James Clapper and the U.S. won in Copenhagen, just like Buzz in Rebel Without a Cause.
America's best and brightest at the NSA have inadvertently declared war on the law of physics. They spied on every negotiating position of every nation at the Copenhagen climate talks to protect the biggest greenhouse gas polluters in America. They won the battle in Copenhagen. The climate talks failed to produce an agreement that would enforce strong limits to greenhouse gas emissions to prevent catastrophic global warming in excess of 2 degrees Celsius. In winning that battle, the NSA and the Obama administration are losing the war to save California, Texas and the western and plains states from catastrophic warming and drought that will devastate America's food supplies. There's no winning a war against the laws of physics. There's no breaking even. If you fight a war against the environment you will lose. But that's just what the NSA is doing.
According to another top secret document, the NSA was already involved in climate related intelligence activities several years before the COP15. The document from the S17 division was posted to the internal NSA website on May 14 2007. Then US Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, James R. Clapper, who now oversees the NSA as Director of National Intelligence, is quoted from an internal NSA conference:
»Increasingly the environment is becoming an adversary for us. And I believe that the capabilities and assets of the Intelligence Community are going to be brought to bear increasingly in assessing the environment as an adversary.«
The general theme of the document is a set of risk assessments on various effects of climate change that the entire intelligence community was working on. However, the document suggests that the NSA's actual focus in relation to climate change was spying on other countries to collect intelligence that would support American interests, rather than preventing future climate catastrophes. It describes the US as being under pressure because of its role as the historically largest carbon emitter. A pressure to which the NSA spies were already responding:
I am not outraged by the NSA spying and the failure of the Copenhagen talks as Bill McKibben was. The most wealthy and powerful nations didn't want Copenhagen to place limits on them. The U.S. was one of many nations that made Copenhagen fail. However, I was surprised that people in the Obama administration would believe that there's a way of winning a game of chicken with the climate.
'Insane, Disgusting' and 'Epic Treachery': NSA Spied on Climate Talks
'Obama admin. clearly never wanted Copenhagen talks to work,' says Bill McKibben following latest NSA revelations concerning climate talks
Since the year 2000 extreme drought has ravaged the western states, moving from Texas to California and parts in between. These drying of the west is devastating agriculture and putting pressure on water supplies. Climate models predict worse to come, but our leaders are fighting little battles over words on paper that ultimately mean nothing. Our media reports on squabbles and scandals that amount to nothing. We obsess on the insignificant while we ignore the threats to our food and water, the necessities of life. We have spent trillions of dollars on military actions to secure oil, which, when consumed, will add to the warming and drying that threatens our food and water. American priorities are totally out of touch with reality. That money needed to be spent on developing new industries that would greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Yet, as California burns in January, after a year of the least rain in recorded history, we squabble over whether Snowden was a hero or a traitor instead of doing something to change the insane ways we are spending our money and our time. Our military priorities are insane. We spend billions on phantom threats while declaring nature the enemy. You can't win a war with mother nature. The laws of physics win every time.
For another take on this story see Don Midwest's diary.
