Think big on climate: the transformation of
society in months has been done before
George
Monbiot
The astonishing story of how the US entered the second
world war should be on everyone’s minds as Cop26 approaches
Wed 20 Oct
2021 07.00 BST
Fatalism
creeps across our movements like rust. In conversations with scientists and
activists, I hear the same words, over and again: “We’re screwed.” Government
plans are too little, too late. They are unlikely to prevent the Earth’s
systems from flipping into new states hostile to humans and many other species.
What we
need, to stand a high chance of stabilising our life support systems, is not
slow and incremental change but sudden and drastic action. And this is widely
considered impossible. There’s no money; governments are powerless; people
won’t tolerate anything more ambitious than the tepid measures they have
proposed. Or so we are told. It’s a stark illustration of a general rule:
political failure is, at heart, a failure of imagination.
Let’s set
aside the obvious lessons of the pandemic, when the magic money tree
miraculously burst into leaf, governments discovered they could govern (albeit
with varying degrees of competence) and people were prepared radically to
change their behaviour. There’s a bigger and more powerful example. It’s what
happened when the US joined the second world war.
There’s
discomfort in environmental circles with military analogies. But the war is
among the few precedents and metaphors that almost everyone can grasp. And we
would be foolish not to learn from this remarkable lesson.
Before the
US declared war, President Franklin Roosevelt had begun to draft troops and
build his “arsenal of democracy”: the materiel with which he supplied the
allied forces. To “outbuild Hitler”, he called for levels of production widely
considered impossible. But after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7
December 1941, the impossible happened.
The day
after the attack, Roosevelt requested and achieved a declaration of war from
Congress. He immediately began to reorganise not only the government but the
entire nation. He set up a series of agencies that were lightly overseen but
coordinated through simple but effective measures such as the “controlled
materials plan”.
He
introduced, for the first time in US history, general federal income taxes. The
government rapidly raised the top rate until, in 1944, it reached 94%. It
issued war bonds and borrowed massively. Between 1940 and 1945, total
government spending rose roughly tenfold. Astonishingly the US government spent
more money (in current dollar terms) between 1942 and 1945 than it had between
1789 and 1941. From 1940 to 1944, its military budget rose by a factor of 42,
outstripping Germany’s, Japan’s and the United Kingdom’s put together.
Civilian
industries were entirely retooled for war. When the car industry was instructed
to switch to military production, its massive equipment was immediately
jack-hammered out of the floor and replaced, often in a matter of weeks, with
new machines. General Motors began turning out tanks, aircraft engines, fighter
planes, cannons and machine guns. Oldsmobile started making artillery shells;
Pontiac produced anti-aircraft guns. By 1944, Ford was completing a long-range
bomber plane almost every hour. During its three years of war, the US
manufactured 87,000 naval vessels, including 27 aircraft carriers, 300,000
planes, 100,000 tanks and armoured cars and 44bn rounds of ammunition.
Roosevelt described it as a “miracle of production”. But it wasn’t a miracle.
It was the realisation of a well-laid plan.
The US war
effort mobilised tens of millions of people. Between 1940 and the end of the
war, the number of American troops rose 26-fold, while the civilian labour
force increased by 10 million. Many of the new workers were women.
From 1942
until 1945, the manufacture of cars was banned. So were new household
appliances and even the construction of new homes. Tyres and gasoline were
strictly rationed; meat, butter, sugar, clothes and shoes were also limited.
Rationing was considered fairer than taxing scarce goods: it ensured everyone
received an equal share. A national speed limit of 35mph was imposed, to save
fuel.
Posters
warned people “When you ride ALONE, you ride with Hitler! Join a car-sharing
club TODAY”, and asked “Is this trip really necessary?”. They cautioned: “Waste
helps the enemy: conserve material”. Americans were urged to sign the
Consumer’s Victory Pledge: “I will buy carefully; I will take good care of the
things I have; I will waste nothing.” Every imaginable material – chewing gum
wrappers, rubber bands, used cooking fat – was recycled.
So what
stops the world from responding with the same decisive force to the greatest
crisis humanity has ever faced? It’s not a lack of money or capacity or
technology. If anything, digitisation would make such a transformation quicker
and easier. It’s a problem that Roosevelt faced until Pearl Harbor: a lack of
political will. Now, just as then, public hostility and indifference,
encouraged by legacy industries (today, above all, fossil fuel, transport,
infrastructure, meat and media), outweighs the demand for intervention.
The
difference between 1941 and 2021 is that now the mobilisation needs to come
first. We need to build popular movements so big that governments have no
choice but to respond to them, if they wish to remain in office. We need to
make politicians understand that the survival of life on Earth is more
important than their ideological commitment to limited government. Preventing
Earth’s systems from flipping means flipping our political systems.
So what is
our Pearl Harbor moment? Well, how about now? After all, to extend the analogy,
the Pacific seaboard of the US has recently come under unprecedented climatic
attack. The heat domes, the droughts and fires there this year should have been
enough to shock everyone out of their isolationism. But the gap between these
events and people’s understanding of the forces that caused them is, arguably,
the greatest public information failure in human history. We need bodies
equivalent to Roosevelt’s Office of War Information, constantly reminding people
of what is at stake.
As the US
mobilisation showed, when governments and societies decide to be competent,
they can achieve things that at other times are considered impossible.
Catastrophe is not a matter of fate. It’s a matter of choice.
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
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