Metaphors In The Balance

At the Huffington Post, naturally enough (and from the start of the month, prior to ClimateGate), “Al Gore Explains How Call For Climate Change Action Is Similar To Civil Rights Movement (Video)”

Uh-huh. I thought it was the equivalent of the Holocaust:

In his 1992 book Earth in the Balance, he wrote that “today the evidence of an ecological Kristallnacht is as clear as the sound of glass shattering in Berlin.” He repeatedly refers to the unfolding “ecological holocaust” and invokes Martin Niemoller’s famous quote (“When the Nazis came for the Communists, I remained silent; I was not a Communist. … When they came for the Jews, I did not speak out; I was not a Jew. …”) to label himself and other environmentalists “the new resistance.”

In An Inconvenient Truth and in interviews, Gore sticks to his guns. He quotes Churchill’s warning about the gathering storm of fascism and declares: “The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place we are entering a period of consequence.”

And hopefully, there will be consequences of some sort for both those who hid the decline and those who concurrently used loaded metaphors designed to invoke the moral equivalent of war.