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Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Bill McKibben wants the world to wage war against Climate Change, by giving governments full wartime powers to seize private property and coerce businesses into supporting the effort, and with strict government control of the economy.
A WORLD at WAR
We’re under attack from climate change—and our only hope is to mobilize like we did in WWII.
BY BILL MCKIBBEN
August 15, 2016
In the North this summer, a devastating offensive is underway. Enemy forces have seized huge swaths of territory; with each passing week, another 22,000 square miles of Arctic ice disappears. Experts dispatched to the battlefield in July saw little cause for hope, especially since this siege is one of the oldest fronts in the war. “In 30 years, the area has shrunk approximately by half,” said a scientist who examined the onslaught. “There doesn’t seem anything able to stop this.”
…
World War III is well and truly underway. And we are losing.
…
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.
…
“It was public capital that built most of the stuff, not Wall Street,” says Wilson. “And at the top level of logistics and supply-chain management, the military was the boss. They placed the contracts, they moved the stuff around.” The feds acted aggressively—they would cancel contracts as war needs changed, tossing factories full of people abruptly out of work. If firms refused to take direction, FDR ordered many of them seized. Though companies made money, there was little in the way of profiteering—bad memories from World War I, Wilson says, led to “robust profit controls,” which were mostly accepted by America’s industrial tycoons. In many cases, federal authorities purposely set up competition between public operations and private factories: The Portsmouth Naval Shipyard built submarines, but so did Electric Boat of Groton, Connecticut. “They were both quite impressive and productive,” Wilson says.
“Usually, when people from different worlds are dealing with each other, they get into conflicts and then dig in their heels deeper,” Berk says. “But because the stakes are so high and it’s moving so fast, no one doubts that if you don’t get a handle on this battle in the Atlantic, then the immediate consequences will be really grave. So they’re willing to do this kind of pragmatic trial and error. They start to see that ‘I can’t dig in my heels–I need this other person to learn from.’” In the face of a common enemy, Americans worked together in a way they never had before.
…
Read more: https://newrepublic.com/article/135684/declare-war-climate-change-mobilize-wwii
The McKibben post is well worth reading in full, amongst other things it contains interesting reflections about the climate policies of current US presidential candidates.
Leaving aside the question of whether renewables can replace fossil fuels (according to top Google engineers, they can’t), think about what a grim world McKibben wants to create.
The government would have unconstrained power to seize private property, and direct business people to work for the government for whatever “profit” the government decided was fair, on pain of having their assets forcibly removed and handed to someone else.
McKibben handily skirts around how he would deal with non business people, political opponents who object to or obstruct his war on climate, but it seems pretty obvious what would happen, if wartime history is any guide. A government willing to seize property and treat productive people as slaves simply wouldn’t tolerate opposition. At the very least public opposition to government policy would lead to long term internment – incarceration without due process.
Worst of all, McKibben’s war would never end. McKibben actually laments that control of the economy was handed back to private individuals after WW2.
That attitude quickly reset after the war, of course; solidarity gave way to the biggest boom in personal consumption the world had ever seen, as car-packed suburbs sprawled from every city and women were retired to the kitchen. Business, eager to redeem its isolationist image and shake off New Deal restrictions, sold itself as the hero of the war effort, patriotic industrialists who had overcome mountains of government red tape to get the job done. And the modest “operations researchers,” who had entered and learned from the real world when they managed radar development during the war, retreated to their ivory towers and became much grander “systems analysts” once the conflict ended. Robert McNamara, a former Ford executive, brought an entire wing of the Rand Corporation to the Defense Department during the Kennedy administration, where the think-tank experts promptly privatized most of the government shipyards and plane factories, and used their out-of-touch computer models to screw up government programs like Model Cities, the ambitious attempt at urban rehabilitation during the War on Poverty. “The systems analysts completely took over,” Berk says, “and the program largely failed for that reason.”
Read more: Same link as above
If I had written a post anywhere near as outrageous as McKibben’s jingoistic demand for a war on climate, his demand for wholesale surrender of liberty and property rights to government, I would be called a fascist. But because McKibben is a green, he gets a free pass from mainstream media to demand the unthinkable.
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Even Obama and his EPA concede that the US cannot make a difference in atmospheric CO2 content. We could disappear and it would hardly be noticeable. So when the war powers act allows POTUS to curtail concrete production in China, McKibben’s war has a chance. Until then it’s a lost cause and we should be all into negotiating a cease fire if not a complete surrender. ( How does one surrender to climate change-you must be able to if you can wage war on it.) Whats that about the definition of insanity? And his ranting is based on verbiage in the Democrat platform. Does Hillary endorse his craziness?
Yes, Hillary Clinton is accepting support from McKibben and 350.org. Yet another reason to vote Trump.
DMA asks: ” How does one surrender to climate change-you must be able to if you can wage war on it[?]”
I believe it was best summarized in the phrase “We must have the courage to do nothing”. That would be surrender in my opinion.
Bartleby
I fully agree and do believe it is the obvious best path to follow.
I was thinking along the lines of building a pool with a wet bar and a barbeque in my back yard, buying one of those floating chairs, and ordering Tanqueray in handles along with cases of limes. Anytime you guys want to drop by for a dip and a cold adult beverage, just yell over the back fence.
Sweet surrender.
[The mods look again, but notice he did not post his address, nor the GPS coordinates of the back fence of that Tanqueray-filled pool. .mod]
I said I was thinking about it. But, I am only going to do it if there really is GW. I believe the Russian’s are right and we are heading into a new LIA. Until I am convinced otherwise, the pool is a fantasy. But, if I am wrong, you will receive an invitation.You have my word on it.
I should add that Tanqueray is the good stuff, and it is for drinking not floating. The pool would be full of water, nicely, but not overly, warmed. The bar will have tonic to ward off the malaria, lots of limes, and plenty of ice. If you want martinis, bring your own vermouth and a shaker.
Bartleby: The great playwright and commentator, Keith Waterhouse coined the phrase:
I heartily recommend it to our leaders.
It’s more than just the US that cannot make a difference in atmospheric CO2 content. McKibben and his “researchers” are conveniently the fact that John Kerry correctlypublicized last year:
“The fact is that even if every American citizen biked to work, carpooled to school, used only solar panels to power their homes, if we each planted a dozen trees, if we somehow eliminated all of our domestic greenhouse gas emissions, guess what – that still wouldn’t be enough to offset the carbon pollution coming from the rest of the world.
If all the industrial nations went down to zero emissions –- remember what I just said, all the industrial emissions went down to zero emissions -– it wouldn’t be enough, not when more than 65% of the world’s carbon pollution comes from the developing world.”
So what does McKibben want to do? Have a real war with Asia over CO2 emissions before 2030?
“How does one surrender to climate change”
I’ve surrendered by trying to catch up with DiCaprio’s air miles.
“Bill McKibben wants the world to wage war against Climate Change,…”
Below is how I interpret the above:
“The Rockefeller foundations (and other rich lefty groups/people) wants the world to wage war against climate change,…”
‘The government would have unconstrained power to seize private property, and direct business people to work for the government for whatever “profit” the government decided was fair, on pain of having their assets forcibly removed and handed to someone else.’
Sounds like what they’re doing to the medical industry. Free enterprise and common sense are mostly gone from our government.
He’s got his world wars mixed up. Sounds as stupid as the Kaiser pre-WWI.
So Socialism has been overtaken by Crony Capitalism or ‘Fascism lite”. This is how the Nazis ran things, instead of taking over the industries like their cousins the communists did, they simply regulated them and made sure the owners supported the Regime politically. Kind of like what is happening with US industry now. And of course we have the pretense of a Bill of Rights that is continually toddering on obliteration by interpretation. McKibben is not much different than his predessors on the left. If its not one cause, its another. This country, this idea was a nice experiment.
McKibben: “…experts … used their out-of-touch computer models to screw up government programs…”
Wow! He’s onto something here…!
Let’s not let experts with their out-of-touch computer models near anything that matters!
Mckibben is even madder than he looks.
He needs to be sectioned for the safety of the public.
What happened to all those 68’s and their make love not war.
According to https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/08/19/climate-philosopher-demands-a-tax-on-children/
love seems not to be the answer, and then war is apparantly the only solution.
Lost is that fact that most of the industrial capacity of the world was in the US.
I suppose we were supposed to keep the rest of the world in the rubble of World War II.
Think you’re exaggerating a bit there, from Wiki so usual caveats but;
GDP in billions of (1990) dollars 1939/1945
British Empire 687/731
French Empire 248/150
Soviet Union 366/343
United States 893/1498
German Reich 461/310
Italian Empire 154/115
Japanese Empire 247/207
The huge growth in US GDP is certainly remarkable but it started at 29% of world GDP and finished at 45%. Not that the World wasn’t and isn’t eternally gateful for the enormous contribution to the defeat of fascism.
Apples and oranges.
The first post referenced manufacturing capacity while you are listing GDP, which includes a lot of things not related to manufacturing.
You’re right of course although not really apples and oranges since GDP of the industrialised nations seems a reasonable rough guide. Manufacturing as a percentage of total GDP probably rose in US but it seems unlikely that it didn’t rise elsewhere too (Sweden and Switzerland for instance). You missed the more obvious error that although it was a World War the combined GDP of the major combatants was not the total World GDP. On that basis US GDP is 20% of total World GDP in 1939 and about 31% in 1945. Very impressive but it still seems unlikely ‘that most of the industrial capacity of the world was in the US’. Perhaps Neo could provide a source for the original comment.
It was not the world GDP, however it was the vast majority of the first world GDP which is where most of the manufacturing for trade was also occurring.
The fact that a lot of second and third world countries were also growing crops and hand producing stuff for local consumption greatly increases the world GDP but has no impact on this discussion.
You can’t surely define 45% as ‘the vast majority’. 45% of the total GDP of the combatants in 1945 was my calculation and obviously not all the ‘first world’ countries were combatants.
WWII did not involve all of the first world, but there was precious little from that category left out.
Those that were left out were not major manufacturers to begin with.
Bill McKibben is barking mad. But Tony Blair isn’t far behind…
“Brexit is a catastrophe for Britain,” Mr. Blair also claimed in the lecture, insisting that people only voted against the European Union (EU) because they were uneducated.
“[Education is] the single most important way to prepare societies for globalisation. We need a commitment to it like the one we have on climate change”, he said.
http://www.thenational.ae/uae/tony-blair-holds-up-uae-as-model-nation
We’ve got one here—Common Core— with similar predictable results, if we can’t get rid of it.
The world isn’t at war, just the climate numpties are. Their foes are science, rationality, democracy, truth, and human decency. Fortunately, they’re losing. But don’t tell McKibby. He might cry.
What a mental degenerate…..to state it kindly.
Advice to Bill: seek help
We’ve been told repeatedly that 97% of all scientists agree with what McKibben is saying. I guess they didn’t make the photo-op for some reason. But no doubt The Republic will feature those scientists enthusiastically celebrating Bill’s ideas in an upcoming article.
/snark
Weepy, you foretold your retirement a couple of years ago, why not make at least that prediction come true.
… and from his favorite role model?
That is funny as he’ll. Thx for posting it.
Cannot….stop….laughing. 🙂
+1. Thanks.
A strange resemblance to Donald Duck . No disrespect to the Duck .
Let’s hope it keeps warming .
What do eco- frauds have against plants, animals and more ocean ?
Kind of selfish aren’t they ?
Scary global warming promoters are going to really hyperventilate as the
scam collapses and wrecks their business .
It is a pity Bill doesn’t stand for election, where his great ideas could get a full airing.
It is a pity Bill doesn’t stand for election, where his great ideas could get a full airing.
That is exactly why Bill and his ilk don’t stand for election. They know full well that no democratic process would ever let them past the first round. They work in the background at eg UN conferences where there is no democratic oversight of the very real damage they are already inflicting.
That video is super funny, especially given the WUWT post after this one – ‘The North Atlantic: Ground Zero of Global Cooling’ !!!
I love Bill McKibben! He epitomizes the missing link (they say we haven’t found it yet, I say you are looking in the wrong places). Ignorance truly is bliss. What Billy Boy doesn’t know may also be what many of youu also do not know, and that is that the ends of all post-MPT interglacials is considered the “Climatic Madhouse”. It is entirely possible that at 11,719 years old, the Holocene is entering its death throes. There were a minimum of two major positive thermal excursions at the end of the last interglacial, the last one was the strongest and it saw the glacial inception. Same thing happened at the end of MIS-11:
“The Marine Isotope Stage 11 interglacial, centered at ~400 ka, appears to be the best candidate for understanding climatic changes in the context of low insolation forcing such as that of our present interglacial. Direct correlation between terrestrial (pollen) and marine climatic indicators and ice volume proxy from deep-sea core MD01-2447 (off northwestern Iberia) shows for the first time the phase relationship between southwestern European vegetation, sea surface temperatures in the northeastern Atlantic midlatitudes and ice volume during MIS 11. A warmest 32,000 years-long period and three following warm/cold cycles occurred synchronously on land and ocean. The end of the warmest period sees the glacial inception which coincides with the replacement of warm deciduous forest by conifer (pine-fir) expansion in northwestern Iberia and, consequently, with the southward migration of the tree line in high latitudes in response to declining summer insolation.”
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Stephanie_Desprat/publication/229415952_Is_vegetation_responsible_for_glacial_inception_during_periods_of_muted_insolation_changes/links/0c96051e55e2f0f6b2000000.pdf
Same thing happened at the end of MIS-19:
“During the glacial inception from MIS 19 to MIS 18, the low resolution EPICA Dome C water stable isotope record (Jouzel et al., 2007) has revealed millennial variability principally marked by the occurrence of three consecutive warm events.”
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Valerie_Masson-Delmotte2/publication/48416689_New_MIS_19_EPICA_Dome_C_high_resolution_deuterium_data_Hints_for_a_problematic_preservation_of_climate_variability_at_sub-millennial_scale_in_the_oldest_ice/links/0912f50ef2d7d14be2000000.pdf
So I am sorry to Billy Boy, and all the mewling quim out there. You have a much more difficult problem to solve than you can possibly imagine! As time, and the Holocene, plow on, I become less and less resistant to your mewlings. Go right ahead, strip the climate security blanket from the late Holocene atmosphere. Tip us into the next glacial. Your gene pool stands a far lower chance of making it to even the first Dansgaard-Oeschger oscillation, much less to the next interglacial (some 90kyrs away). In other words I am leaning more towards “I suggest a new strategy R2, let the Wookie(s) win!”
Here”s why:
“Here, we study the questions why we still live in an interglacial world and when we should expect the end of the Holocene under natural conditions (no anthropogenic influence) or under anthropogenic perturbations (also referred to as “Anthropocene”), questions which attracted considerable interest in recent years. It was argued that without earlier anthropogenic activity we would live already in glacial world (Ruddiman’s hypothesis). Tzedakis et al. (Nature Geoscience, 2012), using MIS 19 as the best analogy in terms of the orbital parameters for the Holocene, suggested that the new glacial inception would start within the next 1500 years, assuming natural CO2 level of 240 ppm. However, 240 ppm is much lower than preindustrial CO2 level and CO2 concentrations during several most recent interglacials (starting from MIS 11). Here, using the comprehensive Earth system model of intermediate complexity CLIMBER-2, carefully calibrated for the simulations of the past eight glacial cycles, we show that (i) although climate conditions during late Holocene were very close to the bifurcation transition to the glacial climate state (Calov and Ganopolski, Geophys. Res. Lett., 2005), it is very unlikely that under pre-industrial CO2 level (280 ppm) glacial inception would occur within the next several thousand years; (ii) it is likely that the current interglacial, even without anthropogenic CO2 emission, would be the longest interglacial during the past million years; (iii) current CO2 level makes new glacial inception virtually impossible within the next 50,000 years; (iv) in agreement with earlier result of Archer and Ganopolski (Geochem. Geophys. Geosyst., 2007) based on a conceptual model of glacial cycles, we found that consumption of a large portion of available fossil fuel could postpone the next glacial inception by hundreds of thousand years.”
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2013EGUGA..15.1666G
I could provide a slew of quotations/references, but we are limited to 3 before automatic moderation sets in.
But the salient point here should be rather simple and obvious. Only 1 post-MPT interglacial has lasted longer than about half a precession cycle, which varies between 19,000 and 23,000 years and we are at the 23kyr point now, making 11,500 half. At 11,719 years old, the Holocene is now looking a bit long in the tooth. As far as I can tell from vast research the only thing we could possibly do to extend it would be to release large quantities of GHGs into the late Holocene atmosphere. Gobs of research confirms this hypothesis, but with the proviso that the warmists are actually right about the insulating properties of CO2/CH4/etc.
But the hard point is precisely this. Who wants to extend the Holocene/Anthropocene such that we are stuck with ever growing numbers of mewling McKibben-style quim? Isn’t it interesting that by coming at the problem from a completely opposite viewpoint one can come to the exact same conclusion?
So I laugh at you Billy Boy. You have no idea if this last grand solar maximum was the Holocene’s last hurrah, or its first of several. And we have no idea what caused those…… What we do know is that if you happen to be absolutely correct about GHGs, then you could not possibly be more wrong about what to do about them. You call this the Anthropocene. OK, I’ll bite. Technically would that not mean that we are actually living in the anthropogenic extension of Holocene interglacial warmth? And you want to end it? Right? You realize that there is only one other climate state left, the cold glacial state.
Did you bump your head?
Full Disclosure: I am doing my bit, I drive a 6-month old SRT Challenger with the 392 Hemi. I’ll be long gone before you man-up to try and take it away Billy Boy. That is assuming you ever do manage to graduate puberty.
Billy writes when he drinks. How quaint.
A McKibben is an anti-MacGuffin.
It is long past time to unite and defeat green fascists like Bill McKibben.
Our climate extremists behave disturbingly like the nice folks pushing NICE in “That Hideous Strength”.
Dictators need a reason to grab total power: for Stalin, Hitler, Mao and McKibben these are dressed up differently, but still just means to a Goal.
Kibbles n Bits sounds like a crackpot Communist looking for an excuse to introduce totalitarianism.