In an address this week to U.S. military forces at the Royal Air Force base in Mildenhall, England, President Joe Biden tried to convince troops climate change is “the greatest threat facing America.”
“You know, when I went over in the Tank in the Pentagon, when I first was elected Vice President, with President Obama, the military sat us down to let us know what the greatest threats facing America were — the greatest physical threats,” Biden said. “And this is not a joke: You know what the Joint Chiefs told us the greatest threat facing America was? Global warming. Because there’ll be significant population movements, fights over land, millions of people leaving places because they’re literally sinking below the sea in Indonesia; because of the fights over what is arable land anymore.”
While some might be shocked at such a claim — one that ignores a whole host of legitimate foreign and domestic threats facing America today — Biden’s rhetoric aligns with his prior remarks, as well as the sentiments from his administration.
In October 2020, in an interview with Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior advisor in the Obama administration, Biden said climate change is the “number one issue facing humanity.” Forget Russia, Communist China, the U.S.-Mexico border crisis, the Black Lives Matter organization, Antifa, Islamic terrorism, or the nation’s suicide and mental health crisis. There is no shortage of items more threatening than an issue both highly politicized and steeped in ambiguous science.
Vice President Kamala Harris noted in her May commencement speech at the Naval Academy that there are three notable threats our military will be tasked to deal with: COVID-19 and preventing pandemics, intelligence hacking, and — you guessed it — climate change. Of course, Harris has yet to take seriously her role as a world leader, and America eagerly awaits her presence as border liaison.
Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Mark Milley and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin testified Thursday before the Senate Armed Services Committee soon after Biden’s address. Foreseeably placed in an odd position by the president, Milley was unwilling to take a firm stance against Biden.
“The president is looking at it from a much broader angle than I am,” Milley testified. “I’m looking at it from a strictly military standpoint. And from a strictly military standpoint, I’m putting China and Russia up there.”
But in a more clear fashion, Austin aligned with Biden. Indeed, his opening statement mentioned the phrase “climate change” 15 times. It was nothing out of left field for the defense secretary, however. After all, it was Austin who spoke at the Leaders Summit on Climate in April and called climate change an “existential threat.”
“Today, no nation can find lasting security without addressing the climate crisis. We face all kinds of threats in our line of work, but few of them truly deserve to be called existential. The climate crisis does,” Austin said, in addition to, “climate change is making the world more unsafe and we need to act.”
Milley and Austin’s remarks are more guarded than Biden and Harris’s but still point to a White House inadequately communicating what represents the greatest crisis facing the United States. Still, while migrants cross the border in numbers unseen in decades, the White House blames climate change for the surge instead of its Remain in Mexico repeal and flimsy stance that signals to illegals that they will face fewer consequences for breaking the law in Biden’s America.
Biden has been more focused on appeasing the far-left wing of the party that thinks we will drop dead if we don’t start devouring insects or buying exorbitant electric cars. To the administration, killing jobs over climate orders, joining a costly international agreement, offering climate change as infrastructure, touting trillion-dollar federal plans, and appointing John Kerry as a climate envoy with no scientific experience are all deemed as more pertinent than any legitimate threats.
Even the U.S. Army has joined the energy bandwagon, releasing a memo titled “U.S. Army: Addressing Climate Change Threats” that states climate change is a “serious threat to U.S. National security interests and defense objectives” and “The Army has a lot to be proud of, yet there is a lot of work to continue to operate efficiently across extreme weather and climate conditions.”
Still, data indicates climate change is not the threat that members of the Democratic Party claim it is. As energy expert Marc Morano pointed out to the Federalist in March, “The alleged ‘climate emergency’ is merely a premise for achieving the political goals that the left has sought for decades.” The aim? Expanding the role of government until it has been involuntarily injected into our homes. And as long as the left operates in a vacuum of idealism and denial, it will continue to hurt the American people.
It is no wonder Biden joked to the troops and said, “I keep forgetting I’m president.” It’s long past time for him to start remembering.
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