Climate to get first National Intelligence Estimate by ⁦ @Chemnipot⁩

Here’s a story about the long journey to this NIE (THREAD) https://www.eenews.net/climatewire/stories/1063723629

Back in 2007, I was working on climate and energy policy in the Senate for Hagel (R-NE). He had heard from the retired flag officers of the @CNA_org Military Advisory Board about their report “climate change and the threat to security”

In response, he joined with Senator Durban to write legislation asking the Intelligence Community to do a National Intelligence Estimate on climate change and it’s threat to security.

I was tasked to write the bill and build support across staff.

It was fairly easy to build bipartisan support for the effort. A group of Republican Senators like Warner, McCain, Lugar, and others were open to learning more about climate.

We were successful in getting the legislation included in the intelligence committee’s reauthorization bill that was being drafted. This was a big bill: it was the first time that Congress had done an intel bill since the failures of 9/11 and the atrocities of Abu Ghraib.

So, there was a lot of pressure to get the Intel bill passed, but also a lot of controversy. Ironically, climate was one of the LEAST controversial items in the bill.

As the bill was getting ready for the floor, we were told there was as a hold placed on it by Senator Inhofe, based on the climate section.

In trying to clear the hold, we sat down with Inhofe’s Chief of Staff, who said he would never let anything calling climate change a “national security threat” pass. We said we simply wanted the Intel community to consider the question.

Inhofe said he would allow the bill to ask for an NIE of “regional and local weather changes” but would never allow the term “climate change” in the bill.

We reached an impasse, and couldn’t let the whole Intel bill go down based on climate (which, remember, was the LEAST controversial portion of the bill.)

Then we heard from the DNI, saying don’t worry about it: we’ll do a National Intelligence Assessment (NIA) on climate.

So, Inhofe got climate out of the bill, but we got the Intelligence Community to consider the security impacts of climate change. Then, the report was classified (another fight). But the testimony of Tom Fingar got most of it out: https://fas.org/irp/congress/2008_hr/062508fingar.pdf

So, today’s announcement of a climate change NIE is an important step, but the intelligence community has been working on climate impacts (at various levels of interest) for 13 years now. (END)