More Voices Added to the National/Energy Security Debate

More voices are being heard making the renewable energy-national security connection, this time, soldiers who have returned from wars in the Middle East. I spoke to one of the organizations leading the charge that sees the connection and has been taking that message on the road on a nationwide bus tour. The tour is sponsored by Operation Free, a coalition of veteran and national security organizations that was founded last summer and has Colorado stops planned this week.

With clean energy sometimes regarded as a cause of the political left, support in some military circles might belie that. The group wants to make a link to climate change and energy security. I just spoke to the group, which features names from the political and foreign policy establishments behind it, like retired Generals Anthony Zinni and Wesley Clark, and former Senator John Warner. There are also hundreds of soldiers, veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"If you make a list of the world's failed states, the places where Osama bin Laden has lived and where the effects of climate change are most seriously and dangerously felt, it's all the same list," said its spokesman Dave Solomini.

It's a view that might be starting to resonate and I that I just discussed in an article that measured public attitudes. And the group seems to have endorsed what I think is a common-sense view of the modern energy landscape. That is, whether or not you believe in man-made climate change, energy security and economic development are justifications for renewable energy development and promotion.

The group's first bus tour of two weeks last October went from Montana to Maine, and now it is embarked on a two-month tour across 16 states. It will have appearances in Colorado this week. "When you speak in places like Pennsylvania and Ohio that have been hurt, and they see that the steel mills might be put back to work making towers for wind turbines, and then people start to get it," Solomini added.

It's a connection that's not always made in the public mind when climate and energy are discussed, but maybe it's one that might be aiming headway.

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