Washington (Platts)--22Jul2009

Committees in the US Congress that deal with national security and
intelligence issues should play a role in crafting bills to cap greenhouse gas
emissions from American power plants, oil refineries and other industries, a
former Republican lawmaker and ex-military official said Tuesday.

John Warner, who represented Virginia in the US Senate for 30 years and
who previously served as secretary of the US Navy, maintains that climate
change is a national security issue because it could spawn global conflicts
that could require a US military response.

Therefore, lawmakers on the Senate Armed Services and Intelligence
committees--both of which deal with military issues--should play a role in
writing the climate-change legislation that the Senate is expected to debate
later this year, Warner said.

"I would hope that maybe the Armed Services committee and the
Intelligence committee could be invited to look at this legislation," Warner
told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Currently, the armed services and intelligence panels are not among the
Senate committees that are crafting the comprehensive climate bill that Senate
Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, has said he will bring to the
Senate floor in late September.

The Environment and Public Works Committee, which Senator Barbara Boxer
of California heads, is taking the lead on the bill. Other panels, including
the Agriculture and Finance committees, also are playing a role.

Senator John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat and chairman of the Foreign
Relations Committee, stopped short of formally endorsing Warner's call for the
Armed Services and Intelligence committees to participate in crafting the
climate bill, but Kerry emphasized that he, too, believed that climate change
poses national security challenges for the US.

"Climate change injects a major new source of chaos, tension, and human
insecurity into an already volatile world," Kerry said. "If we fail to connect
the dots--if we fail to take action--the simple, indisputable reality is that
we will find ourselves living not only in a ravaged environment, but also in a
much more dangerous world."

Specifically, Kerry said climate change could cause widespread flooding,
food shortages, droughts and other humanitarian disasters that could require a
military response. Two retired military officials who testified at the hearing
also echoed that view.

"New climate conditions will lead to further human migrations and create
more climate refugees, including those who cross our own borders," said former
Navy Vice Admiral Lee Gunn, who now heads the American Security Project, a
Washington-based think tank. "The stress of changes in the environment will
increasingly weaken marginal states. Failing states will incubate extremism."

Warner, who headed the Senate Armed Service Committee during his
three-decade stint in the Senate, was not always a backer of mandatory carbon
caps, but he changed course late in his career, and co-sponsored a major
climate-change bill along with Senator Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut
Independent. That bill passed out of Boxer's committee in 2007, but
Republicans killed it when it came to the Senate floor the following year.
--Mu Li, mu_li@platts.com