You must read Kevin Drum’s new article in Mother Jones: We Need a Massive Climate War Effort Now
Among his major points is that expecting people to cut back on their energy use is not realistic:
Even if we could get wealthy Western countries to accept serious belt-tightening, they’re not where the growth of greenhouse gas emissions is taking place right now. It’s happening in developing countries like China and India. Most people in these countries have living standards that are a fraction of ours, and they justifiably ask why they should cut back on energy consumption and consign themselves to poverty while those of us in affluent countries—which caused most of the problem in the first place—are still driving SUVs and running air conditioners all summer.
This is the hinge point on which the future of climate change rests. Clearly the West is not going to collectively agree to live like Chinese farmers. Just as clearly, Chinese farmers aren’t willing to keep living in shacks while we sit around watching football on 60-inch TV screens in our climate-controlled houses as we lecture them about climate change.
What we really need is a WWII level of effort on R&D:
During World War II, the United States devoted 30 percent of its economy to the war effort—or one thousand times what we’re spending on green tech.
There were three elements to this mass mobilization. First, Americans were asked to make modest sacrifices over the course of a few years. Victory gardens were planted, tin was collected, sugar and gasoline were rationed. Men enlisted and women went to work in factories. The rich paid high taxes and the rest of us bought war bonds. Perhaps there’s a limit to how much we can ask of people, but plainly we can ask something of them.
Second, we built an enormous war machine: 89,000 tanks, 300,000 aircraft, 1,200 major combat ships, 64,500 landing craft, 2.7 million machine guns, and $2.6 trillion worth of munitions in today’s dollars. And it’s worth noting that much of this we simply gave away to allies like Britain and the Soviet Union. This was a global war that required American leadership and funding on a global scale.
Third, we spent money on R&D. There was the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb, but there was also the development of radar, code breaking, computers, jet aircraft, plastic explosives, and M&Ms.
Yes, M&Ms helped by providing calories for the troops that didn’t melt in the field. Anyway:
As in World War II, a call for modest sacrifice is fine: It produces a sense of solidarity against a common enemy and gives people a personal stake in the outcome. But in the end, that’s not what won the war. It was big spending and lots of R&D.
(snip)
So how much should we spend? For argument’s sake let’s be modest and aim for only 10 percent of peak World War II–level spending. That’s $700 billion per year in today’s dollars—a hundred times more than we currently spend on energy R&D, but barely 15 percent of what we spent to defeat the Axis. It also amounts to not quite 16 percent of our current federal budget.
(snip)
Ultimately, massive R&D might fail. But unlike current plans, it has one powerful benefit: At least it’s not guaranteed to fail.
He goes on to list a large number of technologies in development the are already working or close to working that would benefit from more research. Read the whole thing and consider donating to Mother Jones, a source I turn to every day.