John Kerry, the forgotten soldier on climate change

[MBS]

in Rolling Stone, and it's about time that Sec. Kerry's lifelong efforts on environmental issues were recognized:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/john-kerry-on-climate-change-the-fight-of-our-time-20151201

(figure legend: "John Kerry has been actively working to protect the environment since the U.S.'s first Earth Day, in 1970.&quot

In the climate wars. . .Kerry is a forgotten soldier. Al Gore won all the glory (and the ridicule), and President Obama has the muscle. But the truth is, no one has done more in the trenches of this battle than Kerry. He has been in the fight since the first Earth Day, in 1970, and has not let up since, participating in practically every climate conference and U.N. climate meeting in the past 30 years. It helps that he is from an environmentally conscious state like Massachusetts, but his interest in climate change has been anything but politically expedient – he did not shy away from talking about it when he ran for president in 2004, even when pollsters told him it was foolish. He pushed hard for cap-and-trade legislation in Obama's first term (and, despite Obama's less-than-full-fledged support, might have gotten it done had not his pal Sen. John McCain, long a supporter of action on climate change, gone MIA on the issue after he lost the 2008 election). As secretary of state, Kerry was one of the prime movers behind last year's historic U.S.-China deal, in which China agreed to significant carbon reductions and which helped break the bottleneck in U.N. climate negotiations. (I traveled for several days with Kerry in China last year while he was working on a trade agreement with the country, and was astonished by how he opened every meeting, no matter what the subject or who the Chinese officials were, with a few words about the urgency of climate change.)

After touring the base in Norfolk, Kerry gave a speech at Old Dominion University that tried to sum up the connections between climate change and national security. "The bottom line is that the impacts of climate change can exacerbate resource competition, threaten livelihoods, and increase the risk of instability and conflict, especially in places already undergoing economic, political and social stress," Kerry said. "And because the world is so extraordinarily interconnected today – economically, technologically, militarily, in every way imaginable – instability anywhere can be a threat to stability everywhere." Kerry's audience was not just the several hundred Virginia dignitaries and students gathered at Old Dominion, but also Republicans in Congress who were gearing up to derail the upcoming U.N. climate talks in Paris, which both Kerry and Obama see as an important turning point in the fight against climate change. In effect, Kerry was saying to climate deniers in Congress: If Paris fails, terrorists win.

. .
(interviewer)To most people, climate change is an environmental issue. It's something that affects trees and frogs and weather. Why should Americans think about climate change as a security issue?
(Sec. Kerry) Because it is. Sixteen members on the board of the Center for Naval Analysis, who are all flag officers – generals, admirals, three-star, four-star, retired – have all said this is a major threat multiplier. And there are many different ways in which a security challenge can emerge. You have drought, therefore, perhaps, huge food shortages. Where there is water today, there may not be in the future. That could cause mass migrations. That creates conflict. The water itself – there are wars over water. Already, tribes are fighting in part of the Sahel and other places where water once existed, and now it's dried up. There's a history of conflict where resources are finite or scarce.

So if you look around the world, the potential for mass dislocation is rising exponentially right now. We saw massive numbers of people uprooted in Syria and moving into Damascus. The drought in the region did not cause what happened, but it exacerbated what happened. It creates greater instability.

. . much,much more at the link.