The Antarctic research did contain, as the Times reported, one morsel of good news. Yes, following the Paris accord would doom much of the Antarctic -- but a "far more stringent effort to limit emissions of greenhouse gases would stand a fairly good chance of saving West Antarctica from collapse."
What would that "far more stringent effort" require? 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, the 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." In fact, Hillary Clinton's negotiators agreed to plans for an urgent summit "in the first hundred days of the next administration" where the president will convene "the world's best engineers, climate scientists, policy experts, activists, and indigenous communities to chart a course to solve the climate crisis."
But what would that actually look like? What would it mean to mobilize for World War III on the same scale as we did for the last world war?
As it happens, American scientists have been engaged in a quiet but concentrated effort to figure out how quickly existing technology can be deployed to defeat global warming; a modest start, in effect, for a mighty Manhattan Project. Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University and the director of its Atmosphere and Energy Program, has been working for years with a team of experts to calculate precisely how each of the 50 states could power itself from renewable resources. The numbers are remarkably detailed: In Alabama, for example, residential rooftops offer a total of 59.7 square kilometers that are unshaded by trees and pointed in the right direction for solar panels. Taken together, Jacobson's work demonstrates conclusively that America could generate 80 to 85 percent of its power from sun, wind, and water by 2030, and 100 percent by 2050. In the past year, the Stanford team has offered similar plans for 139 nations around the world.
The research delves deep into the specifics of converting to clean energy. Would it take too much land? The Stanford numbers show that you would need about four-tenths of one percent of America's landmass to produce enough renewable energy, mostly from sprawling solar power stations. Do we have enough raw materials? "We looked at that in some detail and we aren't too worried," says Jacobson. "For instance, you need neodymium for wind turbines -- but there's seven times more of it than you'd need to power half the world. Electric cars take lithium for batteries -- but there's enough lithium just in the known resources for three billion cars, and at the moment we only have 800 million."
But would the Stanford plan be enough to slow global warming? Yes, says Jacobson: If we move quickly enough to meet the goal of 80 percent clean power by 2030, then the world's carbon dioxide levels would fall below the relative safety of 350 parts per million by the end of the century. The planet would stop heating up, or at least the pace of that heating would slow substantially. That's as close to winning this war as we could plausibly get. We'd endure lots of damage in the meantime, but not the civilization-scale destruction we currently face. (Even if all of the world's nations meet the pledges they made in the Paris accord, carbon dioxide is currently on a path to hit 500 or 600 parts per million by century's end--a path if not to hell, then to someplace with a similar setting on the thermostat.)
To make the Stanford 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 -- took Jacobson's research and calculated how much clean energy America would need to produce by 2050 to completely replace fossil fuels. The answer: 6,448 gigawatts.
"Last year we installed 16 gigawatts of clean power," Solomon says. "So at that pace, it would take 405 years. Which is kind of too long."
So Solomon did the math to figure out how many factories it would take to produce 6,448 gigawatts of clean energy in the next 35 years. He started by looking at SolarCity, a clean-energy company that is currently building the nation's biggest solar panel factory in Buffalo. "They're calling it the giga-factory," Solomon says, "because the panels it builds will produce one gigawatt worth of solar power every year." Using the SolarCity plant as a rough yardstick, Solomon calculates that America needs 295 solar factories of a similar size to defeat climate change -- roughly six per state -- plus a similar effort for wind turbines.
Building these factories doesn't require any new technology. In fact, the effort would be much the same as the one that Solomon oversaw at Intel's semiconductor factory in New Mexico: Pick a site with good roads and a good technical school nearby to supply the workforce; find trained local contractors who can deal with everything from rebar to HVAC; get the local permits; order long-lead-time items like I-beam steel; level the ground and excavate; lay foundations and floors; build walls, columns, and a roof; "facilitate each of the stations for factory machine tooling with plumbing, piping, and electrical wiring"; and train a workforce of 1,500. To match the flow of panels needed to meet the Stanford targets, in the most intense years of construction we need to erect 30 of these solar panel factories a year, plus another 15 for making wind turbines. "It's at the upper end of what I could possibly imagine," Solomon says.
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.
In 1941, the world's largest industrial plant under a single roof went up in six months near Ypsilanti, Michigan; Charles Lindbergh called it the "Grand Canyon of the mechanized world." Within months, it was churning out a B-24 Liberator bomber every hour. Bombers! Huge, complicated planes, endlessly more intricate than solar panels or turbine blades -- containing 1,225,000 parts, 313,237 rivets. Nearby, in Warren, Michigan, the Army built a tank factory faster than they could build the power plant to run it--so they simply towed a steam locomotive into one end of the building to provide steam heat and electricity. That one factory produced more tanks than the Germans built in the entire course of the war.
It wasn't just weapons. In another corner of Michigan, a radiator company landed a contract for more than 20 million steel helmets; not far away, a rubber factory retooled to produce millions of helmet liners. The company that used to supply fabrics for Ford's seat cushions went into parachute production. Nothing went to waste -- when car companies stopped making cars for the duration of the fighting, GM found it had thousands of 1939 model-year ashtrays piled up in inventory. So it shipped them out to Seattle, where Boeing put them in long-range bombers headed for the Pacific. Pontiac made anti-aircraft guns; Oldsmobile churned out cannons; Studebaker built engines for Flying Fortresses; Nash-Kelvinator produced propellers for British de Havillands; Hudson Motors fabricated wings for Helldivers and P-38 fighters; Buick manufactured tank destroyers; Fisher Body built thousands of M4 Sherman tanks; Cadillac turned out more than 10,000 light tanks. And that was just Detroit--the same sort of industrial mobilization took place all across America.
According to the conventional view of World War II, American business made all this happen simply because it rolled up its sleeves and went to war. As is so often the case, however, the conventional view is mostly wrong. Yes, there are endless newsreels from the era of patriotic businessmen unrolling blueprints and switching on assembly lines -- but that's largely because those businessmen paid for the films. Their PR departments also put out their own radio serials with titles like "Victory Is Their Business," and "War of Enterprise," and published endless newspaper ads boasting of their own patriotism. In reality, many of America's captains of industry didn't want much to do with the war until they were dragooned into it. Henry Ford, who built and managed that Ypsilanti bomber plant, was an America Firster who urged his countrymen to stay out of the war; the Chamber of Commerce (now a leading opponent of climate action) fought to block FDR's Lend-Lease program to help the imperiled British. "American businessmen oppose American involvement in any foreign war," the Chamber's president explained to Congress.
Luckily, Roosevelt had a firm enough grip on Congress to overcome the Chamber, and he took the lead in gearing up America for the battles to come. Mark Wilson, a historian at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, has just finished a decade-long study of the mobilization effort, entitled Destructive Creation. It details how the federal government birthed a welter of new agencies with names like the War Production Board and the Defense Plant Corporation; the latter, between 1940 and 1945, spent $9 billion on 2,300 projects in 46 states, building factories it then leased to private industry. By war's end, the government had a dominant position in everything from aircraft manufacturing to synthetic rubber production.
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