Red, Green, and Blue

This is a guest post by Meg Hamill who works at the environmental non-profit LandPaths, in partnership with the Open Space District of Sonoma County, California.

As you read this, there is progress being made on a report entitled “Global Trends 2025.” Prominent analysts in the US intelligence community are currently compiling the report, which will be presented to the incoming president of the United States early in 2009. Aspects of this unfinished report were highlighted last week in a speech by Thomas Fingar (pictured at right,) a top U.S. intelligence analyst, to a conference of Intelligence Professionals in Orlando, Florida.

Here are some quotes from the speech:

By 2025…

• the U.S. “will remain the preeminent power, but that American dominance will be much diminished over this period of time,”
• The “overwhelming dominance that the United States has enjoyed in the international system in military, political, economic, and arguably, cultural arenas is eroding and will erode at an accelerating pace with the partial exception of military,”
• “it is not a good time to live in the Southwest because it runs out of water and looks like the Dust Bowl. It is not a good time to be along the Atlantic seaboard, particularly in the South because of the projected increase and intensity and severity and frequency of severe weather - more hurricanes, more serious storms, and so forth.”
• “Think about the difficulty of scrounging up in the international system the food for 17 or 18 million North Koreans, for a few tens of millions on the Horn of Africa. Any number – any activity put down in the Chinese context, you have got one hell of a problem. And that is going to happen. This isn’t in the maybe category. This is in the for-real category.”
• “Climate change, we concluded, is not by itself going to bring down any governments. It is not going to lead to wars. But two things are pretty certain – that the already stressed and strained and flailing governments and states – this well could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. A little bit more severe water shortage, a little bit more severe food shortage, more people beginning to migrate, economic migrants looking within and across – within countries and across borders for better opportunities and better substance.”
• “Water shortages. As far as I know, there is no disagreement about the projection of strains in water in particular regions. Regions that include the already unstable Middle East, that include China – that the projections of continued 10 percent growth for China and all that that means. Ignore the fact that it has severe water problems now. And they get much, much worse by 2015 or 2020. Why does it matter? Orders of magnitude in a North China plain that is running out of water because they are depleting the underground aquifers through millions of tube wells drilled in the 1960s, produces the food for 400 million people.”

The above remarks are taken directly from a transcript of Fingar’s speech released by the director of National Intelligence. (PDF download.)

Photo credit: U.S. Department of State website

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