In a new piece published Monday in The New Republic, the co-founder of the global climate action group 350.org said there is simply no more time to waste and that a full-scale mobilization, like the one orchestrated by the U.S. government during World War II, is now necessary if the adversary—human-caused global warming and the climate change that results—is to be vanquished.
"World War III is well and truly underway," McKibben wrote. "And we are losing."
With the introductory paragraphs reading like a battlefield assessment in which melting ice sheets, firestorms and historic floods represent the movements of enemy forces, McKibben offered a rebuke to the inaction of world leaders who have refused to acknowledge the scale of the attack:
For years, our leaders chose to ignore the warnings of our best scientists and top military strategists.
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.
We're used to war as metaphor: the war on poverty,
the war on drugs, the war on cancer. Usually this is just a rhetorical
device, a way of saying, "We need to focus our attention and marshal our
forces to fix something we don't like." 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 destabilizing
governments. (Over the past few years, record-setting droughts have
helped undermine the brutal strongman of Syria and fuel the rise of Boko Haram in Nigeria.) It's not that global warming is like a world war. It is a world war. Its first victims,
ironically, are those who have done the least to cause the crisis. But
it's 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.
In 2013, environmental journalist David Roberts, then writing for Grist, wrote how the metaphor of wartime mobilization "gets used a lot" but recognized it as an apt way to describe what will ultimately be necessary. More than three years later, following the Paris climate deal signed earlier this year and amid a torrent of increasingly ominous climate studies, the stakes are only that much higher.
"Language appears to be failing us," said Russell Greene, a DNC platform committee member and leading climate activist for the Progressive Democrats of America and People Demanding Action, last month. "What is urgent? When is immediately? We have lost touch. We are living in the age of consequences. We can no longer pretend otherwise. With our every action and non-action we leave our imprint on generations. There is no time left for gradualism. That window has passed. This is a climate emergency—the moment to make a stand for the future. For each other. For our children."
McKibben argued—despite the fossil fuel industry's orchestrated effort to suppress or dismiss the scientific consensus—that there is no longer room for denial or delay.
With an eye toward the U.S. presidential outcome this fall and an unknown congressional makeup for the next administration, McKibben laments the loss of Bernie Sanders in the primary, bemoans the prospect of President Donald Trump, and indicates how Hillary Clinton—though the likely winner—may not willingly embrace the profound counter-assault needed to fight the unrelenting physics of carbon, methane and other greenhouse gases. He wrote:
The
next president doesn't have to wait for a climate equivalent of Pearl
Harbor to galvanize Congress. Much of what we need to do can—and must—be
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 Obama reined in
coal-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 "significantly exacerbate" 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't 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—without immediate executive
action—we will lose this war.
But despite the enormous stakes and troubling odds, he continues, it is no longer an option to choose half measures against the enemy humanity now faces: "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?"
