11 September 2006Augusta Free PressErik Curren
In the five years since Al-Qaeda terrorists flew jetliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Americans have learned that we are not isolated from the world's problems. Given modern air travel, angry young men suffering misery in a far corner of the world can bring a new kind of suffering right into the nerve centers of America.
As we dealt with the cleanup in New York and tried to support victims' families, we heard of more deadly attacks in Madrid and London and learned of foiled bombing plots around the world. We learned to shrug off elevated threat alerts, we grumbled about long lines at airport security, and we protested overzealous terror investigations with phone taps and library-checkout snooping that threatened our privacy and civil liberties.
At the same time, Americans began to take seriously another global threat to our peace, our freedom and our way of life: global warming.
Scientists have been telling us since the late '80s that burning fossil fuels releases enough carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to warm the earth's climate to a dangerous level. But well-funded disinformation campaigns by the auto, oil, coal and electric utility industries kept Americans confused about global warming for more than a decade. And this worked to delay any real action.
In the last year, the fog has finally begun to lift. With the release of a couple best-selling books, a half dozen TV specials on major networks and Al Gore's documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," Americans now say in polls that they recognize that global warming is real, that it's caused by humans and that it's dangerous.
Now these two threats are coming together. Recently, some national-security experts have started saying that global warming could make terror attacks on the United States more likely in the future.
"Global Responses to Global Threats," a report put out by the Oxford Research Group in the U.K. in June, says that you can't stop terror attacks by killing or capturing terrorists or their leaders. That just creates martyrs. As long as the fundamental causes of terrorist anger are left to fester, then new suicide bombers and Bin Ladens will pop up to replace the old ones.
"Contemporary threats are often interconnected," says the report. "International terrorism or armed conflict cannot be dealt with in isolation from extreme poverty and environmental degradation."
This point is not new, but including the environment as a security issue enables us to see how global warming might make terrorism worse.
There are many ways that changes from global warming in various parts of the world might lead to civil unrest and a spillover into terrorism. Coastal flooding and shifting rainfall patterns are just two examples.
Scientists say that global warming could raise sea levels by three to five feet or, in a worst-case scenario with the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets collapsing, 20-40 feet. Nations including Bangladesh, Indonesia and the Philippines already host insurgencies connected to Al-Qaeda. If their low-lying coastal areas begin to flood as a result of sea-level rise, millions of refugees will stream into already crowded areas inland where people today already lack sufficient resources to live.
Refugee movements would create civil unrest and lead to local wars that could, in turn, lead to terror attacks abroad. If warring groups see the U.S. taking the role of the local authorities against them, then terrorists could strike American targets in revenge, as has already happened in the Middle East, where terrorists say that they hate America for bolstering unpopular governments like those of Saudi Arabia or Egypt.
In the Middle East, as long as the U.S. supports autocratic governments that sell us oil or assist us in the war on terror but repress their own people and refuse to address their own widening gap between rich and poor, angry groups will turn to extremists and terrorists to vent their rage.
With respect to oil conflict, global warming is a wildcard. It is unclear whether a global-warming solution that helped America reduce its demand for Middle Eastern oil would help or hurt the security situation there, which seems to depend, at least in the short term, on rule by unpopular governments bolstered by oil payments.
But before foreigners wanted oil out of the desert sands of Arabia, locals wanted water. Since they still do, water shortages worsened by global warming could tear the Middle East apart, according to the Oxford Research Group report.
" 'Water politics' already plays a part in conflict in some regions of the world, particularly the Middle East (where Israel, for example, has already taken action against Syria and Lebanon over supplies from the river Jordan). Demand for fresh water is well beyond that which can be sustained at current, much less, future levels."
While coastlines could flood from rising seas, in dry areas, global warming is generally predicted to bring less rain. In the Middle East, lower rainfall would reduce drawn-down water supplies even further. Crops could fail and natural ground cover could wither, yielding green land to creeping desertification.
Perhaps the most interesting conclusion of the Oxford Research Group report is not that terrorism could increase, but that compared with other threats, terrorism is not a major cause of death in the U.S. Most years in the past decade, fewer than 40 Americans died from terrorist attacks.
"Even in 2001," the report says, "which saw the highest death toll from international terrorism on record, the number of Americans killed was around 2,500. That number of innocent people killed is horrific, but in the same year in the United States 3,500 people died from malnutrition, 14,000 people died from HIV/AIDS, and 62,000 people died from pneumonia."
Perhaps surprisingly, the conservative Cato Institute agrees.
"Those adept at hyperbole like to proclaim that we live in 'the age of terror,' " said John Muller of Ohio State University in the fall 2004 issue of Cato's publication Regulation. "However, while obviously deeply tragic for those directly involved, the number of people worldwide who die as a result of international terrorism is generally only a few hundred a year, tiny compared to the numbers who die in most civil wars or from automobile accidents. In fact, in almost all years, the total number of people worldwide who die at the hands of international terrorists anywhere in the world is not much more than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States."
Cato's Muller calls for Americans to go beyond emotional reactions to dramatic terrorist attacks and consider the risk of attacks in context of the other risks of daily life, such as car accidents.
While agreeing on the need for unemotional analysis, the authors of the Oxford Research report come to a different conclusion, namely, that we should no longer view security issues in a vacuum. They say that instead of seeing terrorism as a purely military or intelligence problem, the U.S. government needs to start addressing the economic and environmental issues that go along with terrorism.
"Working on one of these issues in isolation from the other two no longer makes sense; measures are needed which simultaneously ensure environmental protection, sustainable development and global security."
Just think of the implications of this. If we recognized global warming as a national-security threat not only implicated in terrorism, but as a much clearer and more present danger than terror attacks, we could expect to see some big changes:
1. The Department of Homeland Security would apply some of $43 billion annual budget to solutions for global warming like helping automakers raise the average fuel efficiency of our nation's cars from 20 to 40 miles per gallon or even help build trains to reduce America's reliance on cars for getting around and trucks for shipping freight.
2. "Wanted Dead of Alive" posters for Osama bin Laden would be joined by flyers picturing CEOs of companies that sell energy-wasting products like the Hummer H2 and developers of suburban communities designed so that residents cannot walk anywhere, but instead have to drive even on short errands.
3. We could convert Guantanamo Bay from a hated prison to a world-class R&D center for transferring clean technology to the Middle East. Young people from the Islamic world would still be brought there, but not for interrogation and torture. Instead, they would come on scholarships to work with American scientists and entrepreneurs on business ideas to diversify the economies of oil-exporting nations and help to raise their citizens out of the soul-crushing poverty that sends them into the arms of extremists.
The double-whammy of environmental degradation from global warming in poor nations with fragile ecologies combined with a heavy-handed military response from U.S. client governments to any civil unrest is sure to create more young men angry at America - more Mohammad Attas and Khalid Sheik Mohammads.
Though it goes against traditional security planning, fighting global warming may actually be the most effective way to "drain the swamp" of potential terror supporters and suicide bombers, and give America a more lasting sense of security than any number of airport screeners, bomb-sniffing dogs and phone taps.
Erik Curren is a regular contributor to The Augusta Free Press. Curren is the author of Buddha’s Not Smiling: Uncovering Corruption at the Heart of Tibetan Buddhism Today. More information about Curren's works is available on-line at www.alayapress.com. The views expressed by op-ed writers do not necessarily reflect those of management of The Augusta Free Press.
