a "World War II-scale mobilization" in context

Yesterday, on the occasion of the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, I heard an interview with an author writing about the Manhattan Project. At one point, he mentioned the major problems besetting the world today, and that we could use another mobilization on the scale of the Manhattan Project to combat climate change (or words to that effect).

It struck me that this is another manifestation of our denialism regarding the climate emergency. While there is a World War II analogy for this emergency, it is emphatically not the Manhattan Project — rather, it is the entire idea of shared sacrifice that was so prevalent in the war years. Here in Richmond, at the Rosie the Riveter museum, you can see war-era posters exhorting citizens to "use it up, wear it out, make it do" and ration cards for meat, butter and sugar.

If we were to take on this ethic of shared sacrifice, it could at least start us on the road toward conquering the overconsumption which is at the root of the crisis (yes, we would have to re-organize our economy to deal with no-growth — something that will have to be done to live on a finite planet)... But instead, we've been told so often that we have the know-how to fix this without having to give up anything, the first WWII image that comes to mind for so many people is the Manhattan Project and a quick technological fix. Unfortunately, any techno-fixes out there are either pipe-dreams, or simply defy the laws of thermodynamics (or both). We keep waiting for that mobilization around the "green economy" because no one wants to be the grown-up and declare that we can't have our cake and eat it, too — that is, we can't keep our lifestyles and a habitable planet.