Burn it all down governance

The Navy has quietly stood down its Task Force Climate Change, created in 2009 to plan and develop "future public, strategic, and policy discussions" on the issue.

The task force ended in March, a spokesperson said, and the group's tab on the Navy's energy, environment and climate change website was removed sometime between March and July, according to public archives.

There is still a climate change link in the lower right corner of the site that led, at last check, to an empty page titled "Climate Change Fact Sheets."

Since it started, the TFCC released several reports on the strategic challenge climate change poses, taking a close look at what the melting Arctic means for strategic planning, and the dangers sea-level rise and extreme weather pose to many naval installations.

Alice Hill, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and former senior director for resilience on the National Security Council under President Obama, said she created a Department of Homeland Security task force modeled on the one created by the Navy.

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In an email, the Navy spokesperson said the TFCC was ended because its processes are "now duplicative as functions have been transitioned to existing business processes; therefore, the original components of the task force are no longer needed."

  EE News

The DHS under Trump is going to seriously address climate change? And I'm the king of the world.

[Retired Navy Rear Adm. Jon White, who ran TFCC from 2012 to 2015, said] he sees "little evidence" that the task force's work has been fully incorporated into the Navy's decisionmaking process.

"Across all of [the Department of Defense], it is hard for me to see that climate change is taken as seriously at it should be," said White, who is currently president of the Consortium for Ocean Leadership. "The task force ended, in my opinion, without full incorporation of climate change considerations."

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White said he is "suspicious" of how quietly the TFCC shut down, something that even he, as a former director, only heard about "third and fourth hand" as more of a rumor than actual fact.

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"It's consistent with the patterns we've seen: Efforts with the title 'climate change' have either been suspended or renamed," Hill said.

"By not mentioning climate change, we are signaling the events that we're experiencing now, the impacts, are not something that immediately needs to be attended to and planned for," she added.

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"It all goes back to the White House," White said. "That's what changed, the White House," he added.

White said the president's insistence that climate change is not a national security threat has led to a culture in Navy leadership where people either do not care enough about the matter or they are too afraid for their careers to fight for climate considerations.

"They don't want to get targeted by the administration; it's a battle they don't want to fight," he said.

It's amazing how many moral cowards are in high positions in this coutry.

Ten years ago, I left my job as a tenured university professor to work as an intelligence analyst for the federal government, primarily in the State Department but with an intervening tour at the National Intelligence Council. My focus was on the impact of environmental and climate change on national security, a growing concern of the military and intelligence communities.

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I always appreciated the apolitical nature of the work. Our job in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research was to generate intelligence analysis buttressed by the best information available, without regard to political considerations. And although I was uncomfortable with some policies of the Trump administration, no one had ever tried to influence my work or conclusions.

That changed last month, when the White House blocked the submission of my bureau’s written testimony on the national security implications of climate change to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The stated reason was that the scientific foundation of the analysis did not comport with the administration’s position on climate change.

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Perhaps most important, this written testimony on a critical topic was never entered into the official record.

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After an extended exchange between officials at the White House and the State Department, at the 11th hour I was permitted to appear at the hearing and give a five-minute summary of the 11-page testimony.

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The intelligence community has repeatedly warned of the dangers that climate change poses to national security. Early this year, for instance, Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, warned in the annual “Worldwide Threat Assessment,” “Global environmental and ecological degradation, as well as climate change, are likely to fuel competition for resources, economic distress, and social discontent through 2019 and beyond.” ([In July, President Trump announced that Mr. Coats would step down shortly, to be replaced by one of his biggest defenders, Representative John Ratcliffe, a Texas Republican.)

In blocking the submission of the written testimony, the White House trampled not only on the scientific integrity of the assessment but also on the analytic independence of an arm of the intelligence community. That’s why I recently resigned from the job I considered a sacred duty, and the institution I loved.

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My last day on the job was July 12. In the weeks since the hearing I came to understand that there was little left for me to achieve in my position. More than most officers in the intelligence community, I interacted often with the public in discussions of environmental security issues. After the experiences of the prior two months, I wondered whether I could continue public engagements without being tainted by questions about my own analytic independence.

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We need to better understand and anticipate the challenges facing the nation and its partners. Whatever my next step might be, I believe these issues remain critical, and I will try to continue this work going forward.

  Rod Schoonover @ NYT

And....from former NOAA chief David Titley:






...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.