{"id":77801,"date":"2016-08-22T12:00:44","date_gmt":"2016-08-22T11:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=77801"},"modified":"2016-08-18T13:56:37","modified_gmt":"2016-08-18T12:56:37","slug":"a-world-at-war-were-under-attack-from-climate-change-and-our-only-hope-is-to-mobilize-like-we-did-in-wwii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/08\/a-world-at-war-were-under-attack-from-climate-change-and-our-only-hope-is-to-mobilize-like-we-did-in-wwii\/","title":{"rendered":"A World at War: We\u2019re under Attack from Climate Change\u2014And Our only Hope Is to Mobilize like We Did in WWII"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"wind<\/a><\/p>\n

In the North this summer, a devastating offensive is underway. <\/em><\/p>\n

15 Aug 2016 – <\/em>Enemy forces have seized huge swaths of territory; with each passing week, another 22,000 square miles of Arctic ice\u00a0disappears<\/a>. 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. \u201cIn 30 years, the area has shrunk approximately by half,\u201d said a scientist who examined the onslaught. \u201cThere doesn\u2019t seem anything able to stop this.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the Pacific this spring, the enemy staged a daring breakout across thousands of miles of ocean, waging a full-scale\u00a0assault<\/a>\u00a0on the region\u2019s coral reefs. In a matter of months, long stretches of formations like the Great Barrier Reef\u2014dating back past the start of human civilization and visible from space\u2014were reduced to\u00a0white bone-yards<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0evacuation<\/a>\u00a0of 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\u00a0Louvre<\/a>. The enemy is even deploying biological weapons to spread psychological terror: The\u00a0Zika virus<\/a>, 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\u00a0urging<\/a>\u00a0women not to get pregnant. And as in all conflicts, millions of\u00a0refugees<\/a>are fleeing the horrors of\u00a0war<\/a>, their numbers swelling daily as they\u2019re forced to abandon their homes to escape famine and desolation and disease.<\/p>\n

World War III is well and truly underway. And we are losing.<\/em><\/p>\n

For years, our leaders chose to ignore the warnings of our\u00a0best scientists<\/a>\u00a0and top military strategists<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not that global warming is\u00a0like\u00a0a world war. It\u00a0is\u00a0a world war. And we are losing.\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

We\u2019re used to war as metaphor: the war on\u00a0poverty<\/a>, the war on drugs, the war on cancer. Usually this is just a rhetorical device, a way of saying, \u201cWe need to focus our attention and marshal our forces to fix something we don\u2019t like.\u201d 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\u00a0destabilizing<\/a>\u00a0governments. (Over the past few years, record-setting droughts have helped undermine the brutal strongman of Syria and fuel the rise of\u00a0Boko Haram<\/a>\u00a0in Nigeria.) It\u2019s not that global warming is\u00a0like<\/em>\u00a0a world war. It\u00a0is<\/em>\u00a0a world war. Its first\u00a0victims<\/a>, ironically, are those who have done the least to cause the crisis. But it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

To answer those questions\u2014to assess, honestly and objectively<\/strong>, our odds of victory in this new world war\u2014we must look to the last one.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s leaders committed precisely the same mistake we are making today\u2014they tried first to ignore their foe, and then to appease him.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s why Neville Chamberlain came home from Munich to cheering crowds: Constrained by Britain\u2019s military weakness and imperial overreach, he did what he thought necessary to satisfy Hitler. Surely, the thinking went, the dictator would now see reason.<\/p>\n

But Hitler was playing by his own set of rules, which meant he had contempt for the political \u201crealism\u201d of other leaders. (Indeed, it meant their realism wasn\u2019t.) Carbon and methane, by contrast, offer not contempt but complete indifference: They couldn\u2019t 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\u00a0Paris<\/a>\u00a0last December exactly as Chamberlain returned from Munich:\u00a0hopeful<\/a>, even exhilarated, that a major threat had finally been tackled. Paul Krugman, summing up the world\u2019s conventional wisdom, post-Paris,\u00a0concluded<\/a>\u00a0that climate change \u201ccan be avoided with fairly modest, politically feasible steps. You may want a revolution, but we don\u2019t need one to save the planet.\u201d All it would take, he insisted, is for America to implement Obama\u2019s plan for clean power, and to continue \u201cguiding the world as a whole toward sharp reductions in emissions,\u201d as it had in Paris.<\/p>\n

\"wind<\/a><\/p>\n

This is, simply put, as wrong as Chamberlain\u2019s \u201cpeace in our time.\u201d 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\u2014not the 1.5 to 2 degrees promised in the pact\u2019s preamble. And it may be too late already to meet that stated target: We actually flirted with that\u00a01.5 degree<\/a>\u00a0line at the height of the El Ni\u00f1o warming in February, a mere 60 days after the world\u2019s governments solemnly pledged their best efforts to slow global warming. Our leaders have been anticipating what French strategists in World War II called the\u00a0guerre du longue dur\u00e9e<\/em>, even as each new edition of\u00a0Science<\/em>\u00a0orNature<\/em>\u00a0makes clear that climate change is mounting an all-out blitzkrieg, setting newrecord<\/a>\u00a0highs for global temperatures in each of the past 14 months.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0described<\/a>\u00a0the new data as \u201can OMG thing.\u201d \u201cThe long-term effect,\u201d\u00a0The New York Times\u00a0<\/em>reported<\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>\u201cwould likely be to drown the world\u2019s coastlines, including many of its great cities.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

The Antarctic research did contain, as the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0reported,<\/strong> one morsel of good news. Yes, following the Paris accord would doom much of the Antarctic\u2014but a \u201cfar more stringent effort to limit emissions of greenhouse gases would stand a fairly good chance of saving West Antarctica from collapse.\u201d<\/p>\n

What would that \u201cfar more stringent effort\u201d 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\u00a0platform<\/a>\u00a0that called for a World War II\u2013type national mobilization to save civilization from the \u201ccatastrophic consequences\u201d of a \u201cglobal climate emergency.\u201d In fact, Hillary Clinton\u2019s negotiators agreed to plans for an urgent summit \u201cin the first hundred days of the next administration\u201d where the president will convene \u201cthe world\u2019s best engineers, climate scientists, policy experts, activists, and indigenous communities to chart a course to solve the climate crisis.\u201d<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

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>, 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\u00a0numbers<\/a>\u00a0are 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\u2019s 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\u00a0plans<\/a>\u00a0for 139 nations around the world.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s landmass to produce enough renewable energy, mostly from sprawling solar power stations. Do we have enough raw materials? \u201cWe looked at that in some detail and we aren\u2019t too worried,\u201d says Jacobson. \u201cFor instance, you need neodymium for wind turbines\u2014but there\u2019s seven times more of it than you\u2019d need to power half the world. Electric cars take lithium for batteries\u2014but there\u2019s enough lithium just in the known resources for three billion cars, and at the moment we only have 800 million.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019s as close to winning this war as we could plausibly get. We\u2019d endure lots of damage in the meantime, but not the civilization-scale destruction we currently face. (Even if all of the world\u2019s nations meet the pledges they made in the Paris accord, carbon dioxide is currently on a path to\u00a0hit<\/a>\u00a0500 or 600 parts per million by century\u2019s end\u2014a path if not to hell, then to someplace with a similar setting on the thermostat.)<\/p>\n

Defeating the Nazis required more than brave soldiers. It required a wholesale industrial retooling.\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2014Intel\u2019s mammoth Rio Rancho semiconductor plant in New Mexico\u2014took Jacobson\u2019s research and calculated how much clean energy America would need to produce by 2050 to completely replace fossil fuels. The answer: 6,448 gigawatts.<\/p>\n

\u201cLast year we installed 16 gigawatts of clean power,\u201d Solomon says. \u201cSo at that pace, it would take 405 years. Which is kind of too long.\u201dSo 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\u2019s biggest solar panel factory in\u00a0Buffalo<\/a>. \u201cThey\u2019re calling it the giga-factory,\u201d Solomon says, \u201cbecause the panels it builds will produce one gigawatt worth of solar power every year.\u201d Using the SolarCity plant as a rough yardstick, Solomon calculates that America needs 295 solar factories of a similar size to defeat climate change\u2014roughly six per state\u2014plus a similar effort for wind turbines.<\/p>\n

Building these factories doesn\u2019t require any new technology. In fact, the effort would be much the same as the one that Solomon oversaw at Intel\u2019s 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; \u201cfacilitate each of the stations for factory machine tooling with plumbing, piping, and electrical wiring\u201d; 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. \u201cIt\u2019s at the upper end of what I could possibly imagine,\u201d Solomon says.<\/p>\n

Turning out more solar panels and wind turbines may not sound like warfare<\/strong>, but it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

In 1941, the world\u2019s largest industrial plant under a single roof went up in six months near Ypsilanti, Michigan; Charles Lindbergh called it the \u201cGrand Canyon of the mechanized world.\u201d 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\u2014containing 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\u2014so 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.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t 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\u00a0liners.\u00a0<\/em>The company that used to supply fabrics for Ford\u2019s 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\u2014the same sort of industrial mobilization took place all across America.<\/p>\n

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\u2014but that\u2019s largely because those businessmen paid for the films. Their PR departments also put out their own radio serials with titles like \u201cVictory Is Their Business,\u201d and \u201cWar of Enterprise,\u201d and published endless newspaper ads boasting of their own patriotism. In reality, many of America\u2019s captains of industry didn\u2019t 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\u2019s Lend-Lease program to help the imperiled British. \u201cAmerican businessmen oppose American involvement in any foreign war,\u201d the Chamber\u2019s president explained to Congress.<\/p>\n

\"wind<\/a><\/p>\n

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\u00a0Destructive Creation<\/em>. 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\u2019s end, the government had a dominant position in everything from aircraft manufacturing to synthetic rubber production.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was public capital that built most of the stuff, not Wall Street,\u201d says Wilson. \u201cAnd at the top level of logistics and supply-chain management, the military was the boss. They placed the contracts, they moved the stuff around.\u201d The feds acted aggressively\u2014they 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\u2014bad memories from World War I, Wilson says, led to \u201crobust profit controls,\u201d which were mostly accepted by America\u2019s 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. \u201cThey were both quite impressive and productive,\u201d Wilson says.<\/p>\n

\u201cUsually, when people from different worlds are dealing with each other, they get into conflicts and then dig in their heels deeper,\u201d Berk says. \u201cBut because the stakes are so high and it\u2019s moving so fast, no one doubts that if you don\u2019t get a handle on this battle in the Atlantic, then the immediate consequences will be really grave. So they\u2019re willing to do this kind of pragmatic trial and error. They start to see that \u2018I can\u2019t dig in my heels–I need this other person to learn from.\u2019\u201d In the face of a common enemy, Americans worked together in a way they never had before.<\/p>\n

That attitude quickly reset after the war, of course; solidarity gave way to the<\/strong> 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 \u201coperations researchers,\u201d 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 \u201csystems analysts\u201d 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. \u201cThe systems analysts completely took over,\u201d Berk says, \u201cand the program largely failed for that reason.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s reasonable to ask if we can find the collective will to fight back in this war against global warming, as we once fought fascism.<\/p>\n

For starters, it\u2019s important to remember that a truly global mobilization to defeat climate change wouldn\u2019t 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\u2019s struggling economies. (British economist Nicholas Stern\u00a0calculates<\/a>\u00a0that 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.)<\/p>\n

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. \u201cNo country will walk away from such investments,\u201d\u00a0 writes<\/a>\u00a0 Vaclav Smil, a Canadian energy expert. As investigative journalists have shown over the past year, the oil giant Exxon\u00a0knew<\/a>\u00a0all about global warming for decades\u2014yet spent millions to spread climate-denial propaganda. The only way to overcome that concerted opposition\u2014from the very same industrial forces that opposed America\u2019s entry into World War II\u2014is to adopt a wartime mentality, rewriting the old mindset that stands in the way of victory. \u201cThe first step is we have to win,\u201d says Jonathan Koomey, an energy researcher at Stanford University. \u201cThat 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

FDR geared up early: The ships and planes that won the Battle of Midway were all built before Pearl Harbor.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u00a0Keystone<\/a>pipeline, stymied Arctic drilling, andbanned<\/a>\u00a0fracking in key states and countries. As one oil industry official lamented in July, \u201cThe \u2018keep-it-in-the-ground\u2019 campaign\u201d has \u201ccontrolled the conversation.\u201d This resembles, at least a little, the way FDR actually started gearing up for war 18 months before the \u201cdate which will live in infamy.\u201d The ships and planes that won the Battle of Midway six months into 1942 had all been built before the Japanese attacked Hawaii. \u201cBy the time of Pearl Harbor,\u201d Wilson says, \u201cthe government had pretty much solved the problem of organization. After that, they just said, \u2018We\u2019re going to have to make twice as much.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Pearl Harbor\u00a0did<\/em>\u00a0make 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\u2019s entire economy converted to wartime production. Use of public transit went up 87 percent during the war, as Naomi Klein points out inThis Changes Everything<\/em>;\u00a0<\/em>40 percent of the nation\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2014no single moment that galvanizes the world to realize that nothing short of total war will save civilization. Perhaps the closest we\u2019ve come to FDR\u2019s \u201cdate of infamy\u201d speech\u2014and it wasn\u2019t all that close\u2014was when\u00a0Bernie Sanders<\/a>, in the first debate, was asked to name the biggest security threat facing the planet. \u201cClimate change,\u201d he replied\u2014prompting all the usual suspects to tut-tut that he was soft on \u201cradical Islamic terrorism.\u201d Then, in the second debate, the question came up again, a day after the Paris massacres. \u201cDo you still believe that?\u201d the moderator asked, in gotcha mode. \u201cAbsolutely,\u201d\u00a0replied<\/a>\u00a0Sanders, who then proceeded to give an accurate account of how record drought will lead to international instability.<\/p>\n

\"wind<\/a><\/p>\n

Had he won, it\u2019s possible that Bernie could have combined his focus on jobs and climate and infrastructure into some kind of overarching effort that really mattered\u2014he 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\u2019s actually the right verb) that climate change is a\u00a0hoax<\/a>\u00a0manufactured by the Chinese, who apparently in their Oriental slyness convinced the polar ice caps to go along with their conspiracy. Clinton\u2019s advisers originally promised there would be a \u201cclimate war room\u201d in her White House, but then corrected the record: It would actually be a \u201cclimate map room<\/a>,\u201d which sounds somewhat less gung ho.<\/p>\n

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\u2014a 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\u2014were\u00a0defeated by 7\u20136 tallies<\/a>, with the Clinton appointees voting as a bloc. They were quite concerned about climate change, they insisted, but a \u201cphased-down<\/a>\u201d 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\u2019d 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\u2019t 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\u2019s oldest and most essential physical features\u2014a polar ice cap, say, or the Pacific\u2019s coral reefs\u2014that\u2019s a pretty good sign that a tipping point is near. In this war that we\u2019re in\u2014the war that physics is fighting hard, and that we aren\u2019t\u2014winning slowly is exactly the same as losing.<\/p>\n

To my surprise, things changed a couple weeks later,<\/strong> when the final deliberations over the Democratic platform were held in Orlando. While Clinton\u2019s negotiators still wouldn\u2019t support a ban on fracking or a carbon tax, they did\u00a0agree<\/a>\u00a0we needed to \u201cprice\u201d carbon, that wind and sun should be given priority over natural gas, and that any federal policy that worsened global warming should be rejected.<\/p>\n

Maybe it was polls showing that Bernie voters\u2014especially young ones\u2014have been slow to sign on to the Clinton campaign. Maybe the\u00a0hottest June<\/a>\u00a0in American history had opened some minds. But you could, if you squinted, create a hopeful scenario. Clinton, for instance,\u00a0promised<\/a>\u00a0that America will install half a billion solar panels in the next four years. That\u2019s 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\u2019ll be positioning America as the world\u2019s dominant power in clean energy, just as our mobilization in World War II ensured our economic might for two generations. If we don\u2019t get there first, others will: Driven by anger over smog-choked cities, the Chinese have already begun installing renewable energy at\u00a0a world-beating rate<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In this war we\u2019re in\u2014the war\u00a0 that physics is fighting hard, and that we aren\u2019t\u2014winning slowly is the same as losing.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cIt would be a grave mistake for the United States to wait for another nation to take the lead in combating the global climate emergency,\u201d the Democraticplatform<\/a>\u00a0asserts. \u201cWe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

The next president doesn\u2019t have to wait for a climate equivalent of Pearl Harbor to galvanize Congress. Much of what we need to do can\u2014and must\u2014be 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 Obamareined in<\/a>\u00a0coal-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 \u201csignificantly exacerbate\u201d 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\u2019t 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\u2014without immediate executive action\u2014we will lose this war.<\/p>\n

Normally in wartime, defeatism is a great sin.<\/strong> Luckily, though, you can\u2019t give aid and comfort to carbon; it has no morale to boost. So we can be totally honest. We\u2019ve waited so long to fight back in this war that total victory is impossible, and total defeat can\u2019t be ruled out.<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n

In\u00a0Japan<\/a>, 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\u00a0wildfire<\/a>\u00a0described by the local fire chief as \u201cone of the most devastating I\u2019ve ever seen.\u201d Suburban tracts looked like Dresden after the bombing. Planes and helicopters buzzed overhead, dropping bright plumes of chemical retardants; if the \u201cFlight of the Valkyries\u201d had been playing, it could have been a scene from\u00a0Apocalypse Now<\/em>. And in\u00a0West Virginia<\/a>, a \u201cone in a thousand year\u201d storm dropped historic rain across the mountains, triggering record floods that killed dozens. \u201cYou can see people in the second-story windows waiting to be evacuated,\u201d one local official\u00a0reported<\/a>. A particularly dramatic\u00a0video<\/a>\u2014a kind of YouTube\u00a0Guernica<\/em>\u00a0for our moment\u2014showed a large house being consumed by flames as it was swept down a rampaging river until it crashed into a bridge. \u201cEverybody lost everything,\u201d one dazed resident said. \u201cWe never thought it would be this bad.\u201d A state trooper was even more succinct. \u201cIt looks like a war zone,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Because it is.<\/p>\n

______________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

Bill McKibben is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and co-founder of the climate group 350.org. <\/em>@billmckibben<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Illustrations by Andrew Colin Beck<\/em><\/p>\n

Want to join the fight against climate change? Sign up on\u00a0350.org\u00a0<\/em>here<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 newrepublic.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

15 Aug 2016 – 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. \u201cIn 30 years, the area has shrunk approximately by half,\u201d said a scientist who examined the onslaught. \u201cThere doesn\u2019t seem anything able to stop this.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77801","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77801"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77801\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}