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We Need to Literally Declare War on Climate Change [1]

['Bill Mckibben', 'Illustrations Andrew Colin Beck']

Date: 2016-08-15

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.’”

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[1] Url: https://newrepublic.com/article/135684/declare-war-climate-change-mobilize-wwii

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