Feature Reference Articles #12

Carbon Ironies. Wen Stephenson, The Baffler. June 13, 2018.

ADDRESSING AN IMAGINED READER in the all-too-likely “hot dark world” of our all-too-near human future, William T. Vollmann begins his two-volume, twelve-hundred-plus-page Carbon Ideologies (the second volume of which was published last week) with a curious and characteristically audacious gambit. In the opening pages of Volume I: No Immediate Danger, as he sets out upon this tome concerning fossil fuels and nuclear energy, Vollmann explains: “I do my best to look as will the future upon the world in which I lived—namely, as surely, safely vanished. Nothing can be done to save it; therefore, nothing need be done. Hence this little book scrapes by without offering solutions. There were none; we had none.” 

Some twelve hundred pages later, near the end of Volume II: No Good Alternative—having heard from coal miners and refinery workers, oil executives and nuclear engineers, fracking enthusiasts and carbon lobbyists, politicians and industry-captured regulators, residents of variously poisoned communities and even a few beleaguered activists—Vollmann beseeches his future reader to go easy on him and us. “If you could end up saying, ‘well, yes, we might have made the same mistakes as you, if we’d been lucky enough to live when you did,’ I’d feel that Carbon Ideologies had accomplished some of its purpose,” Vollmann writes. “How you judge us can mean nothing to us who are dead, but to you it might mean something, to accept that we were not all monsters; and forgiveness benefits the forgiver, so why wouldn’t I prefer you to call our doings mistakes instead of crimes?” But Vollmann suspects this is a bit much to ask. “Most likely,” he wearily admits, “you are a hard, angry person. . . . Beset by floods, droughts, diseases and insect plagues . . . fearing for your children in the face of multiplying perils, how can you feel anything better than impatient contempt for my daughter and me, who lived so wastefully for our own pleasure?” 

Now, perhaps this is unfair, but it occurs to me that Vollmann’s imagined reader, sweating and hungry beside a dead, acidic ocean, may be entitled to ask why the author spent years of his comfortable (as he never tires of confessing) carbon-powered life writing a twelve-hundred-page book about energy and global warming without offering more than a dismissive hand-wave in the direction of “solutions” like solar, wind, geothermal, batteries, smart grids, etc.—at the very moment in history when such renewable energy technologies and their economics were beating all expectations. Well, it seems Mr. Vollmann simply doesn’t believe there’s anything we humans can do about a problem as big and complicated as climate change—after all, as a friendly pastor in West Virginia said to him, the Earth is so large! And even if there were, it would almost certainly require people like himself to engage politically and make some kind of sustained collective effort, which would be tedious and boring and difficult. And while it’s possible that the logically fallacious (see tu quoque) obsession with his own carbon complicity and supposed “hypocrisy” may offer him a convenient excuse for not lifting a finger, it may also be the case that he simply doesn’t want to look like the sentimental chump who falls for some hope-mongering twaddle about fighting for humanity and not giving up on each other, and all of that. Whatever the reason, he tells his misfortunate reader: “I am sorry.”

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And yet, for all that I find enjoyable and admirable in Vollmann’s project, I’m also sharply opposed to his brand of climate fatalism, which seems to be symptomatic, a kind of irresistible temptation, among intellectuals and other expensively educated types these days. And it’s this sense of utter futility and resignation in the face of our human emergency which would seem to warrant a reply. Because Vollmann is correct on some important level, but only up to a point. To borrow the phrase he used in Rising Up and Rising Down (2003), his seven-volume moral treatise on violence—which, along with Poor People (2007), he considers a companion to Carbon Ideologies—his “moral calculus” here is fundamentally flawed, based as it is on a common misunderstanding or mischaracterization of the climate catastrophe.

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And there’s a good bit that Vollmann gets right, or so it seems to me, in terms of the moral calculus on climate. This is especially the case in his vivid, often affecting, unerringly humane portraits of ordinary people caught up in the carbon system—and nowhere more so than in West Virginia, where the people he meets, at all social levels, have been literally poisoned by that system, indoctrinated and deceived by its ideologues, sacrificed on the altar of limitless profits and the so-called patriotic duty to “keep the lights on.” He knows there’s no moral equivalence between these folks and the executives, lobbyists, politicians, and revolving-door regulators who do everything in their considerable power—including pitiful appeals to victimhood—to keep the system humming along. So it’s satisfying when he drops all sarcasm near the end of the book and lays it on the line:

Those who found themselves compelled by economics to be complicit in the production, distribution and consumption of harmful energies . . . were not especially at fault. For them, fossil fuels constituted sheer subsistence. . . . Even less could I accuse those who had not been educated to understand the almost invisibly approaching misery.  

However, I began to believe that those who selfishly, maliciously or with gross negligence did harm ought to be singled out, shamed and maybe even . . . punished.—What constituted gross negligence? A parent who left a loaded gun in reach of a baby was surely responsible for the result. Those West Virginia officials, Colorado lobbyists and Oklahoma Chamber of Commerce types who publicly advanced the agendas of their chosen fossil fuels but refused to even acknowledge questions about global warming stood convicted, in my mind at least, of authoritarian partisanship. I would have heard their side; they were not even willing to tell me theirs, much less ask about mine. And they had power. . . . These are the ones, my friend. These are the ones who laid you low.

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Nevertheless, for a writer so finely attuned to the nuances of moral reasoning, Vollmann displays a surprisingly simplistic and binary view of the climate catastrophe.

Just how fucked ‘we’ or ‘they’ will be—that is, what kind of civilization, or any sort of social justice, will be possible in the coming centuries or decades—depends on many things. 

Yes, of course, we’re fucked. (Though it’s important to specify the “we” in this formulation, because the global poor, the disenfranchised, the young, and the yet-to-be-born are certifiably far more fucked than such affluent, white, middle-aged Americans as Vollmann and myself.) But here’s the thing: with climate change as with so much else, all fuckedness is relative. Climate catastrophe is not a binary win or lose, solution or no-solution, fucked or not-fucked situation. Just how fucked we/they will be—that is, what kind of civilization, or any sort of social justice, will be possible in the coming centuries or decades—depends on many things, including all sorts of historic, built-in systemic injustices we know all too well, and any number of contingencies we can’t foresee. But most of all it depends on what we do right now, in our lifetimes. And by that I mean: what we do politically, not only on climate but across the board, because large-scale political action—the kind that moves whole countries and economies in ways commensurate with the scale and urgency of the situation—has always been the only thing that matters here. (I really don’t care about your personal carbon footprint. I mean, please do try to lower it, because that’s a good thing to do, but fussing and guilt-tripping over one’s individual contribution to climate change is neither an intellectually nor a morally serious response to a global systemic crisis. That this still needs to be said in 2018 is, to say the least, somewhat
disappointing.)

As experts (and other people, like me) have been saying for years now, it is almost certainly too late to prevent highly disruptive and, in many places, catastrophic climate change within this century, with all the human misery and death that will bring. But it’s also the case that rigorous analyses (though you won’t find them in Carbon Ideologies) show how most of the world’s energy systems could in fact be radically decarbonized in the coming decades; that the barriers are not technological or economic; and that there are now signs of the political and economic winds shifting globally, in spite of (and in response to) Donald Trump’s election. Are they shifting fast enough? Not even close. Is the carbon lobby still doing everything it can to obstruct and delay? Yes, by all means. And even if the world somehow miraculously moves as fast as possible between now and mid-century, as scientists are calling for, will it prevent dangerous and destabilizing climate disruption for centuries and possibly millennia to come? Probably not. In fact, achieving the vaunted Paris Agreement goals would actually require “negative emissions” technologies, capable of pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere on a vast scale, which remain largely speculative (not to say fantasy).

So, yes, Vollmann and other doomists are right that it’s a no-win situation—depending on what you mean by “win.” If you mean “stopping” or “solving” climate change and preserving the world as we’ve known it, then the climate fight was “lost” a long time ago, maybe before it began. And yet science also tells us that, even at this late date, some versions of “losing” could look far worse than others. We can still lose less badly! Not the most inspiring battle cry, perhaps, but when you understand the stakes—human survival—still a cause worth lifting a finger for.

Scientists don’t really know with precision (which means William T. Vollmann doesn’t really know) where the atmospheric tipping points actually are, and whether we’ve already crossed some of them or soon will—see, for example, the accelerating collapse of Arctic sea ice and the melting permafrost—making worst-case scenarios unstoppable. Climate experts will tell you that every fraction of a degree of warming we prevent could be well worth the effort. So is it too late to prevent many catastrophic impacts across much of the world? Almost certainly. Is it too late to prevent the worst-case scenarios and thus even greater suffering of billions more human beings? Maybe. Maybe not. We don’t know. And that’s the point. As for the politics, maybe the obstacles really are insurmountable. But maybe they’re not. History shows that revolutionary change, both political and technological, is almost never foreseen—or even believed possible—by those living in the historical moment. Again, that’s the point. We don’t know exactly when it will be “too late” (“too late for what?,” we should always ask), or what may be possible if we keep pushing hard enough.

If you’re comfortable throwing up your hands and doing nothing in the face of this kind of uncertainty, very well; it’s your choice. Vollmann won’t think any less of you, and quite honestly, neither will I. Political action, sustained commitment, sacrifice—these are a lot to ask of anyone. But please don’t take moral comfort from assurances that there is nothing to be done. There’s plenty.

Which is one reason it’s too bad that Vollmann, though he does profile a few seemingly isolated activists fighting the Carbon Goliaths in West Virginia and Colorado and Bangladesh, never acknowledges the existence of the global grassroots climate movement that has become a serious force over the past decade. In case you’re unaware, this is the bottom-up movement that has not only stopped fossil-fuel mega-projects like the Keystone XL pipeline, Pacific Northwest coal export terminals, and regional fracked-gas infrastructure in the Northeast, with thousands of ordinary citizens putting their bodies on the line—and hundreds of thousands coming into the streets—to do so. It’s also the movement that’s pushed global institutions with more than $6 trillion in assets to divest from the fossil-fuel industry, fundamentally altering the conversation on climate and carbon—bringing concepts like “stranded assets” and “carbon bubble” into the mainstream (but not into Carbon Ideologies)—putting the industry’s political culpability and its criminally reckless business model front and center, even beginning to hurt its bottom line. These are no small accomplishments.

But there’s plenty to be done, too, for those who can’t see themselves as climate activists—because the basic political struggles for democracy and human rights, in this country and around the world, are as central to our climate future as the fights to keep carbon in the ground. For those who must try to adapt and live through what’s coming—including Vollmann’s daughter and my own kids—there won’t be any climate justice, or any justice at all, no matter what the global temperature may be, if we lose our democracy.

Unfortunately, many of the sort of educated, literate folks Vollmann is writing for don’t seem to understand all this. Or maybe they don’t want to understand. Perhaps they prefer to look away. It’s so much easier to tell oneself the game is up, that nothing can be done, that nothing ever could have been done, so why bother? It’s perversely comforting to wallow in tragic-ironic guilt over one’s carbon complicity, using it as a pathetic excuse.

The fact that there’s no purity and no “solution” (a word that should be struck from the climate lexicon) in the simplistic binary sense doesn’t mean that nothing can or should be done, even at this late date, even in the face of catastrophe on some unknowable schedule and scale—especially if you care at all about your fellow human inhabitants of this planet, as William T. Vollmann most clearly, and unironically, does. If nothing else, just holding onto our humanity as we sweat in the dark ought to keep us busy.

No Wiser Than Before: An Introduction. Erik Wallenberg & Ansar Fayyazuddin, Science for the People. Special Issue, Summer 2018.

“Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.” – Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle 

The world is predominantly conceptualized as split between the subjects of history (humans) and the objects of history (everything else). The undifferentiated mass of everything else–identified as nature, or the environment – is treated as if it is simply for human use. Only in periods of crisis do we recognize that there are limits to what can be done to nature before the balance is tilted to a degree that things begin to go horribly wrong for humans as well. Against this reductive split, the world is in fact an ecological whole. Whatever conceptual divisions one makes, one cannot wish away our interdependence and the ultimate unity of the human and non-human worlds. 

We are living through an ecological disaster. Fueled by the drive for profit, the exploitation of both nature and human labor are defining features of our time. Ecosystems are collapsing under the assault of fossil fuel extraction, geological manipulation, and the systematic release of toxins into our water, air and earth. Islands are sinking as sea levels rise. Children are poisoned by lead in their water. Bee colonies are dying off as weather patterns change. And rapacious capitalist greed remains unabated. 

The crisis of climate change is undeniable and requires urgent attention for anyone concerned with the fate of humanity and the world. However, when thought of in the narrowest terms, climate change is shorthand for the rise in global temperatures driven by the precipitous increase in heat trapping greenhouse gases. When the problem is formulated entirely in terms of physical data and timeless mechanism, it is shorn of its historical and social specificity and its provenance in the capitalist drive for profit and its reliance on fossil fuels. Without historical and social context, climate change appears simply as a problem of science, to be solved with technology. 

From Barack Obama’s science advisor to the current Republican House Science Committee, the large-scale manipulation of the climate to mitigate global warming–geoengineering, for short–has gained a hearing in the halls of government.1 For their part, billionaire tycoons such as Bill Gates and Richard Branson champion their own role to drive geoengineering innovation. As several contributors to this collection point out, even the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has legitimated geoengineering as a possible solution. 

With this special issue of Science for the People, we aim to engage with this current of thought and interrogate the research and technology, the assumptions and costs, as well as the general focus on the technological and how that relates to the social, political, and economic questions that drive this crisis. 

Geoengineering: A Fix or a Cover? 

Clive Hamilton, author of Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Geoengineering, divides geoengineering schemes into two broad categories. He identifies “Carbon dioxide removal technologies” that “aim to extract excess carbon from the atmosphere and store in somewhere less dangerous,” as a “kind of clean-up operation.” The second category he sees as “an attempt to mask one of the effects of dumping waste into the sky.” This is exemplified by “Solar radiation management technologies” that “seek to reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the planet” in order to reduce the amount of trapped energy in the atmosphere.2 He concludes that, “While advances in climate science ought to be teaching us to be more humble, advocates of schemes aimed at regulating sunlight or interfering in Earth-system processes seem to draw the opposite conclusion.”3 

The first category—the “cleanup operation” school of geoengineering thought—enjoys near common sense status, particularly as more thoroughgoing political solutions to overhaul the energy sector appear too far off to make the needed difference. And yet, as reported last year in WIRED and The New Yorker, even the carbon capture methods that the IPCC mitigation strategies rely on, remain speculative. And if such negative emissions technologies do emerge, their implementation on the scale necessary guarantees massive disruptions to ecosystems and food markets. So what happens when the pragmatic option is itself unrealistic? 

Hamilton’s second, more desperate category has become increasingly prominent. One speculative scientific paper touted by authors from both the political mainstream and on the radical left proposes a geoengineering project to save the Great Barrier Reef from a warming ocean.4 By spraying salt water into the air, the scientists suggest, clouds will form, reflecting more sun and lowering local temperatures just enough to prevent ocean warming. But even if this lowered local temperatures, it would need to be done in perpetuity as global temperatures would continue to rise all around it. Any glitch in the system of salt water spraying would send temperatures soaring and could be even more catastrophic, allowing no time for adaptation, migration, or evolution of coral species.

The original Science for the People ended publication in 1989, just as the modern consensus about anthropogenic climate change was beginning to emerge. In this collection of essays, contributors delve into the technical and political–as well as legal and ethical – challenges raised by the specter of geoengineering. Here, we step into today’s debates about the role of technology in resolving the climate crisis. But first, we look at 20th century experiments in weather modification–a useful corollary to today’s proposals to manipulate the climate–and some of Science for the People’s coverage and analysis at the time.

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Alternatives to Geoengineering 

The task at hand appears to us to be the creation of healthy relationships for human and non-human interactions on this finite planet. Our debate should not be about whether technology is good or bad, or whether humans should or should not shape the environment; rather we must find a way to incorporate ecological complexity into a democratic system. When we neglect the historical and social context in favor of a narrow focus on technical aspects of a problem, the sources of the problem remain unaddressed.

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In a debate on geoengineering, physicist, ecologist, and environmentalist Vandana Shiva noted,

“Einstein warned us, you can’t solve problems with the same mindset that created them…The geoengineers don’t realize, sunshine is not a curse on the planet. The sun is not the problem, the problem is the mess of pollution we are creating. These shortcuts that are attempted from places of power, and I would add places of ignorance of the ecological web of life, are then creating the war solution. Because geoengineering becomes war on a planetary scale; with ignorance; and blind spots.”

We’re faced with a pile of unknowns from those advocating and conducting geoengineering research. While time and money are spent researching technological fixes with unintended consequences, the solutions that we know will work–leaving fossil fuels in the ground, transitioning to sustainable forms of energy, increasing energy efficiencies, eliminating military spending, and engineering buildings and transport to cut out the waste–all of these solutions, which could be immediately implemented, are not funded because they do not fit into the current paradigm.

“In our progress-minded society,” Barry Commoner wrote in 1971,

“anyone who presumes to explain a serious problem is expected to offer to solve it as well… But none of us…can possibly blueprint a specific ‘plan’ for resolving the environmental crisis. To pretend otherwise is only to evade the real meaning of the environmental crisis: that the world is being carried to the brink of ecological disaster not by a singular fault, which some clever scheme can correct, but by the phalanx of powerful economic, political, and social forces.” 

It’s these forces we need to change.

How big does the fire need to be? J.D. ALT, New Economic Perspectives. Aug. 13, 2018.

I have written about this before, but it bears repeating now—and perhaps it bears repeating every week until somebody with more leverage than me picks the message up and carries it a step further: America (and the rest of the world, for that matter) has the resources needed to limit and mitigate the enormous damage and dislocations that climate-change is now beginning to impose. The “resources” I’m referring to are not dollars. They are materiel, labor, and human ingenuity. The only question is how and when we’ll stop simply raising warning flags and marshal those resources to take real action against the growing challenges.

To date, virtually nothing concrete has been done, or even started. The reason is because—to date—we insist on imagining that the “money” needed to pay for serious planning, and to begin real actions, must come, directly or indirectly, from tax-payer’s pockets. Virtually by definition, this means the “money” is not available—nor, we should admit, will it ever be. Therefore, since we insist on believing that is where the money must come from, we cannot even begin. There are a multitude of scientists and informed advocates who are now sounding alarm bells about what’s coming down the road, but not a single one of them, unfortunately, can tell an audience how their local, state, or national governments are going to pay for the actions that need to be planned and implemented. Until that changes, we are like the proverbial deer frozen in the headlights of an on-coming tractor-trailer.

Fortunately, history has shown us how to get unfrozen. History has shown us that, when necessary, we can easily imagine a money-reality different than what we habitually insist is true: that money can be newly “created” to buy whatever is needed—labor, materiel, human ingenuity—to undertake and accomplish something we all recognize needs to be done for our collective benefit. Whether we “see” this alternative money-reality simply depends, apparently, on how big the fire is.

The history lesson I’m specifically referring to is America’s mobilization out of the Great Depression and into World War II. As documented in the books American Default, by Sebastian Edwards, and A Call to Arms, by Maury Klein, in 1933 America was facing its own frozen-in-the-headlights-how-can-we-pay-for-it predicament: The economy then had essentially collapsed into the Great Depression. The banking system was in a death-spiral as panicking families and businesses were withdrawing their deposits for cash dollars—then redeeming their cash for the gold the dollars promised, forcing the banks into insolvency. Family savings had been wiped out, farmers had abandoned their land, businesses had closed their doors, a fourth of the working population lost their jobs, breadlines formed in every major city.

At the same time, wild-fires of armed fascism were destabilizing Europe and southeast Asia. Hitler gained dictatorial control of Germany and soon began mobilizing and arming the war machine of the Third Reich. Paralyzed by its myopic political insistence on maintaining the “sound-money” (gold backed) foundations of the U.S. monetary system—even though it had rendered the system itself virtually useless—America was ill-prepared, either to climb out of the Depression or defend itself against the growing conflagrations of fascism.

Half the U.S. army in 1933 could be seated in Chicago’s Soldier Field stadium—with the other half standing at attention on the football field. The U.S. Navy consisted of a few hundred left-over World War I rust-heaps, mostly in mothballs. As Germany’s Luftwaffe began demonstrating its newly minted warplanes, the U.S. Airforce did not even exist. Nor did the dollars that would be necessary build it: Where could the dollars possibly come from when America’s families had lost their savings, when America’s businesses had closed their doors, when America’s banks had declared insolvency? Sell War Bonds? Who had the dollars to buy them? Declare an income tax? Who had the income to pay it?

The American mobilization—and the transformation of the understanding of money—began with the election of Franklin Roosevelt. Almost immediately, the federal government began to spend money (no one thought existed) to pay American citizens to undertake and accomplish what needed to be done. Here is a brief, but astonishing, list (annotated from the website The Living New Deal) of the concrete actions that were paid for in U.S. dollars during the first 12 months of Roosevelt’s presidency:

March 4, 1933: Franklin Roosevelt is sworn in as President. 

March 31, 1933: The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) is created by the Emergency Conservation Work Act, putting unemployed young men to work in the nation’s forests and parks. 

May 12, 1933: The Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) is created, via the Federal Emergency Relief Act of 1933, to provide work and cash relief for Americans struggling to get through the Great Depression. 

May 18, 1933: The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is created with the passage of the Tennessee Valley Authority Act to provide affordable power and flood control, which it still does to this day. 

June 13, 1933: President Roosevelt signs the Home Owners’ Loan Act of 1933. The law assists mortgage lenders and individual home owners by issuing bonds and loans for troubled mortgages, back taxes, home owners’ insurance, and necessary home repairs. 

June 16, 1933: President Roosevelt signs the Farm Credit Act, making credit more accessible to farmers, and with fairer terms than private sector lending (e.g., lower interest rates). 

June 16, 1933: President Roosevelt creates the Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works, which eventually becomes known as the Public Works Administration (PWA). During the next 10 years the PWA contributes billions of dollars towards tens of thousands of infrastructure projects all across the nation. 

June 16, 1933: With Executive Order No. 6174, President Roosevelt authorizes up to $238 million in Public Works Administration (PWA) funds for the Navy. From these funds, 32 naval vessels are built. 

October 23, 1933: The Army Corps of Engineers begins the construction of the Fort Peck Dam, one of the many large Corps projects made possible with New Deal funding. 

November 9, 1933: The Civil Works Administration (CWA)is created with Executive Order No. 6420B, under the power granted to President Roosevelt by the National Industrial Recovery Act. By January 1934, over 4 million formerly-jobless Americans are employed by the CWA. to build 44,000 miles of new roads, install 1,000 miles of new water mains, construct or improve 4,000 schools, and much more. 

December 8, 1933: The Public Works of Art Project (PWAP)is created by an allocation of funds from the Civil Works Administration. Unemployed artists are hired to create works of art for public buildings and parks. They will create nearly 16,000 works of art.

Where did the dollars come from to make all this happen? Were they tax-dollars collected from the American people? Were they dollars borrowed from the banking industry and titans of finance? No. They were dollars issued by the sovereign government out of thin air—fiat dollars. As described by Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury, William H. Woodin, the new dollars were “money that looked like money.” And so, as demonstrated by what the spending of it accomplished, it was money. (What Woodin meant by this was that the “Federal Reserve Bank Notes” which the central bank was authorized to issue—as needed—by the Emergency Banking Act of 1933 looked exactly like the old “Federal Reserve Notes” they replaced, except for one tiny detail: they could not be redeemed for gold.)

This course of action, of course, was vehemently opposed by certain interests and forces outraged at the idea of having to trade their gold for fiat currency. They did everything in their power to shut down Roosevelt’s presidency and his gradual and experimental shifts toward a fiat money system. From the perspective of the financial titans—who were, in one form or another, creditors—being repaid in gold was the only thing of importance. The country be damned. Roosevelt called them out in a speech a few days before he was elected, in a landslide, to his second term as President:

“We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace – business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. And we know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me, and I welcome their hatred.”

By 1941, fiat money—and all the things it had paid American’s to accomplish—had begun to pull the country out of the abyss. And just in time. For it turned out the New Deal had only been a warm-up exercise in the creative use of sovereign money to accomplish collective goals. Europe was in the flames of war. Germany was threatening England from a French country-side it had already invaded and occupied—and was stalking American shipping off the U.S. Eastern seaboard with its submarine “wolf-packs.” Then December 7th happened.

Over the next four years, miraculously, America built—and paid for with fiat money—the largest and most technologically advanced war machine that had ever existed on Earth. The scale of the spending was staggering. The most astonishing thing is what the unprecedented spending accomplished in the long run: It transformed an entire society to confront a new reality and created, for all practical purposes, a new “America” to thrive in that reality.

The American people had “paid themselves”—through the fiat monetary actions of their sovereign government—to invent an array of new technologies and apparatuses originally conceived for waging war, but which, after the war, were clearly seen to have useful applications to peaceful life as well—and they had paid themselves to build a great many factories, research and production facilities capable of adapting and producing these useful things to civilian life—andthey had paid themselves to train a very large workforce of engineers, technicians and skilled workers who knew how to make it all work. This was a powerful economic brew—and it was spiced by the fact that the returning G.I.s were getting paidto go to college to explore how to make the whole thing run even better. America never looked back. Until now.

We could ask what happened. We could ask why, today, we cannot marshal enough resources to rebuild the Puerto Rican electric grid and the Virgin Islands hurricane devastation. We could ask why there isn’t a national engineering effort to begin planning for sea-level rise. We could ask why the U.S. forestry service doesn’t have the budget it needs to pay American workers to clear deadfalls and underbrush from its most vulnerable tree-stands. Or why we cannot imagine deploying a fleet of tanker planes to California large enough to deluge any wild-fire before it has a chance to become a conflagration.

The only question we really need to ask, though, is this: How big does the fire need to be before we “understand,” once again, how we can pay ourselves to put it out?