The next president doesn't have to wait for a climate equivalent of Pearl Harbor to galvanize Congress. Much of what we need to do can -- and must -- be accomplished immediately, through the same use of executive action that FDR relied on to lay the groundwork for a wider mobilization. The president could immediately put a halt to drilling and mining on public lands and waters, which contain at least half of all the untapped carbon left in America. She could slow the build-out of the natural gas system simply by correcting the outmoded way the EPA calculates the warming effect of methane, just as Obama reined in coal-fired power plants. She could tell her various commissioners to put a stop to the federal practice of rubber-stamping new fossil fuel projects, rejecting those that would "significantly exacerbate" global warming.
She could instruct every federal agency to buy all their power from green sources and rely exclusively on plug-in cars, creating new markets overnight. She could set a price on carbon for her agencies to follow internally, even without the congressional action that probably won't be forthcoming. And just as FDR brought in experts from the private sector to plan for the defense build-out, she could get the blueprints for a full-scale climate mobilization in place even as she rallies the political will to make them plausible. Without the same urgency and foresight displayed by FDR -- without immediate executive action -- we will lose this war.
Normally in wartime, defeatism is a great sin. Luckily, though, you can't give aid and comfort to carbon; it has no morale to boost. So we can be totally honest. We've waited so long to fight back in this war that total victory is impossible, and total defeat can't be ruled out.
While the Democrats were meeting in that depressing St. Louis hotel room last June, I had my laptop open. Even as they voted down one measure after another to combat climate change, news kept coming in from the front lines:
In Japan, 700,000 people were told to evacuate their homes after record rainfall led to severe flooding and landslides. The deluge continued for five days; at its peak, nearly six inches of rain were falling every hour.
In California, thousands of homes were threatened in a wildfire described by the local fire chief as "one of the most devastating I've ever seen." Suburban tracts looked like Dresden after the bombing. Planes and helicopters buzzed overhead, dropping bright plumes of chemical retardants; if the "Flight of the Valkyries" had been playing, it could have been a scene from Apocalypse Now.
And in West Virginia, a "one in a thousand year" storm dropped historic rain across the mountains, triggering record floods that killed dozens. "You can see people in the second-story windows waiting to be evacuated," one local official reported. A particularly dramatic video -- a kind of YouTube Guernica for our moment -- showed a large house being consumed by flames as it was swept down a rampaging river until it crashed into a bridge. "Everybody lost everything," one dazed resident said. "We never thought it would be this bad." A state trooper was even more succinct. "It looks like a war zone," he said.
Because it is.
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