President Joe Biden warned the Coast Guard Wednesday to prepare themselves for more threats from global warming and the melting Arctic.
“The challenges we face continue to evolve, and the choices we make today are literally going to shape the direction of the world throughout the 21st century,” Biden said. “What we do in the next ten years is going to lay it down.”
The president spoke about the Coast Guard during a change of command ceremony on Wednesday as Admiral Linda Fagan replaced Admiral Karl L. Schultz as commandant.
He said the United States would call on the Coast Guard “more and more frequently” to sustain a “rules-based international order.”
Biden also said that the Coast Guard would be expected “to manage the impact of climate change, becoming more extreme, more extreme weather, and growing migration flows.”
He also warned the men and women of the Coast Guard they would be expected to help control the future of the Arctic.
“The Arctic is going to change drastically and become a place that is going to also potentially generate potential conflict in terms of dominating the Arctic as it melts,” he said, referring to climate change.
The president frequently claims that global warming is the “greatest threat facing America.”
“When I first was elected vice president with President Obama, the military sat us down to let us know what the greatest threats facing America were,” Biden told American troops last year in a speech. “This is not a joke: you know what the Joint Chiefs told us the greatest threat facing America was? Global warming.
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