New Republic - Bill McKibben*
We're under attack from climate change—and our only hope is to mobilize like we did in WWII.
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| Andrew Colin Beck |
In the
North this summer, a devastating offensive is underway. Enemy forces
have seized huge swaths of territory; with each passing week, another
22,000 square miles of Arctic ice
disappears.
Experts dispatched to the battlefield in July saw little cause for
hope, especially since this siege is one of the oldest fronts in the
war. "In 30 years, the area has shrunk approximately by half," said a
scientist who examined the onslaught. "There doesn't seem anything able
to stop this."
In the Pacific this spring, the enemy staged a daring breakout across thousands of miles of ocean, waging a full-scale
assault
on the region's coral reefs. In a matter of months, long stretches of
formations like the Great Barrier Reef—dating back past the start of
human civilization and visible from space—were reduced to
white bone-yards.
Day
after day, week after week, saboteurs behind our lines are unleashing a
series of brilliant and overwhelming attacks. In the past few months
alone, our foes have used a firestorm to force the total
evacuation
of a city of 90,000 in Canada, drought to ravage crops to the point
where southern Africans are literally eating their seed corn, and floods
to threaten the priceless repository of art in the
Louvre. The enemy is even deploying biological weapons to spread psychological terror: The
Zika virus,
loaded like a bomb into a growing army of mosquitoes, has shrunk the
heads of newborn babies across an entire continent; panicked health
ministers in seven countries are now
urging women not to get pregnant. And as in all conflicts, millions of
refugees are fleeing the horrors of
war, their numbers swelling daily as they're forced to abandon their homes to escape famine and desolation and disease.
World War III is well and truly underway. And we are losing.
For years, our leaders chose to ignore the warnings of our
best scientists and top
military strategists.
Global warming, they told us, was beginning a stealth campaign that
would lay waste to vast stretches of the planet, uprooting and killing
millions of innocent civilians. But instead of paying heed and taking
obvious precautions, we chose to strengthen the enemy with our endless
combustion; a billion explosions of a billion pistons inside a billion
cylinders have fueled a global threat as lethal as the mushroom-shaped
nuclear explosions we long feared. Carbon and methane now represent the
deadliest enemy of all time, the first force fully capable of harrying,
scattering, and impoverishing our entire civilization.
It's not that global warming is like a world war. It is a world war. And we are losing.
We're used to war as metaphor: the war on
poverty,
the war on drugs, the war on cancer. Usually this is just a rhetorical
device, a way of saying, "We need to focus our attention and marshal our
forces to fix something we don't like." But this is no metaphor. By
most of the ways we measure wars, climate change is the real deal:
Carbon and methane are seizing physical territory, sowing havoc and
panic, racking up casualties, and even
destabilizing
governments. (Over the past few years, record-setting droughts have
helped undermine the brutal strongman of Syria and fuel the rise of
Boko Haram in Nigeria.) It's not that global warming is
like a world war. It
is a world war. Its first
victims,
ironically, are those who have done the least to cause the crisis. But
it's a world war aimed at us all. And if we lose, we will be as
decimated and helpless as the losers in every conflict--except that this
time, there will be no winners, and no end to the planetwide occupation
that follows.
The question is not, are we in a world war?
The question is, will we fight back? And if we do, can we actually
defeat an enemy as powerful and inexorable as the laws of physics?
To
answer those questions—to assess, honestly and objectively, our odds of
victory in this new world war—we must look to the last one.
For
four years, the United States was focused on a single, all-consuming
goal, to the exclusion of any other concern: defeating the global threat
posed by Germany, Italy, and Japan. Unlike Adolf Hitler, the last force
to pose a planetwide threat to civilization, our enemy today is neither
sentient nor evil. But before the outbreak of World War II, the world's
leaders committed precisely the same mistake we are making today—they
tried first to ignore their foe, and then to appease him.
Eager
to sidestep the conflict, England initially treated the Nazis as
rational actors, assuming that they would play by the existing rules of
the game. That's why Neville Chamberlain came home from Munich to
cheering crowds: Constrained by Britain's military weakness and imperial
overreach, he did what he thought necessary to satisfy Hitler. Surely,
the thinking went, the dictator would now see reason.
But
Hitler was playing by his own set of rules, which meant he had contempt
for the political "realism" of other leaders. (Indeed, it meant their
realism wasn't.) Carbon and methane, by contrast, offer not contempt but
complete indifference: They couldn't care less about our insatiable
desires as consumers, or the sunk cost of our fossil fuel
infrastructure, or the geostrategic location of the petro-states, or any
of the host of excuses that have so far constrained our response to
global warming. The world came back from signing the climate accord in
Paris last December exactly as Chamberlain returned from Munich:
hopeful,
even exhilarated, that a major threat had finally been tackled. Paul
Krugman, summing up the world's conventional wisdom, post-Paris,
concluded
that climate change "can be avoided with fairly modest, politically
feasible steps. You may want a revolution, but we don't need one to save
the planet." All it would take, he insisted, is for America to
implement Obama's plan for clean power, and to continue "guiding the
world as a whole toward sharp reductions in emissions," as it had in
Paris.
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| Andrew Colin Beck |
This is, simply put, as wrong as Chamberlain's "peace in our time." Even
if every nation in the world complies with the Paris Agreement, the
world will heat up by as much as 3.5 degrees Celsius by 2100—not the 1.5
to 2 degrees promised in the pact's preamble. And it may be too late
already to meet that stated target: We actually flirted with that
1.5 degree
line at the height of the El Niño warming in February, a mere 60 days
after the world's governments solemnly pledged their best efforts to
slow global warming. Our leaders have been anticipating what French
strategists in World War II called the
guerre du longue durée, even as each new edition of
Science or
Nature makes clear that climate change is mounting an all-out blitzkrieg, setting new
record highs for global temperatures in each of the past 14 months.
Not long after Paris, earth scientists announced that the West
Antarctic ice sheet is nowhere near as stable as we had hoped; if we
keep pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, it will shed ice much
faster than previous research had predicted. At an insurance industry
conference in April, a federal official
described the new data as "an OMG thing." "The long-term effect,"
The New York Times reported,
"would
likely be to drown the world's coastlines, including many of its great
cities." If Nazis were the ones threatening destruction on such a global
scale today, America and its allies would already be mobilizing for a
full-scale war.
The Antarctic research did contain, as the
Times
reported, one morsel of good news. Yes, following the Paris accord
would doom much of the Antarctic—but a "far more stringent effort to
limit emissions of greenhouse gases would stand a fairly good chance of
saving West Antarctica from collapse."
What would that "far more
stringent effort" require? For years now, climate scientists and leading
economists have called for treating climate change with the same
resolve we brought to bear on Germany and Japan in the last world war.
In July, the Democratic Party issued a
platform
that called for a World War II–type national mobilization to save
civilization from the "catastrophic consequences" of a "global climate
emergency." In fact, Hillary Clinton's negotiators agreed to plans for
an urgent summit "in the first hundred days of the next administration"
where the president will convene "the world's best engineers, climate
scientists, policy experts, activists, and indigenous communities to
chart a course to solve the climate crisis."
But what would
that actually look like? What would it mean to mobilize for World War
III on the same scale as we did for the last world war?
As
it happens, American scientists have been engaged in a quiet but
concentrated effort to figure out how quickly existing technology can be
deployed to defeat global warming; a modest start, in effect, for a
mighty Manhattan Project. Mark Z.
Jacobson,
a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford
University and the director of its Atmosphere and Energy Program, has
been working for years with a team of experts to calculate precisely how
each of the 50 states could power itself from renewable resources. The
numbers
are remarkably detailed: In Alabama, for example, residential rooftops
offer a total of 59.7 square kilometers that are unshaded by trees and
pointed in the right direction for solar panels. Taken together,
Jacobson's work demonstrates conclusively that America could generate 80
to 85 percent of its power from sun, wind, and water by 2030, and 100
percent by 2050. In the past year, the Stanford team has offered similar
plans for 139 nations around the world.
The
research delves deep into the specifics of converting to clean energy.
Would it take too much land? The Stanford numbers show that you would
need about four-tenths of one percent of America's landmass to produce
enough renewable energy, mostly from sprawling solar power stations. Do
we have enough raw materials? "We looked at that in some detail and we
aren't too worried," says Jacobson. "For instance, you need neodymium
for wind turbines—but there's seven times more of it than you'd need to
power half the world. Electric cars take lithium for batteries—but
there's enough lithium just in the known resources for three billion
cars, and at the moment we only have 800 million."
But
would the Stanford plan be enough to slow global warming? Yes, says
Jacobson: If we move quickly enough to meet the goal of 80 percent clean
power by 2030, then the world's carbon dioxide levels would fall below
the relative safety of 350 parts per million by the end of the century.
The planet would stop heating up, or at least the pace of that heating
would slow substantially. That's as close to winning this war as we
could plausibly get. We'd endure lots of damage in the meantime, but not
the civilization-scale destruction we currently face. (Even if all of
the world's nations meet the pledges they made in the Paris accord,
carbon dioxide is currently on a path to
hit
500 or 600 parts per million by century's end—a path if not to hell,
then to someplace with a similar setting on the thermostat.)
Defeating the Nazis required more than brave soldiers. It required a wholesale industrial retooling.
To
make the Stanford plan work, you would need to build a hell of a lot of
factories to turn out thousands of acres of solar panels, and wind
turbines the length of football fields, and millions and millions of
electric cars and buses. But here again, experts have already begun to
crunch the numbers. Tom Solomon, a retired engineer who oversaw the
construction of one of the largest factories built in recent
years—Intel's mammoth Rio Rancho semiconductor plant in New Mexico—took
Jacobson's research and calculated how much clean energy America would
need to produce by 2050 to completely replace fossil fuels. The answer:
6,448 gigawatts.
"Last year we installed 16 gigawatts of
clean power," Solomon says. "So at that pace, it would take 405 years.
Which is kind of too long."
So Solomon did the math to
figure out how many factories it would take to produce 6,448 gigawatts
of clean energy in the next 35 years. He started by looking at
SolarCity, a clean-energy company that is currently building the
nation's biggest solar panel factory in
Buffalo.
"They're calling it the giga-factory," Solomon says, "because the
panels it builds will produce one gigawatt worth of solar power every
year." Using the SolarCity plant as a rough yardstick, Solomon
calculates that America needs 295 solar factories of a similar size to
defeat climate change—roughly six per state—plus a similar effort for
wind turbines.
Building these factories doesn't require any
new technology. In fact, the effort would be much the same as the one
that Solomon oversaw at Intel's semiconductor factory in New Mexico:
Pick a site with good roads and a good technical school nearby to supply
the workforce; find trained local contractors who can deal with
everything from rebar to HVAC; get the local permits; order
long-lead-time items like I-beam steel; level the ground and excavate;
lay foundations and floors; build walls, columns, and a roof;
"facilitate each of the stations for factory machine tooling with
plumbing, piping, and electrical wiring"; and train a workforce of
1,500. To match the flow of panels needed to meet the Stanford targets,
in the most intense years of construction we need to erect 30 of these
solar panel factories a year, plus another 15 for making wind turbines.
"It's at the upper end of what I could possibly imagine," Solomon says.
Turning
out more solar panels and wind turbines may not sound like warfare, but
it's exactly what won World War II: not just massive invasions and
pitched tank battles and ferocious aerial bombardments, but the
wholesale industrial retooling that was needed to build weapons and
supply troops on a previously unprecedented scale. Defeating the Nazis
required more than brave soldiers. It required building big factories,
and building them really, really fast.
In 1941, the
world's largest industrial plant under a single roof went up in six
months near Ypsilanti, Michigan; Charles Lindbergh called it the "Grand
Canyon of the mechanized world." Within months, it was churning out a
B-24 Liberator bomber every hour. Bombers! Huge, complicated planes,
endlessly more intricate than solar panels or turbine blades—containing
1,225,000 parts, 313,237 rivets. Nearby, in Warren, Michigan, the Army
built a tank factory faster than they could build the power plant to run
it—so they simply towed a steam locomotive into one end of the building
to provide steam heat and electricity. That one factory produced more
tanks than the Germans built in the entire course of the war.
It
wasn't just weapons. In another corner of Michigan, a radiator company
landed a contract for more than 20 million steel helmets; not far away, a
rubber factory retooled to produce millions of helmet
liners. The
company that used to supply fabrics for Ford's seat cushions went into
parachute production. Nothing went to waste--when car companies stopped
making cars for the duration of the fighting, GM found it had thousands
of 1939 model-year ashtrays piled up in inventory. So it shipped them
out to Seattle, where Boeing put them in long-range bombers headed for
the Pacific. Pontiac made anti-aircraft guns; Oldsmobile churned out
cannons; Studebaker built engines for Flying Fortresses; Nash-Kelvinator
produced propellers for British de Havillands; Hudson Motors fabricated
wings for Helldivers and P-38 fighters; Buick manufactured tank
destroyers; Fisher Body built thousands of M4 Sherman tanks; Cadillac
turned out more than 10,000 light tanks. And that was just Detroit—the
same sort of industrial mobilization took place all across America.
According
to the conventional view of World War II, American business made all
this happen simply because it rolled up its sleeves and went to war. As
is so often the case, however, the conventional view is mostly wrong.
Yes, there are endless newsreels from the era of patriotic businessmen
unrolling blueprints and switching on assembly lines—but that's largely
because those businessmen paid for the films. Their PR departments also
put out their own radio serials with titles like "Victory Is Their
Business," and "War of Enterprise," and published endless newspaper ads
boasting of their own patriotism. In reality, many of America's captains
of industry didn't want much to do with the war until they were
dragooned into it. Henry Ford, who built and managed that Ypsilanti
bomber plant, was an America Firster who urged his countrymen to stay
out of the war; the Chamber of Commerce (now a leading opponent of
climate action) fought to block FDR's Lend-Lease program to help the
imperiled British. "American businessmen oppose American involvement in
any foreign war," the Chamber's president explained to Congress.
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| Andrew Colin Beck |
Luckily,
Roosevelt had a firm enough grip on Congress to overcome the Chamber,
and he took the lead in gearing up America for the battles to come. Mark
Wilson, a historian at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte,
has just finished a decade-long study of the mobilization effort,
entitled
Destructive Creation. It details how the
federal government birthed a welter of new agencies with names like the
War Production Board and the Defense Plant Corporation; the latter,
between 1940 and 1945, spent $9 billion on 2,300 projects in 46 states,
building factories it then leased to private industry. By war's end, the
government had a dominant position in everything from aircraft
manufacturing to synthetic rubber production.
"It was
public capital that built most of the stuff, not Wall Street," says
Wilson. "And at the top level of logistics and supply-chain management,
the military was the boss. They placed the contracts, they moved the
stuff around." The feds acted aggressively—they would cancel contracts
as war needs changed, tossing factories full of people abruptly out of
work. If firms refused to take direction, FDR ordered many of them
seized. Though companies made money, there was little in the way of
profiteering—bad memories from World War I, Wilson says, led to "robust
profit controls," which were mostly accepted by America's industrial
tycoons. In many cases, federal authorities purposely set up competition
between public operations and private factories: The Portsmouth Naval
Shipyard built submarines, but so did Electric Boat of Groton,
Connecticut. "They were both quite impressive and productive," Wilson
says.
"Usually, when people from different worlds are
dealing with each other, they get into conflicts and then dig in their
heels deeper," Berk says. "But because the stakes are so high and it's
moving so fast, no one doubts that if you don't get a handle on this
battle in the Atlantic, then the immediate consequences will be really
grave. So they're willing to do this kind of pragmatic trial and error.
They start to see that 'I can't dig in my heels--I need this other
person to learn from.'" In the face of a common enemy, Americans worked
together in a way they never had before.
That
attitude quickly reset after the war, of course; solidarity gave way to
the biggest boom in personal consumption the world had ever seen, as
car-packed suburbs sprawled from every city and women were retired to
the kitchen. Business, eager to redeem its isolationist image and shake
off New Deal restrictions, sold itself as the hero of the war effort,
patriotic industrialists who had overcome mountains of government red
tape to get the job done. And the modest "operations researchers," who
had entered and learned from the real world when they managed radar
development during the war, retreated to their ivory towers and became
much grander "systems analysts" once the conflict ended. Robert
McNamara, a former Ford executive, brought an entire wing of the Rand
Corporation to the Defense Department during the Kennedy administration,
where the think-tank experts promptly privatized most of the government
shipyards and plane factories, and used their out-of-touch computer
models to screw up government programs like Model Cities, the ambitious
attempt at urban rehabilitation during the War on Poverty. "The systems
analysts completely took over," Berk says, "and the program largely
failed for that reason."
Today we live in the
privatized, siloed, business-dominated world that took root under
McNamara and flourished under Reagan. The actual wars we fight are
marked by profiteering, and employ as many private contractors as they
do soldiers. Our spirit of social solidarity is, to put it mildly, thin.
(The modern-day equivalent of Father Coughlin is now the Republican
candidate for president.) So it's reasonable to ask if we can find the
collective will to fight back in this war against global warming, as we
once fought fascism.
For starters, it's important to remember
that a truly global mobilization to defeat climate change wouldn't wreck
our economy or throw coal miners out of work. Quite the contrary:
Gearing up to stop global warming would provide a host of social and
economic benefits, just as World War II did. It would save lives. (A
worldwide switch to renewable energy would cut air pollution deaths by 4
to 7 million a year, according to the Stanford data.) It would produce
an awful lot of jobs. (An estimated net gain of roughly two million in
the United States alone.) It would provide safer, better-paying
employment to energy workers. (A new study by Michigan Technological
University found that we could retrain everyone in the coal fields to
work in solar power for as little as $181 million, and the guy
installing solar panels on a roof averages about $4,000 more a year than
the guy risking his life down in the hole.) It would rescue the world's
struggling economies. (British economist Nicholas Stern
calculates
that the economic impacts of unchecked global warming could far exceed
those of the world wars or the Great Depression.) And fighting this war
would be socially transformative. (Just as World War II sped up the push
for racial and gender equality, a climate campaign should focus its
first efforts on the frontline communities most poisoned by the fossil
fuel era. It would help ease income inequality with higher employment,
revive our hollowed-out rural states with wind farms, and transform our
decaying suburbs with real investments in public transit.)
There
are powerful forces, of course, that stand in the way of a full-scale
mobilization. If you add up every last coal mine and filling station in
the world, governments and corporations have spent $20 trillion on
fossil fuel infrastructure. "No country will walk away from such
investments,"
writes Vaclav Smil, a Canadian energy expert. As investigative journalists have shown over the past year, the oil giant Exxon
knew
all about global warming for decades—yet spent millions to spread
climate-denial propaganda. The only way to overcome that concerted
opposition—from the very same industrial forces that opposed America's
entry into World War II—is to adopt a wartime mentality, rewriting the
old mindset that stands in the way of victory. "The first step is we
have to win," says Jonathan Koomey, an energy researcher at Stanford
University. "That is, we have to have broad acceptance among the broader
political community that we need urgent action, not just nibbling
around the edges, which is what the D.C. crowd still thinks."
FDR geared up early: The ships and planes that won the Battle of Midway were all built before Pearl Harbor.
That
political will is starting to build, just as it began to gather in the
years before Pearl Harbor. A widespread movement has killed off the
Keystone pipeline, stymied Arctic drilling, and
banned
fracking in key states and countries. As one oil industry official
lamented in July, "The 'keep-it-in-the-ground' campaign" has "controlled
the conversation." This resembles, at least a little, the way FDR
actually started gearing up for war 18 months before the "date which
will live in infamy." The ships and planes that won the Battle of Midway
six months into 1942 had all been built before the Japanese attacked
Hawaii. "By the time of Pearl Harbor," Wilson says, "the government had
pretty much solved the problem of organization. After that, they just
said, 'We're going to have to make twice as much.'"
Pearl Harbor
did
make individual Americans willing to do hard things: pay more in taxes,
buy billions upon billions in war bonds, endure the shortages and
disruptions that came when the country's entire economy converted to
wartime production. Use of public transit went up 87 percent during the
war, as Naomi Klein points out in
This Changes Everything;
40
percent of the nation's vegetables were grown in victory gardens. For
the first time, women and minorities were able to get good factory jobs;
Rosie the Riveter changed our sense of what was possible.
Without
a Pearl Harbor, in fact, there was only so much even FDR could have
accomplished. So far, there has been no equivalent in the climate war—no
single moment that galvanizes the world to realize that nothing short
of total war will save civilization. Perhaps the closest we've come to
FDR's "date of infamy" speech—and it wasn't all that close—was when
Bernie Sanders,
in the first debate, was asked to name the biggest security threat
facing the planet. "Climate change," he replied—prompting all the usual
suspects to tut-tut that he was soft on "radical Islamic terrorism."
Then, in the second debate, the question came up again, a day after the
Paris massacres. "Do you still believe that?" the moderator asked, in
gotcha mode. "Absolutely,"
replied Sanders, who then proceeded to give an accurate account of how record drought will lead to international instability.
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| Andrew Colin Beck |
Had
he won, it's possible that Bernie could have combined his focus on jobs
and climate and infrastructure into some kind of overarching effort
that really mattered—he was, after all, the presidential candidate most
comfortable with big government since FDR. Donald Trump, of course, will
dodge this war just as he did Vietnam. He thinks (if that's actually
the right verb) that climate change is a
hoax
manufactured by the Chinese, who apparently in their Oriental slyness
convinced the polar ice caps to go along with their conspiracy.
Clinton's advisers originally promised there would be a "climate war
room" in her White House, but then corrected the record: It would
actually be a "
climate map room," which sounds somewhat less gung ho.
In
fact, one of the lowest points in my years of fighting climate change
came in late June, when I sat on the commission appointed to draft the
Democratic Party platform. (I was a Sanders appointee, alongside Cornel
West and other luminaries.) At 11 p.m. on a Friday night, in a mostly
deserted hotel ballroom in St. Louis, I was given an hour to offer nine
amendments to the platform to address climate change. More bike paths
passed by unanimous consent, but all the semi-hard things that might
begin to make a real difference—a fracking ban, a carbon tax, a
prohibition against drilling or mining fossil fuels on public lands, a
climate litmus test for new developments, an end to World Bank financing
of fossil fuel plants—were
defeated by 7–6 tallies, with the Clinton appointees voting as a bloc. They were quite concerned about climate change, they insisted, but a "
phased-down"
approach would be best. There was the faintest whiff of Munich about
it. Like Chamberlain, these were all good and concerned people, just the
sort of steady, evenhanded folks you'd like to have leading your nation
in normal times. But they misunderstood the nature of the enemy. Like
fascism, climate change is one of those rare crises that gets stronger
if you don't attack. In every war, there are very real tipping points,
past which victory, or even a draw, will become impossible. And when the
enemy manages to decimate some of the planet's oldest and most
essential physical features—a polar ice cap, say, or the Pacific's coral
reefs—that's a pretty good sign that a tipping point is near. In this
war that we're in—the war that physics is fighting hard, and that we
aren't—winning slowly is exactly the same as losing.
To
my surprise, things changed a couple weeks later, when the final
deliberations over the Democratic platform were held in Orlando. While
Clinton's negotiators still wouldn't support a ban on fracking or a
carbon tax, they did
agree
we needed to "price" carbon, that wind and sun should be given priority
over natural gas, and that any federal policy that worsened global
warming should be rejected.
Maybe it was polls showing that
Bernie voters—especially young ones—have been slow to sign on to the
Clinton campaign. Maybe the
hottest June in American history had opened some minds. But you could, if you squinted, create a hopeful scenario. Clinton, for instance,
promised
that America will install half a billion solar panels in the next four
years. That's not so far off the curve that Tom Solomon calculates we
need to hit. And if we do it by building solar factories of our own,
rather than importing cheap foreign-made panels, we'll be positioning
America as the world's dominant power in clean energy, just as our
mobilization in World War II ensured our economic might for two
generations. If we don't get there first, others will: Driven by anger
over smog-choked cities, the Chinese have already begun installing
renewable energy at
a world-beating rate.
In this war we're in—the war that physics is fighting hard, and that we aren't—winning slowly is the same as losing.
"It
would be a grave mistake for the United States to wait for another
nation to take the lead in combating the global climate emergency," the
Democratic
platform
asserts. "We are committed to a national mobilization, and to leading a
global effort to mobilize nations to address this threat on a scale not
seen since World War II."
The next president doesn't have to wait
for a climate equivalent of Pearl Harbor to galvanize Congress. Much of
what we need to do can—and must—be accomplished immediately, through
the same use of executive action that FDR relied on to lay the
groundwork for a wider mobilization. The president could immediately put
a halt to drilling and mining on public lands and waters, which contain
at least half of all the untapped carbon left in America. She could
slow the build-out of the natural gas system simply by correcting the
outmoded way the EPA calculates the warming effect of methane, just as
Obama
reined in
coal-fired power plants. She could tell her various commissioners to
put a stop to the federal practice of rubber-stamping new fossil fuel
projects, rejecting those that would "significantly exacerbate" global
warming. She could instruct every federal agency to buy all their power
from green sources and rely exclusively on plug-in cars, creating new
markets overnight. She could set a price on carbon for her agencies to
follow internally, even without the congressional action that probably
won't be forthcoming. And just as FDR brought in experts from the
private sector to plan for the defense build-out, she could get the
blueprints for a full-scale climate mobilization in place even as she
rallies the political will to make them plausible. Without the same
urgency and foresight displayed by FDR—without immediate executive
action—we will lose this war.
Normally
in wartime, defeatism is a great sin. Luckily, though, you can't give
aid and comfort to carbon; it has no morale to boost. So we can be
totally honest. We've waited so long to fight back in this war that
total victory is impossible, and total defeat can't be ruled out.
While
the Democrats were meeting in that depressing St. Louis hotel room last
June, I had my laptop open. Even as they voted down one measure after
another to combat climate change, news kept coming in from the front
lines:
In
Japan,
700,000 people were told to evacuate their homes after record rainfall
led to severe flooding and landslides. The deluge continued for five
days; at its peak, nearly six inches of rain were falling every hour.
In California, thousands of homes were threatened in a
wildfire
described by the local fire chief as "one of the most devastating I've
ever seen." Suburban tracts looked like Dresden after the bombing.
Planes and helicopters buzzed overhead, dropping bright plumes of
chemical retardants; if the "Flight of the Valkyries" had been playing,
it could have been a scene from
Apocalypse Now.
And in
West Virginia,
a "one in a thousand year" storm dropped historic rain across the
mountains, triggering record floods that killed dozens. "You can see
people in the second-story windows waiting to be evacuated," one local
official
reported. A particularly dramatic
video—a kind of YouTube
Guernica
for our moment—showed a large house being consumed by flames as it was
swept down a rampaging river until it crashed into a bridge. "Everybody
lost everything," one dazed resident said. "We never thought it would be
this bad." A state trooper was even more succinct. "It looks like a war
zone," he said.
Because it is.
*Bill McKibben is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and co-founder of the climate group 350.org.
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