Congress should move decisively this year to take action on global warming legislation to avert festering environmental challenges that could further strain the U.S.military former Vice-President Al Gore and former Sen. John Warner said in testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), the committee chairman, and Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of the Energy and Environment Subcommittee, have introduced a draft version of the “American Clean Energy and Security Act” that includes a cap and trade scheme.
Gore was joined by Warner, a Virginia Republican, who had previously co-sponsored his own global warming bill. Gore and Warner both suggested man-made global warming could have serious national security implications if allowed to continue unchecked.
“Our country cannot afford more of the status quo, more gas price instability, more job losses, more outsourcing of families, and more years of sending $2 billion every 24 hours to foreign countries for oil,” Gore said. “And our soldiers and their families cannot take another 10 years of repeated troop deployments to regions that just happen to have large oil supplies.”
Warner was even more emphatic on this point devoting much of his testimony to the additional strains global warming could place on the U.S. military, if congress does not take action.
“Global climate change has the potential, if left unchecked, of adding missions to the already heavy burdens of our military and other elements of our nation’s overall national security. To the extent we can plan today how best to minimize these contingent disasters means, the less we have to call upon our armed forces tomorrow,” Warner said.
