Climate change is urgent, but it is a mistake to us war-fighting rhetoric to urge people to action

Roy Scranton, Climate Change Is Not World War, NYTimes, Sept. 18, 2019.

When Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts introduced their Green New Deal proposal in February, they chose language loaded with nostalgia for one of the country’s most transformative historical moments, urging the country to undertake “a new national, social, industrial and economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II and the New Deal era.” [...] Two years later, Bill McKibben wrote an article arguing that climate change was actually World War III, and that the only way to keep from losing this war would be “to mobilize on the same scale as we did for the last world war.”

Yet much of this rhetoric involves little or no understanding of what national mobilization actually meant for Americans living through World War II. As a result, the sacrifices and struggles of the 1940s have begun to seem like a romantic story of collective heroism, when they were in fact a time of rage, fear, grief and social disorder. Countless Americans experienced firsthand the terror and excitement of mortal violence, and nearly everyone saw himself caught up in an existential struggle for the future of the planet.

Scranton then quickly runs through the changes:

...30 million Americans were uprooted from their homes [...] 16 million service members among them were stripped of their civilian identities and then shuttled through a vast national bureaucracy in the greatest experiment in social mixing and mass indoctrination in American history. [...] More than 400,000 were killed, and 670,000 more were wounded.

Women entered the workforce; a million+ African-Americans served in segregated military units, others migrated north; race riots; industry retooled for war; "free speech and labor organizing were curtailed"; internment camps for Japanese Americans; mass media was consumed by war propaganda.

Total mobilization during World War II also led to the birth of what President Dwight D. Eisenhower would in 1961 define as the “military-industrial complex.” Annual military spending (adjusted for inflation) skyrocketed from less than $10 billion before the war to nearly $1 trillion during it, and except for a brief dip between the end of World War II and the Korean War, has never sunk below $300 billion, whether the United States was at war or not. The country now spends more on its military budget than the next seven nations combined, and maintains the largest number of military bases on foreign soil of any country.

Such is the legacy of America’s mobilization during World War II, which inaugurated a long-term transformation in American politics, permanently shifting power from the legislative branch to the executive, and gave birth to the national security state, the nuclear arms race, and a culture of militarism. As the journalist Fred Cook wrote in 1962, “No break with the traditions of America’s past has been so complete, so drastic, as the one that has resulted in the growth of the military-industrial complex.”

Climate change is different:

First, climate change is not a war. There is no clear enemy to mobilize against, and thus no way to ignite the kind of hatred that moved Americans against Japan during World War II. No clear enemy also means no clear victory. [...]

Second, as opposed to World War II, when national mobilization meant a flood of government money that truly did lift all boats, the transformations required to address climate change would have real economic losers. [...]

Third, mobilization during World War II was a national mobilization against foreign enemies, while what’s required today is a global mobilization against an international economic system: carbon-fueled capitalism. It took President Franklin D. Roosevelt years of political groundwork and a foreign attack to get the United States into World War II. What kind of work over how many years would it take to unify and mobilize the entire industrialized world — against itself?

[And] ... the fact is that climate change is just one of several progressive concerns. [...] Finally, national climate mobilization would have cascading unforeseen consequences, perhaps even contradicting its original goals, just like America’s total mobilization during World War II. [...]

Nevertheless, total mobilization may be our only hope. [...] Nevertheless, total mobilization may be our only hope.