On Monday, as part of the release of the White House’s 56-page National Security Strategy report, President Trump eliminated climate change from his administration’s list of threats to U.S. national security, the Huffington Post reports.
Trump’s stance not only breaks with two decades of military planning, but it also contradicts what many top military commanders and members of his own cabinet have previously said on the matter. In the report itself, there is only one reference to climate change, in which it says that the United States should focus on becoming a global energy powerhouse through the production and exportation of fossil fuels, which contribute to global warming,. (Oh the irony.)
In his speech on Monday that followed the release of the document, Trump’s only mention of climate change was the United States’s withdrawal from, “the very expensive and unfair Paris climate accord.”
Defense Secretary James Mattis is one of several members of the president’s cabinet whose views on climate change are directly contradicted by the report. “The effects of a changing climate — such as increased maritime access to the Arctic, rising sea levels, desertification, among others — impact our security situation,” USA Today reports Mattis told senators during his confirmation hearing. Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer said in his confirmation hearing that he was aware of the ways in which climate change had contributed to rising sea levels and increased storms.
Meanwhile, Trump’s decision to drop climate change from the list of national security concerns follows a year of extreme wildfires in California, and hurricanes in Puerto Rico, Texas and Florida — many of which have been linked to the effects of climate change.