The following excerpt was originally published on New Republic journal’s web portal by writer Bill McKibben*. The New Republic is an American publication established in 1914 for the purposes of “championing progressive ideas and challenging popular opinion”. McKibben’s article, titled “We’re under attack from climate change – and our only hope is to mobilize like we did in WWII” sets forth the argument that current economic difficulties can be likened to the post-World I era economic slump, that climate change is a major part of the problem, and that the answer is for entire countries to become “workbenches” creating the “weapons” to overcome the planet’s current environmental challenges.

The argument is particularly compelling for developing countries like South Africa and the rest of Africa – since these nations missed out on many of the fruits of the industrial revolution while now being afflicted with some of the most devastating effects of climate change. If McKibben’s suggestions are taken at face value, the question then becomes – how will the developing world mobilise technological development to drive their own economic growth in a way that was not open to them in the past?

Part of the article is published below:

In the North this summer, a devastating offensive is underway. Enemy forces have seized huge swaths of territory; with each passing week, another 22,000 square miles of Arctic ice disappears. Experts dispatched to the battlefield in July saw little cause for hope, especially since this siege is one of the oldest fronts in the war. “In 30 years, the area has shrunk approximately by half,” said a scientist who examined the onslaught. “There doesn’t seem anything able to stop this.”

…Day after day, week after week, saboteurs behind our lines are unleashing a series of brilliant and overwhelming attacks. In the past few months alone, our foes have used a firestorm to force the total evacuation of a city of 90 000 in Canada, drought to ravage crops to the point where southern Africans are literally eating their seed corn, and floods to threaten the priceless repository of art in the Louvre. The enemy is even deploying biological weapons to spread psychological terror: The Zika virus, loaded like a bomb into a growing army of mosquitoes, has shrunk the heads of newborn babies across an entire continent; panicked health ministers in seven countries are now urging women not to get pregnant.

World War III is well and truly underway. And we are losing.

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.

…For four years, the United States was focused on a single, all-consuming goal, to the exclusion of any other concern: defeating the global threat posed by Germany, Italy, and Japan. Unlike Adolf Hitler, the last force to pose a planet wide threat to civilization, our enemy today is neither sentient nor evil. But before the outbreak of World War II, the world’s leaders committed precisely the same mistake we are making today—they tried first to ignore their foe, and then to appease him.

Peace in our time?

…The world came back from signing the climate accord in Paris last December exactly as Chamberlain returned from Munich: hopeful, even exhilarated, that a major threat had finally been tackled. Paul Krugman, summing up the world’s conventional wisdom, post-Paris, concluded that climate change “can be avoided with fairly modest, politically feasible steps. You may want a revolution, but we don’t need one to save the planet.” All it would take, he insisted, is for America to implement Obama’s plan for clean power, and to continue “guiding the world as a whole toward sharp reductions in emissions,” as it had in Paris.

This is, simply put, as wrong as Chamberlain’s “peace in our time.” Even if every nation in the world complies with the Paris Agreement, the world will heat up by as much as 3.5 degrees Celsius by 2100—not the 1.5 to 2 degrees promised in the pact’s preamble. And it may be too late already to meet that stated target: We actually flirted with that 1.5 degree line at the height of the El Niño warming in February, a mere 60 days after the world’s governments solemnly pledged their best efforts to slow global warming. Our leaders have been anticipating what French strategists in World War II called the guerre du longue durée, even as each new edition of Science or Nature makes clear that climate change is mounting an all-out blitzkrieg, setting new record highs for global temperatures in each of the past 14 months.

…For years now, climate scientists and leading economists have called for treating climate change with the same resolve we brought to bear on Germany and Japan in the last world war. In July, [America’s] Democratic Party issued a platform that called for a World War II–type national mobilization to save civilization from the “catastrophic consequences” of a “global climate emergency.”

…[To make] the plan work, you would need to build a hell of a lot of factories to turn out thousands of acres of solar panels, and wind turbines the length of football fields, and millions and millions of electric cars and buses. But here again, experts have already begun to crunch the numbers. Tom Solomon, a retired engineer who oversaw the construction of one of the largest factories built in recent years—Intel’s mammoth Rio Rancho semiconductor plant in New Mexico … calculated how much clean energy America would need to produce by 2050 to completely replace fossil fuels. The answer: 6 448 gigawatts.

Turning out more solar panels and wind turbines may not sound like warfare, but it’s exactly what won World War II: not just massive invasions and pitched tank battles and ferocious aerial bombardments, but the wholesale industrial retooling that was needed to build weapons and supply troops on a previously unprecedented scale. Defeating the Nazis required more than brave soldiers. It required building big factories, and building them really, really fast.

… It’s important to remember that a truly global mobilization to defeat climate change wouldn’t wreck our economy or throw coal miners out of work. Quite the contrary: Gearing up to stop global warming would provide a host of social and economic benefits, just as World War II did. It would save lives. (A worldwide switch to renewable energy would cut air pollution deaths by 4 to 7 million a year, according to Stanford data.) It would produce an awful lot of jobs. (An estimated net gain of roughly two million in the United States alone.) It would provide safer, better-paying employment to energy workers. (A new study by Michigan Technological University found that we could retrain everyone in the coal fields to work in solar power for as little as USD181 million, and the guy installing solar panels on a roof averages about $4,000 more a year than the guy risking his life down in the hole.) It would rescue the world’s struggling economies. (British economist Nicholas Stern calculates that the economic impacts of unchecked global warming could far exceed those of the world wars or the Great Depression.) And fighting this war would be socially transformative. (Just as World War II sped up the push for racial and gender equality, a climate campaign should focus its first efforts on the frontline communities most poisoned by the fossil fuel era. It would help ease income inequality with higher employment, revive our hollowed-out rural states with wind farms, and transform our decaying suburbs with real investments in public transit.)

…Without the same urgency and foresight displayed by [Franklin D Roosevelt]—without immediate executive action—we will lose this war.…

McKibben makes the case that America needs to act decisively and outlines various scenarios that might be adapted by the present Democratic and Republican candidates. But America’s leading role in the revolution against climate change is far from a forgone conclusion, and real investment in solar and other renewable technologies could well be the tipping point that changes Africa and Asia’s future for perhaps the next century.

For the full New Republic article, go to: https://newrepublic.com/article/135684/declare-war-climate-change-mobilize-wwii

*Bill McKibben is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and co-founder of the climate group 350.org.@billmckibben