To the editor:

Climate change is not just an environmental or economic issue — it is also creating major threats to our national security. Unless we commit to doing our part as a country, global warming will both make serious reductions in our national military capacity, and multiply the number and scale of armed conflicts around the globe, making our world a much more dangerous place.

In this context, it is good to see the leadership actions taken recently by Ms. Elise Stefanik, our representative from the 21st District in the U.S. House of Representative. Ms. Stefanik has just co-authored on Jan. 11 (with Jim Langevin, D-Rhode Island) a letter to President Trump signed by a bipartisan group of representatives. This letter asks to re-insert climate change into the National Security Strategy, as was included in previous years.

This follows her leadership in the earlier, successful bipartisan effort to retain language (under threat by some Republicans) in the separate 2018 National Defense Authorization Act. This language, which has now been signed into law by President Trump, requires our military to identify the main climate threats to our military facilities and capacities (e.g., the rising sea waters at our largest naval base in Norfolk, Virginia), and the actions needed to counter them.

We need greater efforts in this district to help people be more aware of the tremendous threats that climate change is bringing to our national and global security. I am very glad to see Elise Stefanik taking leadership on this issue within the Republican Party, reflecting in part her concerns about our national security. I also appreciate her recognizing, as the youngest member of the House, that this is a key issue in particular for millennials, who are going to inherit the problems that generations like mine will leave them.

Sincerely,

Lance Clark

Hague