By Mark Neely
Back in 2009, Stanford engineering professor Mark Z. Jacobson and transportation scientist Mark Delucchi, of the University of California at Davis, laid out “A Plan for a Sustainable Future” in Scientific American. It would get the world to an all wind-water-solar economy by 2030.
Later the deadline was moved back to 2050, but what stuck was not so much the details of the engineering plan as the casual estimate of the degree of national effort required. “Society has achieved massive transformations before,” they wrote, and pointed to industrial mobilization in World War II as one example.