=Paper= {{Paper |id=Vol-3069/longpaper06 |storemode=property |title=A Comparative Review of Climate Mobilization Plans |pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3069/FP_06.pdf |volume=Vol-3069 |authors=Janne M. Korhonen,Juho Karvinen }} ==A Comparative Review of Climate Mobilization Plans== https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3069/FP_06.pdf

Proceedings of the Conference on Technology Ethics 2021 - Tethics 2021

A Comparative Review of Climate Mobilization Plans

Long paper

Janne M. Korhonen1 2[0000-0003-3407-6188] and Juho Karvinen3[0000-0002-9802-3854]
1
Turku School of Economics, Finland;
2
Lappeenranta University of Technology, Finland
3
Tampere University, Finland
janne@jmkorhonen.net

Abstract. 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 book-
length treatments. We outline the common themes and suggest further research
to the topic is warranted.

Keywords: climate mitigation, wartime mobilization, sustainability transition

1 Introduction

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 (Mazzucato 2020) and “green new deal” type proposals: while green new deal
proposals typically include significant government-led investments in low-carbon
infrastructure, climate mobilization plans go a step further and envision a directly
planned low-carbon transition underpinned, if necessary, by government’s emergency
powers. In other words, if green new deals represent a step change in government
intervention to secure a sustainable future, climate mobilization plans envision a limited
state of emergency until decarbonization targets are achieved.

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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 Background: Why climate mobilization?

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, large-
scale 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).

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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 (O’Callaghan & Murdock 2021). Even though only about 368 billion
dollars were earmarked for green initiatives, the spending spree provides yet another
proof that governments have the means to pursue substantially more ambitious
environmental policies, and that at least in time of crisis, have much more financial
latitude to do so than often has been assumed. No wonder, then, that ideas such as the
Green New Deal and “build back better” have gained currency in political discourse.
The European Union has adopted an “European Green Deal” with the stated purpose of
becoming the first climate neutral bloc by 2050. Even the United States is currently on
track to spend 2000 billion dollars on rebuilding its infrastructure, including $174
billion boost to the electric vehicle market, $100 billion to update and harden the
country’s aging electric grid, $35 billion in research and development of climate change
mitigation, and another $10 billion to establish a “Civilian Climate Corps” to employ
people to restore land.
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

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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 Example: U.S. industrial mobilization for the Second
World War

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).

Table 1: Expansion of U.S. military production, selected products, 1939-1945. Source: Wilson
2016, p. 79. Figures in metric tons unless otherwise specified.

Product Pre-war production Peak production Ratio
peak/pre-war
Synthetic rubber 3250 tons (1940) 936 800 tons (1945) 288
4000 barrels/day (June 520 000 barrels/day
Aviation fuel 130
1940) (March 1945)
Ocean-going 0,3 million gross tons 18 million gross tons
60
freighters (1939) (1943)
TNT (explosive) 45 tons/day (June 1940) 1815 tons/day (Dec 1942) 40
Completed
3000 (1939) 93 600 (1944) 31,2
airplanes
Aircraft fuselages 9200 tons (1940) 361 560 tons (1944) 39,3
Magnesium 5440 tons (1940) 166 920 tons (1943) 30,7
Aluminium 148 320 tons (1939) 1 043 260 tons (1943) 7
Electricity
28 000 MW (1940) 44 000 MW (April 1944) 1,6
generation capacity
Steel 74,4 million tons (1949) 87 million tons (1945) 1,2

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

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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 (Wilson 2016:19). In short, the First World
War industrial mobilization was conducted in the belief that private companies and “the
market” will sort everything out for the best; the result was chaos, inflation and
profiteering on a vast scale, with “merchants of death” seeing their profits rise more
than 10-fold while others died in the mud in France, equipped with British and French
weapons because the U.S. industry was not able to produce military equipment in
appreciable quantities before the war was over.
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 (Khrushchev & Khrushchev
2004, pp. 638–639; Weeks 2004).
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 Bossie
(2020) and Lacey (2012) show, diverting even up to 44 percent of GDP to war
production did not mean austerity or cause more than a small and temporary decrease
in civilian consumption - totally contrary to what military leaders and civilian planners
and economists believed would inevitably happen (Mason and Bossie 2020:15) .
Massive public investment in new industries led to rapid growth of output and
productivity: instead of having to choose between guns or butter, as the saying goes,
the U.S. economy produced much more guns and more butter (Mason and Bossie
2020:7). In fact, U.S. workers gained considerably during the war. Not only were the
last vestiges of the Great Depression expunged and nearly full employment achieved,
but tight labor markets served as a powerful force for redistribution. Those at the bottom
of the hierarchy - blacks and women - benefited the most. For instance, Mason and
Bossie (2020) note that the gap between median black and white wages closed much
more during the war years than in any subsequent period, even despite the lack of
effective anti-discrimination measures.
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 (see also

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Rockoff 2016, Mason and Bossie 2020). These massive public outlays were financed
by a combination of taxes, debt, and money creation (Rockoff 1998, Lacey 2012). A
later analysis found out that the financial means of the U.S. government would’ve easily
enabled it to continue the war at least until the end of 1946, and almost certainly for
even longer (Lacey 2012).
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 Proposals

The proposals reviewed for this paper are as follows (Table 2).

Table 2: Climate mobilization proposals reviewed in this paper.

Year Main Type Focus area, key points
authors
Academic Generic proposal to treat the climate emergency like
2001 Bartels
article the Second World War mobilization. Canadian focus.
Calls for a combined approach to solve not only the
Spratt and climate crisis but other pressing issues, such as peak
2008 Book
Sutton oil, affordable food and water, and biodiversity.
Refers Brown’s Plan B version 3.0.
Latest iteration (4.0) of Brown’s Plan B. Four
integrated components: cutting net CO2 emissions
80% by 2020; stabilizing world population at 8 bn or
2009 Brown Book
lower; eradicating poverty; restoring the Earth’s
natural systems. Food security is in the center of the
analysis.
Overview proposal of “One Degree War Plan”, a plan
to stabilize the climate to <1 degree warming. High
Randers level modeling by C-ROADS climate model to verify
Academic
2010 and the results. 5-year “climate war” to jumpstart climate
article
Gilding action, followed by 15 years of stabilization phase
(“climate neutrality”) and 80 years of “climate
recovery.” Electricity, fossil cars, gasoline rationed;

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50% of the world’s aircraft grounded in 5 years.
Funded via carbon tax.
2011 Gilding Book Expands on Randers & Gilding 2010.
Focuses on governance issues. Calls for a special
Delina and Academic
2013 ministry for transition to a low-carbon future as the
Diesendorf article
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
2016 Delina Book
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
2016 McKibben Article
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
Silk, redistributionary aspects explicitly discussed and
2016/2019 Report
Bamberger 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
2020 Klein Book “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
Griffith,
electrification efforts. Showcases potential job
2020 Calish and Report
creation benefits. Proposes state-backed loans and
Fraser
other financing as a major, understudied tool for
increasing the adoption rate for low carbon
alternatives.

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Examines how the U.S. government created new war
industries during the Second World War; suggests
Bossie and Working
2020 these lessons are relevant if the U.S. needs to make
Mason paper
large scale economic readjustments for other reasons,
not just because of climate change.
Using the WW2 example, examines how public
Mason and Working spending could restore the normal functioning of the
2020
Bossie paper 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
2020 Malm Book
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 Common themes
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.

Individualist and market solutions are not enough in an existential crisis
“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, market-
based 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

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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.

Inequality prevents action
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, Klein
(2020) directly argues that inequality is “toxic” to social solidarity and mass
mobilization that is now required. “A successful mobilization requires that people make
a common cause across class, race and gender, and that the public have confidence that
sacrifices are being made by the rich as well as middle- and modest-income people”
(Klein 2020:15).
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 Bartels (2001) barely mention societal inequalities; Brown
(2009) holds up the eradication of poverty (but not of inequality) as one of the goals of
his “Plan B”, and Gilding (2011) argues for adaptation measures that “reduce hardship
and geopolitical instability caused by by the unavoidable physical changes to the
climate, including food shortages, forced migration, and military conflict over
resources”. Particularly when contrasted with proposals made just a few years later, the
focus is on global poverty and there is a lack of discussion about the effects of inequality
within rich countries. For instance, Silk (2016:10) argues “in order to secure dignity
and justice for all, to increase the odds of victory, and to preserve our highest ideals
during this long emergency, Marshall Plan-like international aid efforts and equity-
based New Deal type social welfare programs should support this World War II-style
emergency mobilization of our entire society and economy” (emphasis added).
Klein (2020) repeatedly emphasizes a “just transition” that provides support and new
employment opportunities to those whose livelihoods are threatened by the transition,
and highlights the importance of respecting not only human rights in general but
indigenous communities in particular. Klein also argues that just transition probably
requires rationing of goods and services. Examining the inequality aspect even further,
in their paired papers, Mason and Bossie (Mason and Bossie 2020, Bossie and Mason
2020) explicitly emphasize how the mobilization style approach would be a powerful
force for more equal redistribution. In fact, Mason and Bossie’s papers do not go deep
into the details of what a climate mobilization would actually look like: instead, they
take the feasibility of such a program as their starting point and investigate how public
spending on a massive scale to avert a climate disaster could accelerate the economic
transformation while serving as “an engine of growth and equality” (Mason and Bossie
2020). Finally, in the most radical of the proposals reviewed here, Malm (2020) exhorts
his readers to a state-led confrontation against the vested interests that are currently
hindering timely climate action. Malm argues that the state should be given wide
ranging emergency powers, and predicts that the result would be broadly analogous to

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“war communism” in the 1920s Soviet Russia, where the bolsheviks “stumbled from
one emergency to another” with the result of radicalizing their policies.

Catastrophes may motivate, but are they enough?
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” (Brown
2009:256) shocks societies into action and the public opinion shifts from “best we can”
towards “what is necessary” attitude (Gilding 2011). These earlier proposals eschew
from discussing active PR measures that may be necessary for the emergency mentality
to emerge. Later ones, such as Silk (2016, 2019) and Klein (2020) tend to point out that
even during the Second World War, the emergency mentality did not so much emerge
spontaneously as it was emerged via conscious effort on part of alarmed politicians and
the press who declared an emergency and then used mass media to educate the citizenry
of the threat and what to do to overcome it (see e.g. Klein 2012 for a discussion of U.S.
public opinion’s role in the WW2 mobilization effort; Klein 2020 discusses the
Canadian experience). As discussed above, contrary to commonly held assumption, the
U.S. mobilization for instance started years before the “Pearl Harbor moment”, and had
required an active political struggle by farsighted politicians. As noted by most of the
authors discussed here, if a “Pearl Harbor moment” is required to mobilize public
support, then it may already be too late. Brown (2009:256-259) discusses three stylized
models of societal change, the “Pearl Harbor moment” , the “Berlin Wall” (gradual
change followed by a sudden change), and “the Sandwich” (strong grassroots
movement supported by the political elite), concluding that the Pearl Harbor probably
comes too late, the Berlin Wall scenario may take too long, and therefore favoring the
Sandwich approach where activists push sympathetic political elites to the right
direction. Whether the model is applicable in a world where reactionary far right rebels
against “progressive elites” is another question, however.
In an incisive critique, Malm (2020) dissects the differences between the state-led
emergency response to the COVID pandemic and the inaction on climate, arguing that
the climate crisis is more comparable to the process where zoonotic diseases emerge
due to biodiversity loss, and that prompt action was due to the rich being among the
first rather than last COVID victims. However, Malm also notes that the public opinion
is already in favor of stronger climate action, and that decarbonization policy would
never have to ask the people to submit to something as unpleasant as the COVID
lockdowns. In a crisis, measures that were previously considered impossible soon
become self-evident policy.

Rapid energy system transformation is a necessary but not sufficient condition
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.

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Brown (2009) suggested an overall global renewable energy production mix that would
satisfy the world energy demand while reducing GHG emissions by 80 percent in a
decade. Delina (2016) and Klein (2020) base their plans on the “100% WWS” model
by Delucchi and Jacobson (Delucchi and Jacobson 2011, Jacobson and Delucchi 2011),
which calls for the installation of 4 million 5 MW wind turbines, 2 billion 3 kW rooftop
solar photovoltaic (PV) arrays, 90 000 industrial scale (300 MW) concentrated solar
power (CSP) and PV plants, 270 new hydroelectric plants, 5350 geothermal plants, 720
000 wave energy devices, and 490 000 tidal turbines. These would provide about 90%
of estimated 2030 global energy supply; furthermore, significant investments in power
grid expansion, energy storage and carbon free aviation fuel technologies are required.
Even though the 100% WWS model has been strongly criticised (see e.g. Heard et al.
2017, Clack et al. 2017) and one would be advised to treat it as an order of magnitude
estimate rather than an exact plan, this model provides a useful approximation of the
scale of transition required. For instance, to reach the goal of 4 million 5 MW wind
turbines in ten years, current wind turbine installation rates (93 000 MW in 2020) would
have to increase approximately 20-fold (Figure 2). Increases of similar scale are
required across the board.

Fig 2: Annually installed wind energy capacity and the required increase
in 100% WWS scenario.

Rapid transition could be cheaper than a slow one
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

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rapid transition to a low-carbon economy could well turn out to be cheaper than a slow,
gradual approach (Mason and Bossie 2020). While part of this argument rests on
probable damages caused by destabilizing climate, it is very important to note that even
in absence of such costs (which are difficult to calculate), rapid transition could be
cheaper, if production is subject to increasing rather than decreasing returns. The
textbook economics model of production suggests that each additional unit of
production costs more than the last one. In such a decreasing returns situation, higher
demand pushes costs up. If the supply of low-carbon infrastructure is subject to
decreasing returns, then decarbonization can be painfully costly, and slow and gradual
transition is warranted.
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
(Daniel et al. 2019). Calculated in this manner, the “proper” carbon price would start
high, to reduce uncertainties about the effects of GHG emissions rapidly, and diminish
slowly. Such a calculation suggests that rapid transition is the financially prudent
strategy.

Money is a flow, not an object
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

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overriding goal of rapid decarbonization. Disastrous inflation would be averted by
draining the excess liquidity via taxation and, if necessary, by rationing inflation-
causing “bottleneck” goods in the short term, while using public funds to increase their
supply in the long term (Mason and Bossie 2020, see also Rockoff 2016).
Again, there is a notable difference between earlier (Brown 2009, Gilding 2011) and
later (Silk 2019, Klein 2020, Mason & Bossie 2020) proposals: the former suggest
levying the funds via carbon taxes, while the latter take a stance that is more aggressive
and more closely aligned with the WW2 example (see Lacey 2012) in advocating for
money creation and taxing excess wealth and corporate profits directly. While all the
proposals reviewed here, with the possible exception of Malm (2020), acknowledge
that it is only just to promise corporations a fair return on investment for work they do
for decarbonization, the latter proposals argue for the adoption of WW2-style excess
profits taxes and the setting of profits to a decent but not outrageous level. This is seen
as necessary not only to control spending, but even more importantly, to retain a sense
of fairness and justice by preventing “profiteering”: as Klein (2020) notes in his review
of historical experience, the WW2 mobilization effort was nearly doomed by the
public’s bad memories of the First World War mobilization and its outbreak of
profiteering. Likewise, a climate mobilization effort would be hindered if not prevented
altogether, if it were to be perceived as an opportunity for obscene profits.

Governance is critical, and requires both community participation and vigilance
towards civil rights
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
Klein (2020), Silk (2019) and Delina (2016) go into considerable detail about what
kinds of government agencies could be plausibly required, based on the WW2
experience. On an international level, Delina (2016) proposes a body of comparable
status to the U.N. Security Council to oversee the transition.
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

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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 (a threat
expressed in Kester and Sovacool’s 2017 critique of climate mobilization metaphor as
well), and exhort for vigilance in ensuring that no vulnerable group is sacrificed, like
the “enemy aliens” were during the Second World War. Both Klein and Malm are also
concerned that the rise of climate denialist far right, or outright “fossil fascism” (Malm
2020) could occur.

War metaphor relies almost totally on North American World War II experience
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 Klein (2020) when he uses Canada’s
First World War experience as an example to avoid.
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 Kester and Sovacool (2017) in their critique
of Delina & Diesendorf (2013) and Delina (2016) - risk “militarization” of the climate
effort and the adoption of zero-sum competitive mentality on part of participating
nations. As Kester and Sovacool ask, do we really want to go to war?
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

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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.

5 Discussion

“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

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Kester and Sovacool (2017), there is little academic critique of the use of war metaphor
to promote climate action. We suspect, but do not know, that aversion to the war
metaphor is greater in Europe than it is in the United States for instance. What alternate
metaphors could convey the sense of urgency and collective commitment? Could the
“ecological reconstruction” metaphor of Järvensivu et al. (2019) be a better choice for
a broad-based movement, or would we be better off by pressing for a Green New Deal
instead?
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 post-
war 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 (see e.g. Yoshpe 1953). This planning was abandoned once the reality of
thermonuclear war sunk in: from the early 1960s, it became clear to everyone that a
war between the superpowers would be over well before factories could be converted
to war production, and quite possibly before the factory workers had time to duck and
cover. However, these now obscure plans, and other contingency plans from smaller
powers who adopted a “total defence” strategy, such as Switzerland, Sweden and
Finland, should be combed through with the intention of finding insights that could be
useful for climate mobilization or for other unexpected contingencies.
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 large-
scale 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 techno-
optimist 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

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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 market-
based 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 Mazzucato (2020)
and others.

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