[Mb-civic] Earth Policy News - Wartime Mobilization to Save the Environment and Civilization

[Harold Sifton]

> Plan B Book Byte 2006-5
> For Immediate Release
> April 18, 2006
>
>
> WARTIME MOBILIZATION TO SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT AND CIVILIZATION
>
> http://www.earthpolicy.org/Books/Seg/PB2ch13_ss3.htm
>
>
> Lester R. Brown
>
>
> Since the first Earth Day 36 years ago, we have won many environmental
> battles but we are losing the war. Our early twenty-first century
> civilization is on an economic path that is destroying and disrupting the
> natural systems on which it depends. We are consuming renewable resources
> faster than they can regenerate. Forests are shrinking, grasslands are
> deteriorating, soils are eroding, water tables are falling, and fisheries
> are collapsing.
>
> We are using up oil at a pace that leaves little time to plan beyond peak
> oil. And we are discharging greenhouse gases into the atmosphere faster
> than nature can absorb them. As a result, the earth's temperature is
> rising, ice sheets are melting, and the sea is rising.
>
> Our twenty-first century civilization is not the first to move onto an
> economic path that was environmentally unsustainable. Many earlier
> civilizations also found themselves in environmental trouble. As Jared
> Diamond notes in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, some
> were able to change course and avoid economic decline. Others were not. We
> study the archeological sites of the Sumerians, Mayans, Easter Islanders,
> and other early civilizations that were not able to make the needed
> adjustments in time.
>
> Our future also depends on changing course, on shifting from Plan A,
> business as usual, to Plan B, restructuring the global economy. Sustaining
> progress depends on shifting from a fossil-fuel-based,
> automobile-centered, throwaway economy to a renewable-energy-based,
> diversified-transport, reuse/recycle economy.
>
> The good news is that we have the technologies needed to build the new
> economy. We can see the Plan B economy emerging in the wind farms of
> western Europe, the solar rooftops of Japan, the growing fleet of
> gas-electric hybrid cars in the United States, the reforested mountains of
> South Korea, and the bicycle friendly streets of Amsterdam.
>
> The bad news is that we do not have much time. As we contemplate the rapid
> restructuring needed, it is both instructive and encouraging to look at
> the U.S. restructuring for World War II. Initially, the United States
> resisted involvement in the war and responded only after it was directly
> attacked at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. But respond it did. After an
> all-out commitment, the U.S. engagement helped turn the tide, leading the
> Allied Forces to victory within three-and-a-half years.
>
> In his State of the Union address on January 6, 1942, one month after the
> bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt announced the country's arms
> production goals. The United States, he said, was planning to produce
> 45,000 tanks, 60,000 planes, 20,000 anti-aircraft guns, and 6 million tons
> of merchant shipping.
>
> No one had ever seen such huge arms production numbers. But Roosevelt and
> his colleagues realized that the largest concentration of industrial power
> in the world at that time was in the U.S. automobile industry. Even during
> the Depression, the United States was producing 3 million cars a year.
> After his State of the Union address, Roosevelt met with automobile
> industry leaders and told them that the country would rely heavily on them
> to reach these arms production goals. Initially they wanted to continue
> making cars and simply add on the production of armaments. What they did
> not yet know was that the sale of private automobiles would soon be
> banned. From the beginning of April 1942 through the end of 1944, nearly
> three years, there were essentially no cars produced in the United States.
>
> In addition to a ban on the production and sale of cars for private use,
> residential and highway construction was halted, and driving for pleasure
> was banned. A rationing program was also introduced. Strategic
> goods-including tires, gasoline, fuel oil, and sugar-were rationed
> beginning in 1942. Cutting back on consumption of these goods freed up
> material resources to support the war effort.
>
> The year 1942 witnessed the greatest expansion of industrial output in the
> nation's history-all for military use. Wartime aircraft needs were
> enormous. They included not only fighters, bombers, and reconnaissance
> planes, but also the troop and cargo transports needed to fight a war on
> two distant fronts. From the beginning of 1942 through 1944, the United
> States far exceeded the initial goal of 60,000 planes, turning out 229,600
> aircraft, a fleet so vast it is hard even today to visualize it. Equally
> impressive, by the end of the war more than 5,000 ships were added to the
> 1,000 or so that made up the American Merchant Fleet in 1939.
>
> In her book No Ordinary Time, Doris Kearns Goodwin describes how various
> firms converted to wartime production. A sparkplug factory was among the
> first to switch to the production of machine guns. Soon a manufacturer of
> stoves was producing lifeboats. A merry-go-round factory was making gun
> mounts; a toy company was turning out compasses; a corset manufacturer was
> producing grenade belts; and a pinball machine plant began to make
> armor-piercing shells.
>
> In retrospect, the speed of this conversion from a peacetime to a wartime
> economy is stunning. The harnessing of U.S. industrial power tipped the
> scales decisively toward the Allied Forces, reversing the tide of war.
> Germany and Japan, already fully extended, could not counter this effort.
> Winston Churchill often quoted his foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey:
> "The United States is like a giant boiler. Once the fire is lighted under
> it, there is no limit to the power it can generate."
>
> This mobilization of resources within a matter of months demonstrates that
> a country and, indeed, the world can restructure the economy quickly if it
> is convinced of the need to do so. In this mobilization, the scarcest
> resource of all is time. With climate change, for example, we are fast
> approaching the point of no return. The temptation is to reset the clock,
> but we cannot. Nature is the timekeeper.
>
> The question facing governments is whether they can respond quickly enough
> to prevent threats from becoming catastrophes. The world has precious
> little experience in responding to aquifer depletion, rising temperatures,
> expanding deserts, melting polar ice caps, and a shrinking oil supply.
> These trends are fully challenging the capacity of our political
> institutions and leaders. In times of crisis, societies sometimes have a
> Nero as a leader and sometimes a Churchill.
>
> Leadership, like time, is a scarce resource. History judges political
> leaders by whether or not they respond to the great issues of their time.
> For today's leaders, that issue is how to move the global economy onto an
> environmentally sound path. We need a national political leader to step
> forward, an environmental Churchill, to rally the world around this
> effort.
>
>
> #     #     #
>
> Adapted from Chapters 1 and 13 in Lester R. Brown, PLAN B 2.0: RESCUING A
> PLANET UNDER STRESS AND A CIVILIZATION IN TROUBLE (New York: W.W. Norton &
> Company, 2006), available for free downloading and for purchase at
> http://www.earthpolicy.org/Books/PB2/index.htm .
>
> Additional data and information sources at www.earthpolicy.org or contact
> jlarsen (at) earthpolicy.org.
> For reprint permissions contact rjkauffman (at) earthpolicy.org.