Team Romney: Top Response To Climate Change Should Be More Defense Spending!

It is hard to find words bad enough to describe the Republicans' "thinking" on this. "Disgusting, warped, and depraved" don't seem strong enough. Look to their investments in and donations from military contractors for the reason.

But they want to cut or eliminate funding for disaster relief programs.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/09/05/794641/team-romney-top-response-to-climate-change-should-be-more-defense-spending/

By Joe Romm on Sep 5, 2012

Romney Calls For More Scientific ‘Debate’ On Climate Change, But Opposes Any Serious Effort To Cut Carbon Pollution

Politico received an email from a Romney campaign staffer asserting that the Democrats’ concern about the threat from global warming is supposedly at odds with their spending priorities:

“If armageddon is coming from climate change,” the staffer asks, “wouldn’t your first priority be shoring up defenses to protect natural resources, have Guard and Reserves and ships and planes for disaster relief?”

That brings to mind the old saying: If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like your thumb.

As is typical from the anti-science crowd, when they aren’t blocking action — or mocking action — on man-made global warming, they are saying it is too late to do anything. Politico reports:

Here’s what this week’s official Democratic platform says on the issue: “The national security threat from climate change is real, urgent, and severe. The change wrought by a warming planet will lead to new conflicts over refugees and resources; new suffering from drought and famine; catastrophic natural disasters; and the degradation of vital ecosystems across the globe.”

It is what it is, the campaign staffer said — but how can a party both have such a bleak vision and support $487 billion in reduced defense budget growth over the next decade?

First off, the vision is bleak only if we listen to the do-nothing crowd. While we can’t avoid serious global warming at this point, we still have time to avoid “Armageddon” — the end times battle for humanity!

Second, while other countries now out-invest us in what will be the biggest job creating sector of the century — clean energy — we appear to have a lock on defense spending. The very modest proposed cuts in defense would mean that instead of U.S. military spending that is “bigger than that of the next 17 countries combined,” as the Economist put it, we might only have a military budget that is bigger than the next 15 countries combined.

Darn you Canada and Turkey! Of course, even that assumes those other 15 countries don’t slash their military budgets over the next decade, which many will as the growing reality of climate change necessitates vastly greater spending on mitigation and adaptation