AOC and her allies claim to view climate change as a crisis similar in severity to World War II. If you can rely on the predictions that I have seen, she has a case. The problem with the analogy is that the United States didn’t enter World War II until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and wildfires, freak snow storms, and hurricanes, all of which have always been with us to some degree, don’t feel like acts of war to most Americans.
The fact is that climate change is a classic tragedy of the commons, with the additional problem that most of its impacts will be felt in the future, not the present. That means it will be extremely difficult to persuade the American public to treat it as anything more than one of a number of important issues to address in the election, akin to inequality or trade policy. Video of melting glaciers, hurricane and wildfire damage, and polar bears pulling food out of garbage cans only goes so far.
I have posted on how to sell climate change to the public in the past, and I won’t repeat myself. The one thing I would add today is that, by tying the Green New Deal to socialism, AOC is making a horrible public relations mistake. If we really are facing catastrophe, she should be elevating environmental issues over every other policy concern (including inequality) and calling for a large measure of shared sacrifice. Instead, she’s uniting the right against her and treating climate change, not as an existential threat, but as a pretext to create a leftist Jerusalem. That simply will not work.