Former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson claimed Tuesday on MSNBC that climate change “is a security issue.”
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The Morning Joe team claimed it’s “clear over the next four years at least, we’re going to do nothing about climate change, we’re going to potentially take some serious steps back, what would you say, assuming that a new president comes in 2021 — what would you say the United States do immediately to address the threat?”
“My concern is climate change, coupled with aging infrastructure in this country,” Johnson responded. “Hurricane Sandy is a perfect example, we saw the effects of climate change, severe weather conditions impacting aging infrastructure that presents a security issue as well as a number of other issues, and this is a long term challenge for our nation and our world that we’ve got to address.”
“President Obama wanted to address it very much, it’s something he talked about all the time, and it’s something that the next president will need to come back to very definitely. It is a security issue,” he continued.
The most notable political figure to compare climate change to a national security threat is Senator Bernie Sanders. During the 2016 election cycle, Sanders claimed that “climate change is directly related to the growth of terrorism.”
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In June of 2017, President Trump ceased U.S. implementation of the Paris Accords. In a public statement, the president said, “The cost to the economy at this time would be close to $3 trillion in lost GDP and 6.5 million industrial jobs, while households would have $7,000 less income and, in many cases, much worse than that.”
Trump also claimed “the agreement doesn’t eliminate coal jobs, it just transfers those jobs out of America and the United States, and ships them to foreign countries. This agreement is less about the climate and more about other countries gaining a financial advantage over the United States.”