>Trump does not recognize climate change as a national security threat

Once again, reality has intruded into my search for a good fantasy. This time, it’s something bigger than Trump decrees the downsizing of two national monuments in Utah, but in the same anti-environmental vein. Instead, it’s the logical consequence of Trump pulling the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Accord. The Guardian has the story in Trump drops climate change from US national security strategy.

The Trump administration has dropped climate change from a list of global threats in a new national security strategy the president unveiled on Monday.

Instead, Trump’s NSS paper emphasised the need for the US to regain its economic competitiveness in the world.

That stance represents a sharp change from the Obama administration’s NSS, which placed climate change as one of the main dangers facing the nation and made building international consensus on containing global warming a national security priority.
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A senior official said on Sunday the main difference between the Trump NSS and its predecessors was a new emphasis on border security and economic issues.

“The economic piece … gets much more attention,” the official said. “The insistence that economic security is national security.”

In response, it’s time to be a good environmentalist and recycle what I wrote more than six years ago on my personal blog.

[E]conomy is dependent on society, which is in turn dependent on the environment. Without an environment, there is no society. Without a society, there is no economy. Those relationships put sustainability into perspective. They also show that the emphasis on economy above all is exactly backwards. No wonder we’re in trouble.

This is a lesson I wish Trump would learn, but he hasn’t and almost certainly never will, which means we will continue to be in trouble. I wish I could say I’m surprised, but I’m with Iago from “Aladdin” on this one.