Former Defense Secretary Compares Climate Change To Nuclear War

There are two existential catastrophes threatening the world, former Defense Secretary William Perry said. One is quick but avoidable, while the other is slowly unfolding.
"Our planet today faces two existential dangers," Perry said at Stanford University, where he now serves as a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute. "One of them is nuclear war—nuclear catastrophe—and the other is a climate catastrophe. The nuclear catastrophe could happen next month, next year, ten years from now or if we’re lucky, never. But if it happens it happens all at once. On the other hand the climate-change catastrophe is on a slow roll. It is happening. It’s happening every month, every year. It’s getting worse."
Perry, who served as defense secretary from 1994-97, made the comparison at the Stanford Global Energy Forum at the beginning of a dialogue with California Gov. Jerry Brown, who added a point of comparison:
"I’d say nuclear (war) and climate change have a similar lack of attention relative to what the threat is," Brown said. "And we should have a lot more response, a lot more attention than we have."
California has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions from 465 million tons per year to 435 or 440, Brown said, but it has to get down to 165.
"That's a very steep curve," Brown said. "How the hell are we going to do that? It’s gonna take every conceivable market-regulatory-investment-R&D-private-public effort, and it's almost like I'll just—oh my, I don't want to say a war footing, but it takes some of that heroism to deal with climate change."
Perry served in the U.S. Army in occupied Japan and has focused ever since on nuclear war, on maximizing the deterrent potential of the American arsenal and on preventing its use. He's the author of "My Journey at the Nuclear Brink."
But lately a different catastrophe has his attention.
"This is a slow-motion catastrophe. It's a little bit like the legend of the frog and the water, and the water is heating up and gets hotter and hotter, and the frog doesn't think to jump out until it's too late," Perry said. "It is slow motion and we’re not reacting to it. We know what to do, but we're not doing it."
Watch William Perry and Jerry Brown at Stanford: