Republicans Refuse to Expand Climate Change Analysis in Intelligence Authorization

I will have a few posts on the Intelligence Authorization that passed the House Intelligence Committee last week.  (h/t Steven Aftergood)

But before I talked about what made it into the bill, I’d like to highlight what isn’t in it: language requiring the Intelligence Community to consider climate change. The minority views reveal,

One of the bill’s weaknesses is that it does not do enough to enhance analysis of the national security implications of climate change, which the Intelligence Community refers to as environmental indications and warning. Whether by driving competition for scare [sic] resources, by opening the Arctic, or by increasing sea level and storm surge near our naval installations, climate change will have profound, destabilizing effects which need to be understood, anticipated, and accounted for. There may be disagreement about the causes of climate change, but the national security consequences are so significant that they cannot be ignored.

The intelligence community has been delving into this area in recent years (and appear to have renamed climate change “environmental indications and warning”). But thus far, the IC has stopped short of treating climate change as the threat to the US it clearly represents.

It appears Democrats on HPSCI tried to change that. And Republicans refused.

Someday the climate deniers will be held responsible for leaving our country vulnerable. And the Democrats will have left a record of those who should be held responsible.