The Head of the U.S. Coast Guard Isn’t Afraid to Talk About Climate Change – Foreign Policy
▻http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/05/04/the-head-of-the-u-s-coast-guard-isnt-afraid-to-talk-about-climate-cha
Even as other government agencies have quietly banished references to climate change, the head of the U.S. Coast Guard does not shy away from the subject that the White House has made practically taboo.
Adm. Paul Zukunft, who retires next month, almost never specifically uses those two words. Instead, he talks about rising sea levels, melting polar ice, and increasingly severe hurricanes. “As a first responder with a U.S. population that is migrating towards the coasts, it presses us into service,” he says in an interview with Foreign Policy.
But Zukunft focuses on the effects, not the man-made emissions driving the rising temperatures. “I don’t assign causality,” he says. “I just know that I own the consequence piece of this one when it comes to mass rescues.”
[…]
Zukunft talks about the Coast Guard’s experience in “the fourth coast” in northern Alaska, where indigenous communities are watching their homes be swallowed up by rising seas.
“We have more than 30 villages north of the Arctic Circle in Alaska who are subject to coastal erosion and a rise in sea level,” Zukunft says. “The first thing that strikes you when you fly in by helicopter are the number of homes that are literally toppling into the ocean.”
[…]
A recent study commissioned by the Pentagon, for instance, looked at the impact of rising sea levels on American military sites in the Pacific, and specifically asked the authors of the report to consider potential scenarios for rising seas.
And if climate change is unlikely to resonate with the president, its potential to undermine national security certainly appears to make an impression on Congress. In January, 106 House members — 11 of whom were Republicans — wrote Trump to express their dissatisfaction at the absence of any mention of climate in the National Security Strategy.
[…]
The Coast Guard’s bid to obtain badly needed resources to complete its Arctic mission is symptomatic of Washington’s wider neglect of the Arctic, says David Titley, a retired U.S. Navy rear admiral. When it comes to the Arctic, says Titley, the Coast Guard can fulfill “constabulary missions” such as fishing protection, search and rescue, and pollution protection.
Receding ice in the Arctic also means increased shipping traffic, making the need to prepare for search and rescue operations in case of a “Titanic event” — Zukunft’s term for a sinking cruise ship.
“You have cruise ships in these waters, it’s the last frontier if you will,” he says. “We don’t have search and rescue stations across our fourth coast, the Arctic Coast.”
Apart from the practical effects of a warmer Arctic, Washington faces a strategic challenge from Russian — and potentially Chinese — efforts to freeze the United States out of the region. But Zukunft says U.S. political leaders are not ready to make a commitment to a more ambitious American presence in the north.
“There is no bipartisan, bicameral consensus that we the United States, with a GDP 10 times that of Russia, just need to make it a priority to invest in the Arctic,” Zukunft says.
