Climate Change and National Security in Pennsylvania

Rear Admiral Dave Titley, USN (ret), an Advisory Board member of ours and professor at Penn State University, and Brigadier General Steve Cheney, USMC (ret) of the American Security Project, recently spoke at Washington and Jefferson college in Pennsylvania about the national security implications of a changing climate. The audience was a sizable one, including “13 ROTC students from the school.”

As reported in Southwestern Pennsylvania’s Observer-Reporter:

“Why did the Department of Defense get into this?” he [RADM Titley] asked Monday night inside Washington & Jefferson College’s Burnett Center. “The fact is its leaders have seen these changes firsthand and realize that if you don’t prepare for them, there will be consequences.”

The discussion was part of a national tour organized by our friends at the American Security Project (ASP). Read the full article here.

Coverage also included an excellent radio interview with ASP’s Andrew Holland. In that interview, Holland related the infrastructure threat posed by climate change to other more traditional security threats, stating:

“Things like extreme weather, extreme storms, droughts, heat waves, floods,” Holland said, “these all threaten infrastructure in a way, much like terrorism does, or other more traditional threats to national security.”

You can listen to the full interview here.