Mitigating the damage of climate change is going to take a massive effort from our government, similar to that we made to ramp up for WWII. That means adopting many of the same economic strategies that FDR used when the nation was, as it is now, struggling economically. We must, as FDR did, rethink the role of money in society and how it is used as a tool, not an end goal in itself, to enable action toward a goal.

The US dollar is not a “thing” that can increase available resources, but a way to denominate/measure the value of those resources. A builder may run out of materials to build a home, but can never run out of “inches, feet, cubic yards, etc that measure those materials. All economics boils down to resources and their distribution and money is infinitely available to deploy those resources in our monetary system, as well as most others in the world.

Without a gold reserve to defend, and with a lot of available human resources available, we have several advantages over FDR. The fiat currency allows us to “afford” anything that is for sale and priced in dollars without concern for excessive inflation, so rationing and other unpopular tactics shouldn’t be necessary unless they were applied to commodities that are counterproductive to the effort.

We have, for decades, been steeped in propaganda to support the concept of scarce money, to the point of accepting death and human suffering as a consequence of not being good at accumulating and managing it. That must stop, and the people must reject any leaders who tell us we must “pay for” saving the planet by making even more sacrifices. Getting people to let go of household budget thinking won’t be easy, nor will convincing politicians to not grab the low hanging fruit the general econ ignorance of the populace offers them. However, our survival depends upon both.