Anyone who observes politics understands the importance of alarmism. Favorable political action is far more likely when facing an “emergency.” We’ll hear plenty about the “climate emergency” after the United Nations Climate Change Conference , or COP28, in Dubai begins this week.

The so-called climate emergency takes the cake of alarmist topics because the “or else” in this case means the end of the world. Although such doomsday predictions have a terrible track record, since the world has not ended yet, they still move people, especially the young and the impressionable. It’s also easy to cherry-pick sensational stories about extreme weather events such as coastal flooding , droughts, and wildfires to bolster one’s otherwise shaky extrapolations.

But there is a dark side to climate alarmism: It is fundamentally totalitarian — not just inefficient, wasteful, misguided, or myopic. The climate “emergency” opens the door for total tyranny. There is no part of life, no freedom, no right, no value or good that cannot be subjected for the sake of ameliorating the climate emergency. We can see practical examples of this totalitarianism in Europe and in California.

Take California’s S.B. 253 Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act and S.B. 261 Climate-Related Financial Risk Act passed earlier this year. On what basis can a government demand that public and private businesses track and report not only their own emissions, but those of their employees, suppliers, and customers? What could justify such an intrusive and burdensome rule? Climate alarmism.

The California legislature believes it can do whatever it wants in the name of the environment. It can ban the sale of vehicles with internal combustion engines; it can require new buildings to have solar panels. Everything can be regulated. Everything is on the table. They could tell people to paint their cars yellow or their sidewalks green if it “helped” ameliorate the climate emergency.

Europe has also implemented significant restrictions in the name of dealing with the climate emergency. It passed the European Green Deal in 2020 and the European Climate Law in 2021. Germany passed the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Requirement to the German Due Diligence in Supply Chains Act that went into effect this year, placing requirements on large companies that their entire supply chain is supposed to meet.

But people tend to be self-serving. Somehow, things that “help” the environment somehow also end up helping environmental advocates, too. The 70,000-plus people at COP28 make their livings, careers, and sometimes fortunes through environmental activism.

And just as people used to wrap themselves in the flag to avoid criticism, climate alarmists wrap themselves in pseudo-scientific garb. To question them is to question science. (Sound familiar?) To disagree with them is to be complicit with destroying the planet. These are the arguments of totalitarians bent on complete domination.

There is no length to which environmental advocates won’t go to advance their agenda. No right is safe; no property, no opinion. They want everything subjected to their goals. It’s impossible to reason with such totalitarians. The only recourse is to rebut and to resist them.

Paul Mueller is a senior research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research.