It has been a very disturbing summer, with monsoon-like downpours and floods in England, and the wettest June since records began, violent downpours and flooding in China, and disastrous flooding across India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal, leaving 7.5 million people homeless, displaced or stranded. There have been megafires in Greece, and blistering heatwaves in the southern US, causing nuclear power plants to close for lack of cooling water. In Baghdad, as if life weren’t bad enough, temperatures as high as 53 degrees C. And all this from a rise in the global temperature of just 0.8 degrees C.
Even among those who accept that climate change is real, few grasp quite how serious it is. The IPCC sea-level warning for 2100 is up to 59 cm, but NASA’s James Hansen warns that it may be several metres, since the icecaps don’t melt in a linear manner. People are shocked at how fast the Arctic is melting; the whole Arctic could be ice-free in summer by 2030. I recommend the book “Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet” by Mark Lynas for a proper understanding of what will happen if we don’t get a very rapid grip.
The closest historical parallel in terms of the need for a coordinated response is World War II, when Britain and its allies pulled out all the stops to stop the Nazis and the Japanese from dominating the world. (I am currently reading Churchill’s history of WW II.)
In the 1930s, no-one wanted to believe another war might happen so soon after all the suffering of the last one. Churchill was almost alone in trying to warn that Germany was rearming, and Britain should do the same. There was a deep desire to believe it was not so, just as there is a desire among many today to prefer comfort of climate denial to the hard truth of the scientific evidence.
When Hitler marched into Poland, people woke up. Because of the lack of foresight Britain was unprepared, and when the Nazis invaded France in June 1940 the British were forced to retreat at Dunkirk, abandoning all their military equipment.
Britain now stood alone against the Nazis, in imminent danger of invasion without even rifles for the Home Guard. The defeated French made a treaty with Hitler, and America was watching from the sidelines. What is so compelling about Churchill’s memoirs, however, is the absolute determination that Britain would do whatever it took to defeat the Nazis, and defend the hope of freedom and democracy.
The crisis that is looming today is far more severe in terms of what “defeat” will mean. And no, I am not shy of using these war metaphors.
Today, we do not need tanks and bombers – we need solar panels and electric vehicles. In 1940, Britain’s auto industry switched its entire production line from cars to planes in six months; America did the same in 1942.
The World Bank economist Sir Nicholas Stern has estimated that the investment needed to convert our economy to sustainable energy technologies so that we can cease using fossil fuels is 1 to 3% of our GDP.
In 1940, the British government asked people to buy savings certificates to help pay for the war. During one fund-raising drive, the small town of Marple in Cheshire raised 128,360 pounds sterling towards the cost of a Lancaster Bomber, four Spitfires and four Hurricanes. In total, the bonds raised 1,754 million pounds for the war effort – 3% of Britain’s GDP.
If we bought Climate Solutions Bonds at a similar rate of commitment, Canada would raise $33 billion over five years to invest in transit, cycling, energy efficiency, building retrofits, converting the auto industry, retraining coal miners whose mines had been closed, helping Canada’s farmers go organic, and so on.
The British accepted the need for food rationing. We need to accept carbon rationing, starting at 4 tonnes of CO2 a year with anything extra costing $50 to $100 a tonne. They accepted the need to eat a sparse but healthy diet. We need to accept the need to eat far less meat, since the livestock industry produces 18% of our global emissions.
The single factor that made the difference in WWII was the absolute determination of the British people to win, along with her allies in Canada, Australia and the USA, and a similar determination in Russia. We need the same level of commitment today, but for the whole world.
Every one of us has a role to play, just as they did in WWII, and we can be confident that when we emerge successfully from the effort into a sustainable peaceful world, many things will have changed for the better.
Are we moving fast enough? NO! Can we do it, if we try? Absolutely. When we truly realize what is at stake, we won’t hesitate for a second. [We hope it won’t be too late.]
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Guy Dauncey is the author of ‘Stormy Weather: 101 Solutions to Global Climate Change.’ http://www.earthfuture.com/
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