How to Be a Climate Optimist by Chris Turner

Author:Chris Turner [Turner, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2022-05-17T00:00:00+00:00

What followed had no precedent in the annals of war, and it seems in retrospect even more staggering in its improbability and scope. Over the next four years the United States government paid for and oversaw the shipment of more than $13 billion in goods, services and expertise to the sixteen participating European countries (the equivalent today would be more than $100 billion). American ships brought food, animal feed and fertilizer, manufactured goods and raw materials, industrial equipment and machinery. At any given moment during the years the Marshall Plan fed Europe’s reconstruction, 150 vessels were on their way to or from the continent. They took wheat to Dutch bakers, machinery to the fishing docks of Iceland, tractors for farmers in Denmark, building materials and technical expertise for the construction of new roads and power lines in Greece. American boats delivered barrels of industrial chemicals, tons of sulphur, bales of cotton, truck tires, even soup for schoolchildren in destitute Germany, all packed in cases and sacks marked with the Marshall Plan’s red-white-and-blue shield, which read “For European Recovery—Supplied by the United States of America.” Future German chancellor Helmut Kohl remembered a truck doling out soup in his schoolyard under that logo as a formative experience. The Plan’s praises were sung in radio broadcasts and pamphlets from Britain to Italy, and the US government paid for those too.

The Marshall Plan was, in the estimation of both its American funders and its European recipients, a roaring success. In Germany, which had seemed almost beyond repair amid the rubble at war’s end, it helped trigger what even as early as 1950 was being called das Wirtschaftswunder (“the economic miracle”). Truman once said it was “perhaps the greatest venture in constructive statesmanship that any nation has undertaken.” A crucial aspect of the Marshall Plan was that its architects, from Marshall on down, insisted that in the end the recovery had to be led by the European governments themselves and must encourage the redevelopment of local skills in local factories. The intention was not to hand out American largesse to a dependent and supplicant Europe, but for Europe to raise itself to the level America had reached through its ferocious wartime economic expansion. Whatever its motivations, the US government saw the intrinsic value of free, prosperous democracies across the Continent.

This is why the Marshall Plan is the stronger metaphor for the solution-driven response the climate crisis requires. War efforts are inherently nationalistic and often nationalized—controlled by individual governments for the exclusive benefit of one country alone. The global energy transition, by contrast, needs innovations from as many sources as possible to create an arsenal of climate solutions that serve everyone’s emissions-cutting efforts. For the work of the transition’s vanguard to matter, the rest of the world must follow. To deliver on the promise of a much better world, the technologies and techniques of emissions-free industry must spread widely enough to shrink the whole world’s carbon footprint as near to zero as possible, as fast as possible.

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