The raging wildfires in California are further proof that global warming, even beyond the coronavirus pandemic, is the "number one threat to our nation and to our world," Former Department of Homeland Secretary Jeh Johnson said Friday.
"We are failing to address it," Johnson told MSNBC "Morning Joe" host Joe Scarborough. "As (President) Barack Obama used to say, it is a slow-moving emergency."
Political leaders "always deal with the thing that is at the top of their inbox now," and that is a problem when it comes to global warming, the former secretary added.
"This has been a crisis for some time now that we are failing to address and we are seeing the evidence of it more and more, year after year," said Johnson.
The novel coronavirus is also a serious threat to national security, he added.
"Anything that has the ability to kill 200,000 people in seven months is a national security disaster," said Johnson. "There need to be lessons learned from this crisis. This was an unprecedented crisis but not an unanticipated one. We learned a lot from the Ebola experience in 2014."
The coronavirus pandemic is a crisis on a much larger scale, he added, but the lesson that has been learned is that national leadership and the messages on the crisis matter.
It is "horribly depressing" that the United States, the nation with the most powerful healthcare apparatus, has had the poorest response to the virus, Johnson said.
"Put aside what President (Donald) Trump apparently told Bob Woodward on February 7th or March 19th, by mid-April, we knew what we should do to flatten this curve," said Johnson.
The former secretary is also worried about the clear intelligence that Russia and other foreign actors are trying to manipulate the fall election, as 19 years ago, there was also intelligence that pointed to the 9/11 attacks.
"Those who don't know history are bound to repeat it," he warned.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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