On a sunny afternoon in September 1962, President John F. Kennedy strode onto the football field at Rice Stadium in Houston, Texas. Addressing the crowd from a podium on the turf, he announced his government’s ambition to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. His speech is justly famous for its vivid rhetoric, which captured imaginations across the world.
The climate moonshot
The fight against climate change is often likened to Kennedy’s “moonshot”, and with good reason. Like the moon missions, it will require ambition, expertise, and an unprecedented marshalling of resources. But there are key differences.
For a start, climate change, with its globe-spanning effects and multidimensional feedback loops, is a much more complex technical problem than spaceflight – and far more expensive to solve. The International Energy Agency estimates it will cost at least $1 trillion a year to move the world economy onto a net-zero carbon basis.2 That dwarfs the total outlay on the Apollo missions, which came to $25 billion (around $150 billion today, taking inflation into account).
Climate action is also hampered by a lack of coordination. Imagine if Kennedy had set his target without articulating a plan, and simply trusted public agencies and institutions – along with private companies with wildly divergent incentives and interests – to find a way to deliver it. That’s a good analogy for the current state of the climate financing effort in the wake of the Paris Agreement – a space programme without NASA.
