special report_ the environment

AMERICANS DON'T LIKE TO LOSE WARS
which makes sense, since they have so little practice with it. Of course, a lot depends on how you define just what a war is. There are shooting wars - the kind that test mettle and patriotism and resourcefulness and courage - and those are the kind at which the U.S. excels. But other struggles test those qualities too. What else was the Great Depression or the space race or the construction of the railroads or the eradication of polio but a massive, often frightening challenge that the U.S. decided as a country it ought to rise up and face ? If Americans indulge in a bit of chest - thumping and flag - waving when the job is done, well , they earned it.
Now there is a similarly momentous challenge ; global warning. The steady deterioration of the very climate of this very planet is becoming a war of the first order, and by any measure, the U.S. is losing. Indeed, if America is fighting at all - and by most accounts, it's not - it's fighting on the wrong side. The U.S. produces nearly a quarter of the world's greenhouse gases each year and has stubbornly made it clear that it doesn't intend to do a whole lot about it. Although 174 nations ratified the admittedly flawed Kyoto accords to reduce carbon levels, the U.S. walked away from them. While even developing China has boosted its efficiency standards to 15 km/L, the U.S. remains the land of the Hummer. Oh, there are vague promises of manufacturing fuel from switchgrass or powering cars with hydrogen - someday. But for a country that rightly cites patriotism as one of its core values, the U.S. is taking a pass on what might be the most patriotic struggle of all. Its hard to imagine a bigger fight than one for the survival of a country's coasts and farms, the health of its people and the stability of its economy - and for those of the world at large as well.
The rub is, if the vast majority of people increasingly agree that climate change is a global emergency, there's far less consensus on how to fix it. Industry offers its plans, which too often would fix little. Environmentalists offer theirs, which too often amount to naive wish lists that could cripple America's growth. But let's assume that those interested parties and others will always be at the table and will always - sensibly - demand that their voices be heard and that their needs be addressed. What would an aggressive, ambitious, effective plan look like - one that would leave the U.S. both environmentally safe and economically sound?
Forget precedents like the Manhattan Project which develop the atom bomb, or the Apollo program that put men on the moon - single focus programs both, however hard they were to pull off. Think instead of the overnight conversion of the World War II - era industrial sector into a vast machine capable of churning out 60,000 tanks and 300,000 planes, an effort that not only didn't bankrupt the U.S. but instead made it rich and powerful beyond its imagining and - oh, yes - won the war in the process.
Halting climate change will be far harder than even that. One of the more conservative plans for addressing the problem, by Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala of Princeton University, calls for a reduction of 25 billion tons of carbon emissions over the next 50 years - the equivalent of erasing nearly four years of global emissions at today's rates. And yet by devising a coherent strategy that mixes short-term solutions with farsighted goals, combines government activism with private-sector enterprise and blends pragmatism with ambition, the U.S. can, without major damage to the economy, help halt the worst effects of climate change and ensure the survival of its way of life for future generations. Money will do some of the work, but what's needed most is will. "I'm not saying the challenge isn't almost overwhelming,"says Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund and co-author of the new book Earth: The Sequel, "But this is America, and America has risen to these challengers before."
No one yet has a comprehensive plan for how the U.S. could do so again, but everyone agrees on what the biggest parts of the plan would be. Here's our blueprint for how America can flight - and win - the war on global warming.