Green movement takes on an olive hue

Doesn't Earth Day seem a lot more ominous now than it did back in the 90's? Google thinks so, too - this is the latest of their brilliant day-specific logo designs.

To mark Earth Day, here are couple of interesting articles from the last week highlighting the environment's impact on national security, including a new report by former U.S. military officers on the strategic impact of climate change (which envisions floods resulting from the sea-level rising as "potentially destabilizing South Asia countries of Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Vietnam"), and a like-minded article by Thomas Friedman about reframing environmental issues so that "Green is the new red, white and blue."

I've also linked to an old Fortune magazine standby from several years back, "The Pentagon's Weather Nightmare." Warning: that article, and the Pentagon report it is based on, are easily the scariest things I've ever read about the climate change threat. These guys make "An Inconvenient Truth" seem like a lighthearted, feel-good movie in comparison. Here's an excerpt from the report: "As famine, disease, and weather-related disasters strike due to the abrupt climate change, many countries' needs will exceed their carrying capacity. This will create a sense of desperation, which is likely to lead to offensive aggression to reclaim balance . . . When carrying capacity drops suddenly, civilization is faced with new challenges which today seem unimaginable."

"Military: Global Warming may Cause War" [Military.com]
PDF of the think tank report described in the above article [CNA.org]
Thomas Friedman: "The Power of Green" [New York Times]
David Stipp: "The Pentagon's Weather Nightmare" [CNNMoney.com]
PDF of the Pentagon report described in the above article [Environmental Defense]