The Harry Potter Alliance

By Andrew Slack

August 9, 2009

Gearing up against Global Warming

I just read an article in the NY Times that made me feel the following:

The United States of America is finally having an important debate where:

1- the strained debate on global warming, 2- the too often ignored debate on civilian protection, genocide, and poverty, AND 3- the often sensationalist debate around national security threats for the United States are suddenly interconnected:

The US military is finally looking at global warming as a very real national security threat. I believe that global warming is probably the most severe threat to US national security that we have seen since WWII. Droughts and starvation to millions if not billions of people are going to become refugees, running away from homes and into areas that do not have space for them nor an understanding of their culture. We’ve seen this happen before: war breaks out and dictators rise who orchestrate genocide either against the refugees or against those people already living there. The difference between that horrific and tragic situation compared to one caused by global warming, is that with global warming it will happen by the hundreds of millions and it would happen across the entire globe. Do you want to talk about an economic crisis? THAT would be an economic crisis!

The military is looking at how world trade could effectively shut down and from this chaos and desperation on a global scale, new breeds of terrorist organizations would try to recruit new terrorists to go out and wreak more havoc against Western countries. Situations like Hurricane Katrina would become matter-of-fact examples. The genocide in Sudan would become one of many genocides. The US military in trying to preserve some world order as well as fight terrorist threats and preserve international trade would be overextended in ways beyond belief.

For years and years the leading proponents against global warming have been around preserving the environment. Now that global warming is happening far faster than scientists predicted, the US military is stepping in and saying, “okay. This is a potentially HUGE problem for national security.” It’s like the Ministry just acknowledged that Voldemort has returned.

The NY Times quotes Senator John Kerry around connecting global warming to national security:

““I’ve been making this argument for a number of years,’ Mr. Kerry said, ‘but it has not been a focus because a lot of people had not connected the dots.’ He said he had urged President Obama to make the case, too.
“Mr. Kerry said the continuing conflict in southern Sudan, which has killed and displaced tens of thousands of people, is a result of drought and expansion of deserts in the north. ‘That is going to be repeated many times over and on a much larger scale,’ he said.’”

It’s time for us to understand that as much as we want polar bears to thrive on this planet, stopping global warming is not only about protecting one species or multiple species. It’s about protecting all life on this planet, including human life. While the extreme right wing under the funding of the insurance companies is wasting our time trying to thwart an honest debate on the best way to get Americans access to our doctors and replacing that with fist fights at town hall meetings and comparing those who want five year old children to have access to doctors to somehow be Nazis – much the same way that the Ministry was distracted looking for Sirius Black- Voldemort is back in the form of Global Warming. And the US military and US Senate are beginning to wake up.

There is still hope. We can still prevent the majority of these horrors from occurring. We just need to get beyond angry and weak presumptions that global warming is not real, that global warming is not a threat, that the disappearance of a Ministry employee, Harry’s name being put in the Goblet of Fire, and…oh wait, I mean that Katrina, drought in the sub-Sarahan desert, the melting of the polar ice caps and the drowning of polar bears are NOT isolated incidents. They are happening. They are all connected to what developed nations have done to the environment in the last two hundred years.

But we now have an opportunity. We have the opportunity to, for the first time since the Industrial Revolution work WITH the environment not against her. The time has come. We have very little time left in which we can still act to prevent these horrors. We need to act now.