Continuing failure of climate mitigation efforts to produce results has directed scholarly and public interest towards those episodes in human history where governments have enacted emergency measures for the common good. In particular, the experience of the industrial mobilization to the Second World War has been cited increasingly often as a possible model for emergency climate efforts. In this paper, we review the most notable “climate mobilization” proposals from the first explicit war mobilization parallel in 2001 to recent booklength treatments. We outline the common themes and suggest further research to the topic is warranted.
In recent years, there has been a marked increase in public, activist and academic interest in proposals to rapidly convert the world economy to a sustainable footing. Motivated by lack of progress in reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and the failure of existing, gradual, market-based climate mitigation approaches, these climate mobilization proposals envision an all-out, society-wide concerted and planned effort to end dependence on fossil fuels and stop other GHG emissions as well, once and for all. As the name suggests, climate mobilization plans are strongly inspired by experiences of past wars, particularly the Second World War, where democracies had to convert their industries and indeed entire economies to the production of war material in a few scant years.
These approaches are related to, but distinct from “mission-oriented” industrial
policies
Copyright © 2021 for this paper by its authors.
Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) The importance of the topic is not limited to climate change mitigation, however. All out efforts comparable to a major war may be necessary to stave off other existential threats, from future pandemics to asteroids to hitherto unforeseen phenomena. As experience from the COVID-19 pandemic illustrates, existing contingency plans have for the most part proven inadequate. A better understanding of past planetary scale emergencies could help improve emergency planning for the future.
This paper starts with a recap of the urgency of effective climate policies and the failure of the current approaches. This is followed by a brief historical description of the U.S. industrial mobilization for the Second World War, the main inspiration for the climate mobilization proposals. We then provide a review of the proposals from two decades, ranging from the first known explicit suggestion to confront climate change like wartime mobilization in 2001 to book-length treatments in 2020. We then synthesize the key lessons, commonalities and differences of these plans. Finally, we discuss the significance of the mobilization approach in the climate mitigation efforts, discuss some wider ethical aspects of the approach and provide some suggestions for future research. 2
Despite numerous climate conferences and emission reduction pledges, greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere keep growing. This lack of progress, combined with increasing awareness of potentially disastrous effects of even moderate warming (e.g. IPCC 2018, 1.5 report), has galvanized a new wave of popular climate activism. Spearheaded by increasingly radical movements such as Extinction Rebellion and youth-led Fridays for Future, these activists have been moderately successful in demanding far more ambitious climate policies.
At the same time, the limitations of market-based climate policies are becoming increasingly apparent. Even though market-based approaches such as the EU emission trading system promise cost-efficient emission reductions, unwillingness to adopt tight enough emission quotas and numerous loopholes built into carbon trading systems have resulted in woefully inadequate rate of emission reductions. A chicken-and-egg problem is apparent: politicians are loath to push for more ambitious climate policies because low-carbon alternatives are scarce and expensive, and low-carbon alternatives remain scarce and expensive because climate policies are insufficiently ambitious.
As a result, it is clear that humanity is rapidly running out of time to stabilize the Earth’s climate to keep it conducive to the survival and well-being of complex, largescale societies. Pathways to the target agreed upon in the Paris agreement of 2015, 1.5°C, now require exceptionally steep emission reductions and are unlikely to be achievable via incremental improvements to present policies (Fig. 1). Fig 1: Mitigation curves required to hit a 1.5 degree C world. From Griffith et al. (2020).
At the same time, events have overtaken the conventional wisdom that abhors direct
government intervention in the economic sphere. From the 2008 financial crisis to the
2020 COVID-19 pandemic, states have been the backstops that prevented crises from
escalating into cataclysms. Ideas that were until recently considered beyond the pale
are becoming self-evident policy. For example, in 2020 alone, the world’s largest 50
countries announced 14 600 billion US dollars’ worth of spending to counter the effects
of the coronavirus
However, even though the post-COVID policies represent a laudable step in the right direction, they too are unlikely to be sufficient. With less and less time available, more and more radical climate plans are being proposed. While some envision a contraction of industrial civilization, voluntary or involuntary, others propose a radical, all-out effort to reconstruct national economies on a decarbonized basis. These proposals are the focus of this paper. Before reviewing them, let us take a look at the inspiration behind them, the U.S. industrial mobilization for the Second World War. 3
The industrial might of the United States is broadly acknowledged as a key factor in the allied victory in the Second World War. The economy-wide redirection towards war production happened within mere years and the output of all manner of strategic goods expanded tremendously. Within mere years, the output of all manner of strategic goods expanded tremendously (table 1).
In retrospect, the mobilization effort is sometimes presented as a given and the
outcome as obvious: once the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Germany’s
subsequent declaration of war galvanized the U.S. public opinion, it seemed to be only
a matter of time before the latent productive capabilities of the richest country on Earth
would crush the Axis powers. In reality, however, president Roosevelt and others who
saw that a war was coming and realized the United States could not afford to stay out
of it faced a long, grueling uphill battle to put the U.S. industry to war footing. The task
was made even harder by the public’s bad memories from the First World War - “the
war to end all wars” - where the industrial mobilization was mismanaged to the extent
that, for example, the U.S. Army ordered 945 000 saddles and two million feeding bags
for its grand total of 86 000 horses, and railroad transport along the Eastern seaboard
became so hopelessly jammed that eventually the Army had to take direct control over
the railroad companies to sort out the mess
As a consequence, the struggle to mobilize the United States for a second war was
real. Furthermore, this often overlooked struggle, waged by Roosevelt and his allies in
earnest from about 1937, was immensely important for the Allied victory. For example,
without warships and airplanes that had been put into production in 1938, despite
considerable political and popular opposition, the Japanese conquest of the Pacific
would’ve been met with little resistance and forced the counteroffensive to begin from
a very precarious position. Similarly, without the 1.4 billion dollars spent between June
and December 1940 by the New Deal-era Reconstruction Finance Corporation to build
new defense plants and the strongly opposed Lend-Lease act of March 1941 that
permitted war material to be transferred to the opponents of the Axis, the Soviet
defenses might have collapsed under the Nazi onslaught - a fact admitted not only by
Russian historians but by none other than Stalin himself
Even more remarkably, these astonishing feats of production were achieved with
practically no sacrifice on part of the general population. As e.g. Mason and
Finally, the war mobilization demonstrated that in a crisis, the financial apparatus of
a modern economy permits states to finance practically everything that can be
physically constructed. In a thorough review of the economics of the U.S. war
mobilization, Lacey (2012) notes that thanks to careful economic planning and active
measures to control inflation, the Second World War became the first war in human
history where the strength of participants was limited not by the depth of government’s
coffers, but by the economy’s physical capacity to produce war material
In sum, despite its destructive purposes, mobilization for the Second World War remains a heartening example of what human societies can achieve if they truly want to. Even more so than singular technological triumphs like the Manhattan project or the Apollo program, the war years provide an example of a society focused on a single goal, willing to upend the existing arrangements and conventions for the benefit of future generations. It is indeed easy to see how an increasing number of authors and organizations have come to use the war mobilization imaginaries to promote more ambitious climate policies.
In the following section, we will explore some of the common themes of these proposals. This paper is intended as an introduction to the topic, not an exhaustive review, and we will return to the topic in later papers in more detail. 4
The proposals reviewed for this paper are as follows (Table 2). 2011 2013
Gilding
Book Delina and Academic
Diesendorf article 2016
Delina
Book 2016
McKibben
Article 2016/2019
Silk, Bamberger
Report 2020
Klein
Book 2020
Griffith, Calish and Fraser
Report 50% of the world’s aircraft grounded in 5 years.
Funded via carbon tax.
Expands on
Focuses on governance issues. Calls for a special ministry for transition to a low-carbon future as the principal agency to drive the transition.
Expands and fleshes out the themes of Delina & Diesendorf 2013. Focus on governance issues; suggests a body comparable to the UN Security Council to manage the transition. High emission countries would have 15 to 20 years to decarbonize, poor low emission countries as much as 35.
Popular article, one of the first in a major outlet to argue for climate mobilization style effort. Argues climate fight is not “like” war but an actual war.
McKibben also reports participating in the group writing the platform for Bernie Sanders’s presidental election campaign. The rhetoric of wartime mobilization ended up in the Democratic Party campaign although it was fronted by Hillary Clinton.
A report by the Climate Mobilization NGO. Suggests the U.S. has the capacity to end net greenhouse gas emissions by 2025 while creating full employment via large-scale deficit spending. Social equity and redistributionary aspects explicitly discussed and promoted as a reason to adopt a radical approach.
Detailed suggestions of agencies the U.S. government should set up to manage the effort, largely modeled on WW2 and New Deal examples. Original from 2016, updated in 2019.
Makes the case for Canadian climate mobilization.
Very explicit about the need for social equity and “just transition”. One of the only works so far that draw lessons from other than the U.S. war mobilization.
Proposes a strategy to rapidly electrify the entire United States energy system; draws parallels to the WW2 mobilization effort and the New Deal rural electrification efforts. Showcases potential job creation benefits. Proposes state-backed loans and other financing as a major, understudied tool for increasing the adoption rate for low carbon alternatives. 2020 2020
Bossie and Mason
Working paper Mason and Working
Bossie paper 2020
Malm
Book
Examines how the U.S. government created new war industries during the Second World War; suggests these lessons are relevant if the U.S. needs to make large scale economic readjustments for other reasons, not just because of climate change.
Using the WW2 example, examines how public spending could restore the normal functioning of the economic system, decrease inequality, and help transform the economy to a more sustainable basis.
Analyzes the differences between the COVID and climate response. Argues that states have to confront the vested interests that prolong the status quo; suggests that the mobilization metaphor should not be discarded but complemented with another metaphor and analogue, “war communism”. Discusses at length the dilemma of executing control measures in an emergency without trampling on democratic rights, but rather by securing, building on and drawing force from them. 4.1
The common denominator for the texts reviewed here is that they call for emergency action and use the industrial mobilization in the Second World War as a potential model for rapid climate mitigation. Otherwise the texts are varied. Some of them are article length, published in academic journals or popular media. Some of them are books published by commercial publishers or as independent publications. Some of the writers are researchers and academics with various backgrounds, some are activists and environmental writers, some are a combination of both. This section presents the common themes and the following sections briefly illustrate the unique contributions of each particular proposal.
“The ecologically necessary is politically infeasible, but the politically feasible is ecologically irrelevant.” William Rees, professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia and the creator of the ecological footprint concept, quoted in Klein (2020:xix)
All the proposals share the same underlying concern: existing individualist, marketbased solutions championed by most governments and business interest groups around the world are plainly inadequate for the scale of the challenge required. The authors argue that climate change should be treated as an existential crisis requiring collective emergency response, rather than a minor problem treatable by the present gradualist approach. Many point out that the Second World War presented a similar existential threat for democracy, and that individualist, market-based solutions would’ve been just as woefully inadequate back then as they arguably are today. This argument could be summarized as “the Second World War was not won by increasing taxes on personal cars and providing incentives for the production of bombers”. Instead, the governments should assume at the very least a coordinating function, providing not only targets but plans, financing and other support required for collective response to the threat.
Furthermore, many of the proposals correctly note that the prevailing market-based
approach is bound to increase societal inequalities and that this may well be a part of
the reason why climate response has so far been so inadequate. For example,
In fact, the plans reviewed here present an interesting case study of climate activists
coming to the realization that inequalities are central to the environmental crisis. The
earliest proposals such as
All the proposals acknowledge the problem of mobilizing public support in favor of
emergency measures. Earlier proposals assume that public support will be mobilized
after a sufficiently disastrous climate event, a “Pearl Harbour moment”
In an incisive critique,
Since cleaning up the energy system is a sine qua non of climate mitigation, all
mobilization plans are chiefly concerned with rapid energy system transition. By and
large, the proposals suggest a transition to 100% or nearly 100% renewable energy
generation in 10 to 20 years. Most proposals provide only high-level overviews of the
task required, rather than detailed plans for this energy transformation; some shorter
treatments do not even go as far as to assign target numbers for various energy sources.
Fig 2: Annually installed wind energy capacity and the required increase in 100% WWS scenario.
One of the most interesting arguments made by proponents of rapid transition (and not
only by those who advocate for climate mobilization) is the counterintuitive insight that
rapid transition to a low-carbon economy could well turn out to be cheaper than a slow,
gradual approach
However, there are good reasons to believe that actual production of the goods required to decarbonize societies is more often subject to increasing returns. As more wind power plants, solar PV panels, batteries, electrolysers, heat pumps and countless other items of low-carbon infrastructure are produced, they are likely to become even cheaper to produce, a phenomenon variously known as learning by doing, learning curve, or economies of scale. As a result, static analyses that do not account for decreasing costs tend to overestimate the cost of transition, and support a gradual rather than rapid decarbonization. So far, the actual evidence suggests that increasing returns seem to be the norm rather than an exception - see, for instance, how the cost of solar PV installations, batteries, and electric cars has collapsed in mere decades. As Mason and Bossie (2020:13) note, increasing returns also provide the rationale for strong government support for crucial technologies (such as hydrogen electrolysis equipment, required for energy storage and to provide carbon neutral feedstock to chemical industries) at their early stage, when the technologies are not yet profitable for private companies to adopt. Public investment at this stage has done wonders before, and there is little reason to believe it wouldn’t work again. Again, a coordinating function of the state would be beneficial here.
Notably, some researchers have independently argued that the proper way to
calculate the social cost of carbon, i.e. the basis of proposed carbon prices, should
acknowledge the fundamental uncertainties and grievous risks of worst case scenarios
As mentioned above, the Second World War was the first war in human history where
the economy’s physical productive capacity, not state finances, limited the strength of
the warring nations (Lacey 2012). Modern financial instruments, ranging from loans,
public bond issues and new taxes to outright money creation, permitted countries to
direct the output of their economies towards the overriding goal of victory. Climate
mobilization proposals argue that given the existential threat involved, a similar
approach is now necessary and possible. In this thinking, money is seen more as a tool
to guide the flow of physical and human resources to where they are needed: the state
would borrow, tax, and create funds and then spend them in projects that serve the
overriding goal of rapid decarbonization. Disastrous inflation would be averted by
draining the excess liquidity via taxation and, if necessary, by rationing
inflationcausing “bottleneck” goods in the short term, while using public funds to increase their
supply in the long term
Again, there is a notable difference between earlier
All the proposals reviewed here acknowledge that it is one thing to propose drastic
action like climate mobilization, and an entirely different thing to actually make it
happen. The difficulties facing such an effort may seem insurmountable, but, on the
other hand, so did they seem in 1938. The proposals realize that in order to turn policy
suggestions into concrete hardware, a variety of governance mechanisms are probably
required. As the discussion about climate mobilization is still in its early stages, it is
understandable that the proposals are not particularly detailed. However, some, such as
The post-2016 plans in particular emphasize the need for citizen and community participation in the setting of objectives and in actual execution of the plans. As noted in the above section on inequality, there is clearly an increasing awareness that environmental measures have to be perceived as just. For example, whereas the 2008 proposal by Spratt and Sutton rather casually mentioned that labor planning may be needed (implying that the government would direct workers to where they are needed), the 2020 book by Klein examines in considerable detail a three-tiered support structure for people affected by the transition. At individual worker level, income support, early retirement, training and education, relocation support, and other support measures are offered; at a community level, communities reliant on fossil industries are to be provided with help on recruiting new industries and employers, as well as green infrastructure and energy projects; and at the macro level, broader issues of climate justice and the transition to an equitable post-fossil economy are considered.
That said, it seems likely that Malm’s (2020) observation is correct, and some
measure of coercive authority would probably be required. Malm and Klein in
particular express concern that emergency response that by necessity would involve at
least some coercion could easily end up trampling democratic and civil rights
Climate mobilization plans reviewed here draw from a singular experience: that of
North American countries, USA and Canada, during the Second World War. At least
in English, studies that more than mention the experiences of other countries as
examples to follow are extremely rare, and experiences of wars other than the Second
World War are mentioned only in passing, as in
Speculating on the reasons why is somewhat beyond the scope of this paper, but we can hazard a guess that one reason is the different public perception of the war in North American and European experience. In Europe, the war was enormously destructive: in North America, aside from relatively few men suffering on distant battlefields, the war was practically an economic boom with few if any downsides to those whose friends or family were not directly fighting. Based on our discussions with European environmental activists, we believe the “war metaphor” indeed seems to be far less favorably received in Europe, compared to its reception in North America.
Perhaps as a consequence, the most detailed European proposal we were able to find
for comparison was a proposal for “ecological reconstruction”, which borrows its
central metaphor not from the war but from Finland’s post-war reconstruction effort
(Järvensivu et al. 2019). As its authors argue, the reconstruction metaphor may well be
a more suitable metaphor for the conversion of the economy to a sustainable footing.
“Reconstruction” implies a long process of rebuilding and repairing the existing,
damaged institutions, whereas the mobilization metaphor implies a short, sharp break
from the normal, followed by a return to status quo once the imminent threat is defeated.
What’s more, the reconstruction metaphor avoids the problematic connotations with
war and militarism, which - as argued by
That well justified cautionary note withstanding, there are benefits to be had from studying the North American experience. For one thing, for all their differences, the U.S. and Canadian economies in the 1940s operated according to principles pretty much similar to those that are now universal among industrialized countries. The North American mobilization serves as an “existence proof” that largely democratic countries whose market economies were almost entirely based on private ownership could direct immense resources towards solving a pressing problem, and that the public opinion can be steered to approve it. If nothing else, the history of war mobilization shows that humanity is still far from having been knocked out of the climate fight: in reality, we haven’t yet even begun to fight. Even if a destabilized climate causes far more devastating disasters than it has hitherto done, our societies retain stupendous if latent powers that they could marshall for the common good. Simply remembering that this is possible and has been done before, on a far larger scale than anything that is yet required for stabilizing the climate, is an advantage, and an argument against despair. As the famous poster put it, we can do it.
“The fatal blow to the conventional wisdom comes when the conventional ideas fail signally to deal with some contingency to which obsolescence has made them palpably inapplicable.”
J. K. Galbraith, The Affluent Society As famously noted by J. K. Galbraith, the enemy of the conventional wisdom is not new ideas but the march of events. It is therefore unlikely that climate mobilization ideas by themselves will ever cause the governments to adopt such drastic policies. However, it is completely conceivable that some future circumstances provide the sufficient impetus for the adoption of more drastic policies. Even if climate mobilization “contingency” plans are unlikely to be enacted in full, their existence helps to move the terms of what is perceived as conceivable and what is not, i.e., the Overton window of climate policy ambition towards targets that are, in light of climate science, more realistic and conducive to the survival of human civilization.
This paper is a general and in many ways a preliminary review of the climate mobilization approach but leaves several questions open for exploration. We seek to continue our exploration into this topic in further papers, and welcome others to collaborate with us. Breaking from the limited conventional wisdom calls for historical and non-Western insight along with philosophical and ethical considerations. In the following, we recognize some historical research avenues and connect the topic to wider philosophical discussions.
Further historical research could, first, expand the scope of inquiry towards the experiences and lessons learned in other participants of the Second World War, and second, learn from the mobilization efforts for other emergencies to form a more comprehensive picture of emergency economic and industrial policies. Also the policies and institutional arrangements of the post-war reconstruction - the inspiration for the idea of ecological reconstruction - could be studied in more detail to allow for more historical models for climate mitigation apart from the New Deal in 1930s and wartime policies in the 1940s.
An important thread in further historical research would be the limitations and
dangers of the mobilization approach and the war metaphor. Aside from the paper by
Fertile ground for research may also be found in the study of Cold War contingency
plans for industrial mobilization and “total defence”. In the U.S. for instance, the
lessons of the industrial mobilization were thoroughly studied in the immediate
postwar period and volumes of material, often originally classified but now available, were
prepared so that the hard-won lessons from two world wars would not have to be
learned again
After all, the climate crisis is only a part of a broader sustainability crisis, and sustainability crisis is merely one threat facing the human experiment. The most dangerous dangers tend to be those we fail to foresee, and there may well come a time when humanity has to undertake an effort as or even more strenuous as the Second World War. Particularly in the close aftermath of the COVID pandemic, it seems unwise to not consider, coolly and before there is a pressing need, the problems a largescale societal response to some crisis would entail.
The apparent limits of conventional policy framework to address the sustainability crisis raises a need for a more comprehensive evaluation framework. In addition to historical research, this invites fundamental philosophical and ethical questions.
Within philosophy of technology there is a spectrum of attitudes towards technological modernity, from the pessimist and even primitivist views to technooptimist and techno-solutionist ones. Climate mobilization in general falls into the optimist side. In contrast to the techno-pessimist critiques, the mobilization approach does not call for political revolutions or rollback of the technological society. It does not view technology as such as the problem, but the current technological structures resting on fossil fuels and carbon emissions. Decarbonizing technological infrastructure and the economy can be done within the current political institutions with relatively small legislative and institutional reforms.
Unlike some accelerationist forms of techno-optimism though, the mobilization approach is not reliant on new technologies, e.g. geoengineering, solving the environmental wicked problems. As the source of historical inspiration might suggest, the technological solutions in the climate mobilization are instead quite traditional, based on products that are well developed and commercially available. Further, the techno-solutionism of the mobilization approach is not deterministic but stresses a range of active political measures - investments in the research and development of new technologies are only a part of the project.
The advantage of the mobilization approach is that it operates within historical experience of the modern industrial societies. There is no need to rely on technologies that do not yet exist and no need to comprehensively reimagine the political institutions. The policies proposed are something that have already been tried and found functional. It is relatively straightforward to start implementing the policies. However, further evaluation in the light of critical philosophy of technology would allow the optimist rapid climate mitigation and especially the energy transition to stand on a more solid footing.
Especially non-Western perspectives to rapid climate mitigation and the metaphor of wartime mobilization are much needed for several reasons. First, people in the Global South are in the most dangerous position in the face of ecological crises. The success or failure of the environmental policies affect their survival rather directly. Second, they are often the least advantaged people in global production chains. Industrial and economic policies in the Global North are likely to affect working and living conditions in the South. Third, if Europeans are less likely to have a glorified experience of the Second World War compared to North Americans, non-Western people are even less so.
Finally, even accepting the premises of the climate mobilization approach there are
several more concrete research questions to answer regarding the policies and
institutions of the mobilization. What is the status of the current governments around
the globe and their readiness to implement rapid mitigation policies? How to do the
transition from business as usual to emergency measures and back again? More
generally, from the starting point of non-interventionist governments and their
marketbased economic, industrial and technology policies, how to set up institutions that are
able to coordinate economic and technological activities towards a sustainable path?
One possible avenue of approach would be to link these discussions with ongoing
debate about “mission-oriented” industrial policy, as proposed by
Economy. New York: Bloomsbury Press.
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