NATO has a new mission. Defending the West from the Russians is so last century: now it wants to save the world from ‘Climate Change.’
According to an op-ed, written by NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg:
Climate change is making the world more dangerous. NATO’s task is to preserve peace and keep us safe. So to fulfil our main responsibility, NATO must help to curb climate change for our security today and for the security of future generations.
There are lot of heroic assumptions in that paragraph. Perhaps it was written in the hope that Joe Biden will be America’s next President. Certainly, there’s no chance that President Trump would be swayed by such a flimsy argument nor approve of such mission creep. As far as Trump is concerned, NATO is a military defensive alliance, not another tentacle of the polar-bear-hugging, virtue-signalling green blob.
Almost none of the global warming ‘facts’ cited by Stoltenberg in his op-ed is accurate. Stoltenberg begins with some hokey autobiography by trying to claim that recent temperatures in Svalbard in his native Norway are a dread harbinger of climate change.
But as Paul Homewood points out, this is nonsense:
Let’s start with this claim:
Growing up in Norway, I learnt in school that temperatures in Svalbard, arctic home of the polar bear, would hardly ever rise above freezing. But this year, thermostats in Svalbard reached a record 21.7 degrees.
They obviously did not teach him very well then! Summer temperatures in Svalbard hit the mid teens every year. Although this year hit a record of 21.7C, it was only slightly warmer than the previous highest temperature of 21.3C, set in 1979. Hardly an excuse to turn NATO upside down!
Stoltenberg writes:
NATO and its member countries also have a responsibility to help reduce climate change by producing fewer emissions without compromising our core tasks.
We have long focused on fuel efficiency to improve our military effectiveness. Reducing our dependency on fossil fuels, for instance by using solar panels to power military camps, will not just help combat climate change, it can make our troops and equipment more secure, by improving our ability to operate independently and flexibly.
Members of the NATO Alliance are taking a lead with plans to cut emissions from our armed forces through initiatives such as using biofuels, developing hybrid vehicles and improving the energy efficiency of bases and other infrastructure.
If this is true then the time has come to defund NATO. Who said it was NATO’s ‘responsibility to help reduce climate change’? Since when? NATO was founded during the Cold War, mainly as an alliance to offset the military threat to the West posed by the Soviet Union.
After the Berlin Wall came down and the Warsaw Pact collapsed in the late Eighties/early Nineties, NATO was left without a real purpose and has yet to find a new one. Its interventions – such as the one in Libya in 2011 – often seem to make things worse, not better.
Remarkably, NATO still feels able to spend $1 trillion a year supporting its mostly unnecessary, even pointless or counterproductive, make-work schemes.
$1 trillion is a lot of money to spend on a Cold War that ended 30 years ago. Perhaps that explains this pitiful attempt to represent climate change as the great new existential threat. Maybe, if and when he wins his second term, President Trump will decide that NATO has long since served its useful purpose. There are already about a gazillion and one institutions claiming to save the world from climate change. There’s no need for NATO to do so as well.
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