Coast Guard cadets summoned to battle climatological foe

May 22, 2015
Confusion evident in President Barack Obama’s commencement address at the Coast Guard Academy raises a question bearing on American foreign policy: Is it possible the administration has let its obsession with global warming skew relationships with oil-producing allies?

Confusion evident in President Barack Obama’s commencement address at the Coast Guard Academy raises a question bearing on American foreign policy: Is it possible the administration has let its obsession with global warming skew relationships with oil-producing allies?

Consider the rebuke of Canada over Keystone XL pipeline expansion. Consider Saudi Arabia’s sense of estrangement from the superpower with which it thought it had a special relationship.

Does being an important supplier of oil diminish a country’s standing with the US now that the administration has made confronting climate change, as Obama told graduating Coast Guard cadets, “a key pillar of American global leadership?”

The question strains credulity no more than the president’s calling climate change “a serious threat to global security, an immediate risk to our national security.”

The argument will make Americans anxious about global warming even more so. But polls suggest relatively few Americans consider the issue very important. At some point, people lose patience with the endless efforts of others to scare them.

For most people, scarier developments abound.

Terrorism represents a clear threat. Parts of the Middle East are reverting to Middle Age standards of brutalism. Russia, Iran, and China are testing international patience with their territorial ambitions. These are security problems.

Yet the commander-in-chief chose to lecture students of a military academy about climate change. And he apparently saw no contradiction in boasting about a carrier strike group running on expensive biofuels while budget pressure shrinks America’s fleet of warships.

Along with tortured perspective came the usual problems with polemics and fact. Predictably, the president tried to foreclose opposition by disparaging the imaginary folks “who refuse to admit climate change is real.”

And he insisted on the need “to slow down the warming of the planet.” Temperature observations indicate the planet has done that on its own for 18 years.

Speeches like Obama’s must make Canadians and Saudis wonder what passes for seriousness in Washington, DC, these days. Many Americans wonder about the same thing.

(From the subscription area of www.ogj.com, posted May 22, 2015; author’s e-mail: [email protected])