Perhaps the most ominous rhetoric among climate-change activists is the appeal to create a wartime culture. In 2007, at the height of his popularity, Gore declared that “we must quickly mobilize our civilization with the urgency and resolve that has previously been seen only when nations mobilize for war.” And in July of this year he told a British audience that “Winston Churchill aroused this nation in heroic fashion to save civilization in World War Two. We have everything we need except political will, but political will is a renewable resource.” Even more stridently, Britain’s Environment Agency Chief Executive, Lady Young, called the fight against climate change “World War Three.”
Some have suspected that “global warmers” are interested in far more than merely solving the problem they claim to address. Such skeptics should be respected, given not only the language employed by warmers but the response by similar-minded progressives to the first World War. Many American progressives publicly described the conflict in Europe as an opportunity rather than as an emergency. The philosopher John Dewey spoke for many in the progressive movement when he argued that the war presented a means through which America could rationalize itself and the world. As Dewey hopefully—and correctly—predicted, American intervention would create a culture in which individual freedoms would be sacrificed for the needs of military mobilization and the “public machinery devised for that purpose.” Progressives like Dewey succeeded in their effort to persuade the United States to enter the war and for the war to enter American culture, with disastrous consequences.
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