WASHINGTON - — WASHINGTON - - After months of promoting President Barack Obama's climate plan as a vehicle for creating millions of clean-energy jobs, supporters of the legislation are increasingly pushing another strategy: promoting its benefits for national security.
It's a deliberate, anxiety-themed effort to pressure a handful of fence-sitting moderates to support a bill that is likely to be the Obama administration's next great legislative push after health care.
A coalition backing the energy and climate bill pending before the Senate has enlisted war veterans to pressure senators in person. In TV ads, they call foreign oil dependence a threat to national security and fuel for terrorists.
Other new ads feature ominous pictures of angry Middle Eastern crowds and impoverished "climate refugees," many of them apparently African.
One recent poll tested voter opinions on the argument global warming will "destabilize developing countries, creating the conditions for war, become a breeding ground for terrorism and lead to mass movements of people from places like Mexico and Central America that will overwhelm our borders."
The poll found voters agreed far more with that argument than with one echoing Republicans' arguments against the bill - chiefly, that it would raise energy prices and kill American jobs.
Buoyed by the poll results, climate bill supporters are fusing their security messages with their ongoing focus on the economic future of industries such as wind turbine and solar panel manufacturing.
Critics mock the argument it would boost U.S. security.
"Passing the bill would create far more severe, dangerous, and imminent global crises," James Jay Carafano, a researcher for the conservative Heritage Foundation, wrote last month.
He added: "The law would ensure a steep decline in U.S. economic competitiveness and military preparedness. The consequences of a weak America would inevitably lead to a string of national security crises and an undermining of the nation's capacity to deal with natural disasters here and abroad."
