Michelle Melton on Climate Change as a National Security Threat
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 17 April 2019
⏱️ 46 minutes
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Summary
Since November, Lawfare Contributor Michelle Melton has run a series on our website about Climate Change and National Security, examining the implication of the threat as well as U.S. and international responses to climate change. Melton is a student a Harvard Law school. Prior to that she was an associate fellow in the Energy and National Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where she focused on climate policy.
She and Benjamin Wittes sat down last week to discuss the series. They talked about why we should think about climate change as a national security threat, the challenges of viewing climate change through this paradigm, the long-standing relationship between climate change and the U.S. national security apparatus, and how climate change may affect global migration.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising. |
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| 0:22.0 | rational security, chatter, law fair no bull, and the aftermath. |
| 0:29.0 | If we think of climate change as a national security problem, |
| 0:37.0 | we might focus on the pollution of other countries rather than looking at what we have done. |
| 0:41.0 | And you really already see this quite clearly in the US with regards to developing countries like China and India. |
| 0:47.0 | We blame them. Look at how much China is polluting. |
| 0:50.0 | We can't do anything unless they do. |
| 0:52.0 | So we sort of have already started blaming them as if that's exculpatory for our own actions. |
| 0:56.0 | And second, when we think about climate change in a national security context, |
| 1:01.0 | we may tend to retrench into nationalism when we really do need an international solution to this problem. |
| 1:08.0 | And third, using the national security community to actually address climate change, |
| 1:14.0 | may be harmful to those institutions, as it likely requires them to undertake unfamiliar missions, |
| 1:19.0 | including domestic missions, which may erode sort of the wall that we have built up |
| 1:25.0 | in many places between especially the intelligence community and civil society domestically in the US. |
| 1:31.0 | I'm Michaela Fogel, and this is the Law Fair Podcast April 16, 2019. |
| 1:38.0 | Since November, Law Fair contributor Michelle Melton has run a series on our website |
| 1:43.0 | about climate change and national security, examining the implications of the threat, |
| 1:48.0 | as well as US and international responses to climate change. |
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