Hill Heat

Join Rep. Jason Crow (CO-06), Rep. Tom Malinowski (NJ-07), former Assistant Secretary of Defense Sharon Burke, former Assistant Secretary of the Navy Admiral Dennis McGinn, and more foreign policy experts for a Climate Power, Foreign Policy for America, and League of Conservation Voters (LCV) event on clean energy and national security. Watch on Twitter or Facebook.

The effects of climate change and the way we use energy are significant U.S. national security challenges. Addressing them will be increasingly important for our nation’s defense. The Center for a New American Security (CNAS) invites you to attend an event that will examine these critical issues, featuring a keynote address by Carol Browner, Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change.

A roundtable discussion among national security experts will follow the keynote address. Experts will address questions including: How will energy and water challenges in Pakistan and Afghanistan affect current operations in the region and U.S. military bases around the globe? How will competition for energy, strategic minerals, food, and water affect countries and regions of strategic importance – from Afghanistan to the Arctic, China to Yemen?

This event marks the launch of the groundbreaking CNAS report Broadening Horizons: Climate Change and the U.S. Armed Forces, which examines the dual pressures of climate change and energy on each U.S. military service and regional combatant command. Authors Christine Parthemore; Commander Herb Carmen, USN; and Will Rogers map a road ahead to improve the country’s ability to promote national security in the face of a changing climate.

KEYNOTE ADDRESS

• Carol Browner, Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change

PANEL DISCUSSION

• Dr. David Kilcullen, President and CEO of Caerus
• Rear Admiral Philip Hart Cullom, USN Head of the Navy’s Task Force Energy Director, Fleet Readiness Division on the Navy Staff
• Robert Kaplan, Senior Fellow, CNAS Correspondent, The Atlantic Monthly
• Christine Parthemore, Bacevich Fellow, CNAS

2:30-3:00 p.m.: Check-in and registration
3:00-5:30 p.m.: Event
5:30-7:00 p.m.: Cocktail reception

Location:
The Willard InterContinental Hotel
1401 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW

National Security David Sassoon at Solve Climate notes that Michael McConnell, the Director of National Intelligence, had this to say in a New Yorker profile when asked if Al Qaeda is the greatest threat America faces:

No, no, no, not at all. Terrorism can kill a lot of people, but it can’t fundamentally challenge the ability of the nation to exist. Fascism could have done that. Communism could have. I think our issue going forward is more engagement with the world in terms of keeping it on a reasonable path, so another ism doesn’t come along and drive it to one extreme or another.

And we have to some balance in terms of equitable distribution of wealth, containment of contagious disease, access to energy supplies, and development of free markets. There are national security ramifications to global warming.

Biofuels Technology Review has an extensive piece on the Price of Biofuels, covering the ramifications of America’s heavy investment in corn ethanol and the uncertain future of cellulosic ethanol. The New York Times reports Europe May Ban Imports of Some Biofuel Crops as it recognizes the drastic environmental harm and negative global-warming consequences of replacing rainforest with palm-oil plantations.

China In Dealing with the Dragon, Paul Krugman argues that China should be the U.S.’s primary foreign policy concern, in large part because of climate change, “which will eventually be recognized as the most crucial problem facing America and the world — maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of our lives.”

Coal Heather Moyer at Sierra Club’s Clean Energy Watch points to another New York Times piece that reports:

A justice of the West Virginia Supreme Court and a powerful coal-company executive met in Monte Carlo in the summer of 2006, sharing several meals even as the executive’s companies were appealing a $50 million jury verdict against them to the court.