Is Climate Denial Like Appeasing Hitler?

Britain’s Energy Secretary thinks so:

World leaders who oppose a global agreement to tackle climate change are making a similar mistake to the one made by politicians who tried to appease Adolf Hitler before World War Two, British Energy and Climate Change Minister Chris Huhne said on Thursday….

“This is our Munich moment,” he added, referring to the Munich Agreement, a 1938 pact that gave Hitler land in the former Czechoslovakia as part of a failed attempt to persuade him to abandon further territorial expansion.

“Winston Churchill…once said that ‘an appeaser is someone that feeds a crocodile, hoping that it will eat him last’.”

Obviously, there are serious differences between Hitler and global climate change, but I’m wondering whether this might not be useful as a matter of political rhetoric.  Given how hard it is to get people engaged on environmental problems that are not immediately visible and hard to trace, this might be the rhetorical equivalent of hitting someone over the head with a frying pan.

Perhaps this is best thought of as an example of what someone once referred to as the “Charles Murray Principle.”  Murray, you might recall, is the writer who famously argued that the welfare state causes poverty, and that Blacks are less intelligent than whites, both claims based upon deceptive and fraudulent social science “data”.  But Murray’s “findings” got him into the news so much that later, he was seen as someone who needed to be listened to, because he was a player in the field.

For the most part, this only works for Republicans: there is literally nothing that Pat Buchanan can say that will get him kicked off of television. But perhaps rhetoric like this can help to elevate the issue.  And unlike Murray or Buchanan, at least it has some truth to it.

appeasement, Charles Murray, Chris Huhne, climate denial, James Inhofe, Neville Chamberlain, Pat Buchanan