is a journalism student with a masters degree in contemporary philosophy from the Pantheon-Sorbonne University. He writes for the special issue of Philosophie magazine.
“A Manhattan project for a green transition” is how the signatories of a September 2023 column in Le Monde call it: the idea being to mobilise massive public resources to meet environmental challenges, in a manner reminiscent of the US government’s race to build the world’s first nuclear bomb in the Second World War. Is such a plan realistic? Let’s take a closer look.
“Five years after it began, the Manhattan project was an unprecedented technological success. It encompassed the most advanced science of the time and achieved its large-scale industrialisation. […] If humankind is capable of such prowess for destruction, we can do the same for the common good in times of peace,” reads the piece published in Le Monde on 25 September 2023, which calls for massive investment in technologies.
The authors – including the Nobel prize in physics, Alain Aspect – argue that in order to grab the climate crisis by the horns, a political and scientific revolution is necessary. “40% of technologies necessary for the environmental transition haven’t reached the required level of maturity,” they say. Whereas, in their eyes, investment on the scale of the Manhattan project creates “the scientific basis of the industrial model at once sober in terms of resources, resilient, and carbon-free, which is what we’re calling for.”
The idea of a new “Manhattan project” to save the climate isn’t entirely new. We find a first trace of it as early as 2005 in a New York Times article by journalist Thomas L. Friedman, titled “Bush’s Waterlogged Halo”. In nearly fifteen years, the analogy – between the state-funded development of the atom bomb in just a few years and the solving of the climate crisis through technology – hasn’t failed to raise eyebrows. It has also met with criticism.
War and peace
As early as 2007, in their article “A ‘Manhattan Project’ For Climate Change?”, specialists of environmental policies Chi-Jen Yang and Michael Oppenheimer (not a joke!) argued that such a comparison wasn’t pertinent, and that the two challenges are very different. The Manhattan Project was a wartime endeavour, and its success was made possible by several very specific factors, namely “centralization of authority”, “large government subsidies”, “insulation from political interference”. They further point out that “high price was not a problem, because the government was the only buyer and the sale was guaranteed.”
‘Peacetime technology development doesn’t face the same demands as in wartime’
Global warming is a very different situation. Peacetime technology development doesn’t face the same demands as in wartime. “Interest groups, media, and public opinion all play important roles in determining ultimate acceptability of the product.” But more importantly, the product in question isn’t just destined for the state, which is a central destination: for a technology to resolve the environmental crisis, it must be largely distributed; and this generalisation entails its implementation by private industries following a much less symbiotic and more treacherous relationship than in the case of the bomb. This poses obvious problems. “Because the technology eventually must be employed by the private sector, no sale is guaranteed,” the authors write. “Decision-making authority in a market economy is inevitably dispersed,” and because it’s less centralised, in a sense, it’s also less efficient.
Technological plurality
The authors go even further: even if something like a green Manhattan project …
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