of the climate change that's already on us. So all of these recommendations more or less relate to restraining further increases in greenhouse gases. And there's some great recommendations in there. But can you please help raise the awareness that we've got to get really serious about dealing with the consequences of the weather and the migrant flows and the other things that are national security impacts, not just preventing a worsening of global warming.

I'd like to just focus on transportation for a second. Because if you look at transportation, it is one of the toughest areas to get a grip on. Americans love their cars. Cars are not distributed in proportion to income. Lots of people who don't have very much income need their transportation. Lots of people in my part of the country drive a long way to work every day. And when people have that raise in gasoline tax and stuff, there's got to be some way to make that not so regressive in its impact.

So we really need to focus on cafe standards, raising cafe standards. We really need to make sure that those who are least advantaged in society don't bear the brunt of the burden in fixing the transportation usages. We need to look, in addition to cars and trucks ... we need to be looking at aircraft. Because aircraft are a tremendous contributor to global warming, and it's going to increase in recent years.

So I think it's appropriate to ask government to take strong measures like the measures that are illustrated in here. And I hope we'll be able to get the political head of steam up to do it.

FIGUERES: Thank you, sir.

(Applause)