Oppenheimer’s project should inspire climate action urgency

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Christopher Nolan has directed a biopic on the physicist Robert J. Oppenheimer to worldwide acclaim. Oppenheimer led the famous Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb during World War II, though he was later hounded for his political views.

Here was a government project that delivered successfully despite a tight deadline. It underlines the old truth that even though markets are better when it comes to coordinating activity in complex modern economies, governments can sometimes run focused projects better than the private sector does. This is especially true when the social return on an investment is higher than the private return.

Can the success of the Manhattan Project be replicated in the case of another emergency that has to be dealt with right now under a tight deadline—climate change? The past few weeks have seen a torrent of news on deluges, heat waves and forest fires across the world. Monsoon rains have wreaked havoc in some parts of India, while some other parts are bone dry. Various measures show that this is the hottest year since climate data began being recorded on a regular basis.

Another example that is offered as a model for the green transition is the Apollo Programme, the successful US government initiative to send astronauts into space during the 1960s—and more ambitiously to put humans on the moon before the Soviet Union could. The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) received an equivalent of 0.7% of GDP in the 1960s and employed 400,000 people at the height of the space race. A new paper by Shawn Kantor of Florida State University and Alexander T.