Like ignoring the whole climate change thing for a moment (though we absolutely should not do that), just the quality of life improvements to our health and well being this kind of mobilization would bring would be astonishing.
The wartime World War Two economy we learn about in school was only made possible because of two factors:
1) A massive surge in federal government spending, financed by borrowing from public markets (incl. war bonds), to buy the materiel needed to fight a war on two fronts (in Europe against Germany and in the Pacific against Japan). Such spending caused the public debt as a share of GDP to surge to its highest historical level ever, from about 40% at the start of the war to 100% at its peak, as you can see on this graph: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/US_Debt_... . Today, without such a total war effort, we are running trillion dollar deficits. To put it as shortly and bluntly as I could, trying the same thing today would bankrupt the government. Our debt levels are far higher than they were then, in relative terms, and increasing by over a trillion every year. We would be looking at 2 or 3 trillion dollar deficits. Deficits of that magnitude might shake investors' confidence in the U.S.'s ability to service its debt.
2) The United States was coming out of the Great Depression, and the unemployed labor pool was in the double digits, as you can see on this graph: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/68/Un... . In other words, there were a lot of unemployed people with nothing to do who could quickly be put to work to produce stuff for the war economy. This is not the case today. The economy is running at full employment. The large spare labor pool that existed then doesn't exist today.
America has a large shadow labor force. People who do not regularly apply to work are not counted as officially “unemployed.” Have to take this into account.
It signals to me that people like complaining about things, but do not participate in politics in any productive fashion. Right now it's just team sports, and most people can not name the candidate they are voting for, outside of the presidential election, until they read it off the ballot.
Transport accounts for basically a third of U.S. energy use, though it has been hardly growing over the last few years, which is a good start.
The most efficient car, bus, or train, is the one that you didn't ride.
You would hope, but sadly it depends on what lobbying group they're listening to and what industries are employing their constituents.
The impact on quality of life and society would be "astonishing," but they won't be improvements. The Soviets and Chinese tried similar "mobilization[s]" for food production. The idea was to direct society's efforts to producing enough food for everybody. Tens of millions of people died of starvation as a result. It turns out that governments are bad at running economies.
I don't know why so many people think that the same mechanism (a command-and-control economy) will lead to a different result just because you change the goal from food or industrial production to climate change mitigation.
Think also new deal / public works projects like the Hoover Dam (many died working on the Dam but not because it was a government mobilization project). Just the government spending a bunch of money on environmentally focused projects could happen and could be good.
Um, sure it did? Killing a lot of people was, in a sense, the goal.
America's WWII mobilization is really nothing like the Green New Deal. The total cost of the U.S. war effort is estimated at around $300 B (adjusted for 2009 dollars) [1]. The lowest realistic estimates for the cost of an effective Green New Deal are around double that amount every year, and lasting for decades [2].
It's true that WWII cost far more relative to GDP (over a third, versus 2% for the New Green Deal estimate above), but expressing the cost relative to GDP is not very useful in this context; in 1945 the U.S. was poised to enter a period of ten percent annual GDP growth at a time that military spending was plunging. The situation now is completely opposite; the U.S. will possibly never sustain greater than 2% GDP growth, and the Green New Deal proposes to pull money out of that for decades to come.
The character of WWII spending was also completely different. That money was largely spent on things that were pretty much guaranteed to help the war effort; materiel, industrial infrastructure, and troops. There was little risk of misallocation.
In contrast, the Green New Deal is fraught with misallocation risk. In that way, I suppose that a comparison to modern military spending is actually quite appropriate.
1 - https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-american-economy-during-worl...
2 - https://newleftreview.org/issues/II112/articles/robert-polli...
Extrapolating a general theory from just two examples seems like a mistake.
> Pollin, however, strongly disagrees with the resolution’s aim of getting to net zero with just a decade of investment. “I think it’s completely unrealistic and it’s not worth costing out,” he said of the Green New Deal.
$1 trillion is the price tag of a much more conservative approach that puts a much longer timeline on carbon reduction:
> Edward Barbier, an economist at Colorado State University, agrees that a strict timeline isn’t realistic. He advocates jump-starting the transition by investing about 5 percent of GDP over five or so years. GDP was $20.5 trillion in 2018, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, so that’s a little over $1 trillion a year. “That would push us on a path to clean energy, and a path that permanently lowers carbon emissions,” he told us.
The second point I want to make is that we have much less headroom to do a "New Deal"-style project than we did in 1930. We are actually already far in excess of New Deal-era government involvement in the economy. (See my link above.) Today, government spending is at around 35% of GDP. We are in fact closer to the "total war mobilization" of World War II (where spending peaked at 45%) than to the New Deal era 18%.
So the real lesson is not that command economies are bad but rather that unforeseen circumstances should be avoided. If they hadn’t killed the sparrows we would not now be hearing about how many died.
The Four Pests Campaign is a great example of humans suffering the unintended consequences of their own stupidity and hubris. However the Great Famine had many proximal causes, and there is no evidence that simply sparing the sparrows could have prevented it.
If we go to total war to prevent climate change, that means things like:
* Shutting down power and fuel supplies to poor countries that can't afford current solar or wind power
* Military conquest of uncooperative countries
* Bombing coal mines to shut them down
* Bombing oil fields so nobody can get the oil
* Slaughtering foreign civilians to reduce their carbon emissions
When I think of a "total war" caused by an emergency response to global warming, those are the sort of consequences I imagine. Let's hope we don't get to "total war".
Comparisons to a war are overly dramatic because it puts the destruction on the opposite side of the effort. If you're in a war and two countries spend a trillion dollars fighting the war, those resources go to causing trillions of dollars of damage to the other country -- most of the cost of the war is getting bombed, not making bombs. With climate change it's the opposite -- the more we do against it, the less damage there is overall. On top of that, most of the "costs" are just replacing other costs -- you have to spend money building solar panels, but then you don't have to spend money doing oil exploration or mining coal, which offsets most to all of the cost.
On top of that, wars are characteristically fought by governments with all the bureaucratic inefficiency that implies, whereas the single biggest thing we could do against climate change is to accurately price carbon and then let the market find the most efficient way to optimize it out.
Obviously that doesn't get us out of actually doing it, but the biggest problem isn't that it's actually that hard from an economic perspective, it's that it's hard from a political perspective because the oil industry has a trillion dollar interest in not ceasing to exist.
Vast overuse of energy resources is a pattern intertwined with modern life, from housing to transportation to food to recreation. The people demand having a vehicle with more than 100hp at their whim. Now picture a herd of 100 horses for every person on Earth. It is political suicide to propose cutting down to ecological sustainable levels of 1 horse per person. That's before we take in account the population explosion of 5-10-20x compared to pre-industrial levels. Not sure where you even begin implementing policies to reduce the population levels to ecological sustainable levels.
As a species, we are simply incapable to comprehend that the way out of poverty is intelligent frugality. Instead, we attempt to brute force our way. The effort needed to fall back into an ecological sustainable band far surpasses WW2, and no one wants to hear about the actual costs. Nothing will change until mother Nature will do the change for us. The hard way.
In my opinion, these approaches completely fail at solving large issues that require large orchestrated efforts that require things at state, nation, and even world scale and longer timescales than an individual or their kids.
We haven't really developed a 'hammer' for those sort of problems and that hammer keeps competing with our 'saw' we use on the other problems whose proponents want to only use their 'saw' for every problem they see, ignoring its shortcomings.
The problem with climate change is that it is really expensive to fix with highly uncertain costs to do so.
So it's not expensive in any long-run calculation, only the short-run.
Nor is cost net negative if you use high discount rates and try lower co2 targets (e.g. 3 degrees warming by 2100 is much more likely to have positive ROI than say holding 2 degrees). Huge controversy around protecting against lower probability, highly destructive scenarios. Point is there's lots of controversy here.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_climate_change_...
[1]W. Nordhaus, “Projections and Uncertainties about Climate Change in an Era of Minimal Climate Policies,” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 333–360, Aug. 2018, doi: 10.1257/pol.20170046.
edit: This comment is currently sitting at -2. If you think a 1.5° target is optimal, you should explain why you think so rather than just down voting this post. The paper I linked to is by William Nordhaus who won the Nobel Prize for economics in 2018 for his work related to the economics of climate change.
> While it is true that we estimated damages as high as 10% of GDP annually at the end of the century for warming of 15°F above pre-industrial levels, the odds of a temperature change that would drive damages of this magnitude are slim. In fact, they are less than 1-in-100 by our original calculation. Under a scenario of continued growth in global emissions, 9-out-of-10 global change temperature projections fall approximately in the range of 4°F to 11°F by 2100. The median change is closer to 6°F. We deliberately incorporate tail risks in our research, not just “most likely” outcomes, because consideration of tail risks is crucial to sound risk management.
> In other words, if global GDP doubles or halves by 2100, the results suggest real GDP per capita would still be 7.22% below where it would be otherwise.
For most of the world, an RCP8.5 scenario is equivalent to knocking out 3-4 years of GDP growth. Bad, but not catastrophic, and probably less bad than the impact of "WWII-style mobilization" and shifting the economy into command-and-control mode.
> Our localized approach to studying the relationship between climate and society reveals that the burden is spread unevenly. In many counties, GDP decline could total more than 10% by 2100, and in the worst-hit county, Florida's Union County, losses could near 28% for a likely warming scenario under continued emissions growth (the 7°F median change, not the extreme 15°F change highlighted in press coverage). The combined tally almost certainly understates the extent of the damages, because the worst effects are concentrated in places where incomes are lowest. Tumbling incomes in poor counties have a correspondingly small impact on nationwide GDP, meaning the economic burden of climate change is reduced because it falls on those with low incomes.
> If the burden is spread evenly, 1% or 2% of national GDP might seem manageable, but we will not all be equal in the face of climate change. Across the United States, there will be winners and losers. What is lost in all of this noise is the sad fact that even those smaller numbers are too high a cost. They come from a subset of outcomes that are well-measured. As ever in this debate, it is important that we look beyond the headlines, beyond the averages, and examine the people at the heart of the issue. Look at the mass of evidence that points to people who will actually be negatively affected by climate change. They are not abstract people not-yet-born and in some far-off land. They are your neighbors. They are your friends. They are you. Combining local climate projections with historical observations yields a personalized, evidence-based outlook of future risk. Our ongoing research is mapping out these local impacts across the globe.
That sounds pretty catastrophic.