Fighting Climate Change “like we fought the Nazis”?

Last updated on: October 23, 2018 at 1:04 pm by Jane the Actuary

Fighting Climate Change “like we fought the Nazis”? 2018-10-23T13:04:33-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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How do we fight climate change? My money’s on carbon capture (though I know there’s an ongoing dispute about whether this is feasible, I still tend to think it’s comparatively more feasible than converting all energy generation to solar and wind). New York congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a different plan, though, according to the Washington Free Beacon.

Democratic congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Friday night said the way the Allied Powers defeated the Nazis during World War II provides a blueprint for how the United States should defeat global warming.

“When we talk about existential threats, the last time we had a really major existential threat in this country was around World War II, so we’ve been here before, and we have a blueprint of doing this before. None of these things are new ideas, but we have is an existential threat in the context of war,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “We had a direct existential threat with another nation and at this time it was Nazi Germany and Axis, who explicitly made the United States as an enemy, and what we did was that we chose to mobilize our entire continent and industrialize our entire continent, and we put hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, to work in defending our shores and defending this country.”

She went on to say that the United States needs to adopt the same blueprint in order to get the United States to 100 percent renewable energy, adding that it may seem like “radical” plan, but it’s a necessary one.

This received plenty of mockery on twitter, assuming she thought it was a matter of military conquest and strategy, or simply of willpower — that is, a new version of the old and tired “if we can put a man on the moon. . . “. But I presume she really has in mind parallels to the way the United States operated on the home front:

Rationing of goods, in World War II to ensure that there was enough food, rubber, nylon, etc., for the war effort, but now to be put to use to limit the amount of “carbon” one uses, whether with outright restrictions on purchases, limits on the amount of electricity or natural gas/heating oil one uses, and the like.
Federal government control of private sector employers, wage-and-price controls, and so forth, to be put to use to oblige them to reduce their carbon use and purchase energy generated from renewable sources, or, depending on their sector, to produce those energy sources.
Mobilization of individual workers, in the Left’s long-held dream of a mandatory national service corps for young adults, to put them to work on climate-change-fighting projects, such as serving as low-cost labor to reduce the cost of renewable energy, weatherizing homes, working on farm fields to implement loca-vorism, etc.
Propaganda efforts to generate support for the above, and censorship or even further restrictions on those (“traitors,” after all) who object.

Yes, she doesn’t actually say that. But it sure as heck sounds like it’s what she has in mind, and I don’t think she’s the only one with these dreams that central planning is what we need to solve our problems.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WWII_USA_Ration_Book_3_Front.jpg; By Bill Faulk (Scan of original documents in collection of author) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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Ocasio-Cortez

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