30 United States The EconomistFebruary 24th 2018
2 voy, George Banks, on the National Securi-
ty Council. (Unable to gain a security
clearance, Mr Banks resigned in February.)
The Pentagon betrays no intention of
shredding Obama-era rules directing the
armed services to assess and counter cli-
mate-related weaknesses. It helps that the
military bureaucracy is more hulkingNim-
itzthan nimble corvette, remarks Ann Phil-
lips, a retired admiral formerly involved in
the Navy’s climate-planning: “It takes time
to turn around.”
Bureaucratic inertia is not the only rea-
son why reality has changed less than the
rhetoric would imply. As David Titley, an-
other retired admiral now at Pennsylvania
State University, observes, Mr Trump is the
mirror-image of Mr Obama, who stressed
the securityimplications of climate change
but did little to tackle them. Even before Mr
Trump took office a year ago, Captain Van-
derLey’s construction budgets never in-
cluded extra dollars earmarked for climate
adaptation (or “resilience” as he prefers to
call it, studiously avoiding talkof climate
change). In practical terms, Mr Obama’s
climate cheerleading can sometimes be
hard to tell apart from Trumpian neglect.100,000 tonnes of floating diplomacy
Former officials insist that duringthe last
six years of Mr Obama’s presidency, Re-
publican majorities in Congress would
simply have blocked measures overtly
aimed at combating global warming.
Some money was (and still is) buried in the
DOD’s notoriously opaque budget, they
say. The White House and Congress leave
the men in uniform lots of room to inter-
pret what counts as a “threat”, notes Fran-
cesco Femia of the Centre for Climate and
Security, a think-tank. Often, climate adap-
tation is a side-benefit of work motivated
by other considerations. Norfolk’s four
double-decker piers erected since the
mid-1990s for $60m apiece were chiefly de-
signed to ease access to electricity, water
and internet cables that could previously
only be reached by boat, and to accommo-
date modern ships’ higher decks, explains
Joe Bouchard, a former commander of the
base. If they also guard against encroach-
ing seas, all the better.
Climate change is one among many
threats facingAmerican strategists. Others
are more pressing, from North Korean
nukes and Chinese island-building to wars
in Afghanistan and Syria. But its impor-
tance is poised to grow as the Earth warms,
so Mr Trump’s nonchalance looks myopic.
For all its ponderous officialdom, the Pen-
tagon also has an especially clear chain of
command. What the man at the top con-
siders important—or unimportant—there-
fore matters a great deal. Mr Trump might
not hobble the armed forces’ efforts to deal
with the consequences of climate change.
But a more farsighted commander-in-chief
would be adding to their armour. 7T
HREE days after Nikolas Cruz walked
into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High
School in Florida and shot dead 14 students
and three teachers, one of his former
schoolmates addressed a gun-control rally.
“They say that tougher gun laws do not
prevent gun violence,” shouted 18-year-old
Emma Gonzales, barely pausing to wipe
away the tears that were streaming down
her face. “We call BS!” Her moving speech,
in which that line became a refrain taken
up by a chanting crowd, was broadcast
around the world.
The school shooting, on February 14th,
was America’s deadliest since 2012 when a
gunman killed 20 children, six adults and
himself at Sandy Hook Elementary School
in Connecticut. But it has been the re-
sponse of the surviving students, rather
than its grim toll, that has kept the tragedy
in the news a little longer than usual. The
pupils, from Broward County, an affluent
area north of Miami, have poured their
grief and rage into a new campaign for gun
control. In television interviews, speeches
and social-media poststhey have excoriat-
ed politicians who take cash from the Na-
tional Rifle Association and argue against
expanding gun controls. With other activ-
ists, they have announced plans for nation-
wide protests in March.
Why has their response been so force-
ful? One reason is the age of the survivors.The pupils, in theirlate teens, started their
education after a massacre at Columbine
High School in Colorado in 1999, in which
13 were killed. That means they have been
practising active-shooter drills in the class-
room since kindergarten. Seeing a school
shooting as an event to prepare for, rather
than an awful aberration, seems to have
fuelled the students’ anger. Though polling
suggests that young people are only slight-
ly more in favour of gun-control measures
than their elders, those surveys focus on
those aged 18 and above. There may be a
pre- and post-Columbine divide within
that group.
The survivors ofthe latestschool shoot-
ing have also grown up using social media,
which has helped them channel their rage
into a potent hashtag movement, #Never-
Again. And they have, at a formative age,
witnessed the visual power of mass prot-
est, thanks to the #MeToo movement and
the women’s marches of the past two Janu-
arys. Indeed, they have received help from
its organisers, as well as other groups, for
the “March for Our Lives” planned in
Washington, DC, on March 24th.
What will the teenagers’ impressive
campaigning achieve? Some politicians
seem to have taken note, at least. Marco Ru-
bio, a Republican senator from Florida, has
said he welcomes a Democratic bill in the
state legislature thatwould allow Florida’s
courts to temporarily prevent people from
having guns if they are considered a threat
to themselves or others.
President Donald Trump, who waited
20 hours before addressing America about
the tragedy but is unlikely to have missed
the students on the Sunday talk shows,
said he backed a bill to improve back-
ground checks on those who buy firearms.
Then he said more teachers should be
armed. The president has ordered the De-
partment of Justice to propose regulations
to ban bump-stocks, which can help con-
vert semi-automatic firearms into auto-
matic ones, and which were used by a gun-
man who killed 58 people in Las Vegas in
October. Congress talked about banning
them then, but did nothing. In any case, a
bump-stock ban would have made no dif-
ference in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas
shooting, which was carried out with a
semi-automaticAR-15 rifle.
More stringent gun controls, of the kind
introduced by Australia and Britain after
mass-shooting atrocities, are unlikely to
come soon. But the national protests the
students are planning for next month
could gather momentum. A new poll by
Quinnipiac University suggested that 67%
of Americans back a nationwide ban on
assaultrifles—a higher percentage than
after Sandy Hook. And in Florida, the issue
could become prominent in the mid-term
elections later this year, especially if, as
seems likely, Rick Scott, the state’s gun-lov-
ing governor, runs for the Senate. 7Guns and protestCalling BS
WASHINGTON, DC
The planned protests byhigh-school
children could be the start of somethingPolitically motivated