Let's attack climate change with war-like urgency

Scientitsts almost unanimously agree that climate change is the biggest and most pressing challenge the world has ever known and that a failure to imminently address the causes will drastically change life on the planet. Yet there is rarely, if ever, a day when climate change is the most pressing concern of the general public or political leaders. Today the beer that Obama drinks is front page of the NYTimes.

There's a contradiction here: Either climate change is the biggest and most pressing challenge we face or it isn't. Either way, business as usual isn't helping anything. Transitioning halfheartedly to a low-carbon economy is a waste of time and energy by all measures.

So any sensible strategy would be to give up now or get going. If we're going to get going, which is unfortunately what I believe we must do, then by all approximations, we need to do it with urgency.

We need to do it with what I call WAR-LIKE URGENCY. Here's why:

1. Because in wars, as Bush recently showed, all rules go out the window. Although basic principles about fairness and humanity must be obeyed to solve any problem (again as Bush's failures recently confirmed), all of the political and normative rules created in the past that hinder transformational change must be discarded to produce the change that scientists believe is necessary to really ward off climate change. In WWI, the US Revenue Act levied heavy taxes directly on the rich for the first time in order to finance the creation of the world's most powerful navy. In WWII, petty UK safety ordinances were thrown out the window as all metal railings and fences were confiscated for the war effort. Our war on climate change must similarly override the petty existing barriers.


2. Because wars can provide a sense of purpose. Although this sense of purpose is often used for destructive and divisive purposes, there is no doubt that wars force people to evaluate and celebrate their identity. Mobilizing for a war on climate change just might bring a sense of global identity and purpose commensurate with the difficulty of the task at hand.


3. Because wars transform the economy and society. Pau Koistinen and a variety of other historians have documented the extraordinary mark that wars have left on the social and economic landscape. A full attack against climate change will necessarily bring similar change.


4. Because wars are everybody's business. In WWII, children were evacuated from the British port towns (where German bombing was targeted) to family homes in the countryside. Welsh farmhouses, seemingly removed from the 3, 4, or 5 city kids who had probably never left their neighborhood. Similarly, in our war on climate change, nobody can sit on the sidelines.


5. Because wars generate creativity. When lives are on the line, people tend to come up with creative solutions to problems. One example that I like occurred in the English countryside, where all of the road signs were painted over. This didn't stop the locals from getting where they needed to go but it made it impossible for downed German pilots to find their location on a map. Climate change too will need creative solutions.

Climate change, by all measures, is a war worth fighting. And we must win. So let's attack it with war-like urgency.