Field’s signature example is the US synthetic rubber program. Though historians traditionally consider the program to have been an industrial miracle, he finds a series of preventable errors. First, cheap rubber imports from Southeast Asia made US firms unwilling to hold significant reserve stocks—What if the price goes down?!—or invest in planting large amounts of guayule, a shrub indigenous to the American Southwest from which it was proposed to extract significant amounts of rubber.iv This left the United States so underprepared when Japanese advances cut off rubber supplies that the country was forced to restrict automobile travel not for lack of gas but for fear of running out of tires. Industry dragged its feet, refusing to invest in synthetic capacity, since it assumed the cheap natural rubber would start flowing again after hostilities concluded—an attitude that ignored the fact that the United States could lose the war. When the synthetic program did get up and running with government money, the oil industry insisted on using petroleum (rather than easily produced alcohol) as a feedstock, unnecessarily slowing output at a crucial time. Field concludes that the wait for synthetic rubber delayed the American invasion of France on D-Day by a year.77 “The decision to structure the program around an almost exclusive emphasis on petroleum as a feedstock,” he writes, “worked at cross-purposes with the immediate objective of winning (or at least not losing) the war.”78 We can imagine a future historian saying something similar about today, trying to answer the perplexing question of why, at a historical turning point for the planet, humanity spent such a large percentage of its collective resources on electrifying Americans’ cars: The decision to structure the transition program around electric vehicles worked at cross-purposes with the immediate objective of cooling (or at least not heating) the world.