It’s interesting that the US military tends to be a step ahead of the rest of the country in its risk assessments. The majority of the population may be unconvinced on climate change, but the military has a strategy and considers climate change an exacerbating factor in future conflicts.
Likewise with peak oil. It may not be on the mainstream agenda just yet, but the military has warned that there may be shortages by 2012. “By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 million barrels per day,” says the report, which is amusingly called JOE 2010 (for Joint Operating Environment).
The report also considers the US debt, the trade deficit, water scarcity, grain shortages, and a host of other potential problems. It’s a rather fascinating document. Most importantly, it shows what happens when you look at world issues with a risk perspective rather than a political or scientific perspective.
As an example, consider that Bush’s Vice President Dick Cheney believed in the ‘1% doctrine’ on security issues: “If there’s a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon,” he is alleged to have said during a security briefing, “we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response.” He said that on the same week that the IPCC said that climate change was 90% certain.
Politicians need to maintain stability, and preferably maintain their own popularity. That requires constant optimism, which is why both David Cameron and Gordon Brown talked of an ‘age of aspiration’ rather than an ‘age of austerity’ in their recent campaigns. Bad news gets suppressed, in the hope that it can be shuffled off into the next government, somebody else’s problem. It’s why the US and the UK government insist on using the IEA figures for oil reserves – because they’re the only ones still saying there isn’t a problem. Politics discourages the proper analysis of risk, but as Greg Craven has pointed out, it makes it a whole lot easier to make up your mind on the big issues.
The US military may be the world’s largest consumer of oil and therefore one of the biggest contributors to climate change, but ironically, it shows considerably more awareness than the government it serves.
The Earthbound Report 