In the New Repub­lic​’s Sep­tem­ber cov­er sto­ry, writer and activist Bill McK­ibben makes a pow­er­ful asser­tion: Through glob­al warm­ing, physics is wag­ing World War III on human­i­ty — and we need a World War II-style mobi­liza­tion to defeat it, as we did fas­cism sev­en­ty years ago. ​“For years now, cli­mate sci­en­tists and lead­ing econ­o­mists have called for treat­ing cli­mate change with the same resolve we brought to bear on Ger­many and Japan in the last world war,” he warns. Among oth­er stud­ies, McK­ibben may be ref­er­enc­ing cli­mate sci­en­tist Kevin Anderson’s call for devel­oped nations to scale back emis­sions by 10 per­cent each and every year start­ing now — as in right now—in order to avert dis­as­trous sea lev­el rise and volatile weather.

The war on warming, then, isn’t one that can stand alone. If we want to save the planet, we need to stop the kinds of people who want to make it a dangerous place for those already worst-off.

“The ques­tion is not, are we in a world war?” he says. ​“The ques­tion is, will we fight back? And if we do, can we actu­al­ly defeat an ene­my as pow­er­ful and inex­orable as the laws of physics?”

For the most part, McK­ibben is dead-on: As he makes painful­ly clear in this and oth­er writ­ing, cli­mate change is an exis­ten­tial threat to our species and many oth­ers. It might be the sin­gle great­est chal­lenge human­i­ty has faced yet — as great and still greater than that faced by the Unit­ed States dur­ing World War II. Com­par­ing today’s dead­ly storms to the 1930s’ rise of fas­cism — and today’s gov­ern­ments to Neville Chamberlain’s — is meant to inspire some much need­ed urgency, appeal­ing to the ​“spir­it of social sol­i­dar­i­ty” that swept the nation in the ear­ly for­ties as the Unit­ed States set out to stomp Hitler.

But while there is much to like, McKibben’s WWII metaphor over­looks a few crit­i­cal aspects of both yes­ter­day and today.

Con­fronting the cli­mate threat also involves a slew of con­found­ing fac­tors that aren’t strict­ly cli­mate-relat­ed: McK­ibben frames this fight as a war against physics, dis­count­ing cru­cial ques­tions of pow­er and respon­si­bil­i­ty embed­ded in ris­ing green­house gas emis­sions, as well as the rise of a far right as vit­ri­olic as that which sur­faced in the days before World War II. If we are to mit­i­gate cli­mate change — and, just as impor­tant, enact a humane response to those effects that are already inevitable — we need to name our ene­mies clear­ly, and recre­ate the mil­i­tan­cy of the Depres­sion-era social move­ments that made the most pos­i­tive aspects of America’s WWII mobi­liza­tion possible.

War is dead­ly, and though it was a bru­tal one that defeat­ed fas­cism in in the for­ties, a big­ger and more dynam­ic left today could knock out cat­a­stroph­ic cli­mate change and ascen­dant xeno­pho­bia alike — sans blood­shed. Indeed, it must. And physics may be the wrong foe to gal­va­nize such a force.

A war on cli­mate change doesn’t have to be a war on an abstrac­tion, like our dis­as­trous ones on drugs and ter­ror­ism. While we all in some small way con­tribute to glob­al warm­ing with our cars and ham­burg­ers, glob­al elites do more to cook us in a day than most peo­ple could in a life­time. From the fos­sil fuel industry’s extrac­tive busi­ness mod­el to the car­bon-hun­gry lifestyles of the rich and famous, it’s a rel­a­tive­ly small seg­ment of the pop­u­la­tion dri­ving the lion’s share of glob­al warm­ing. On the pro­duc­tion end, a study released in 2013 found that just 90 com­pa­nies — almost all fos­sil fuel com­pa­nies, includ­ing pri­vate and state-owned firms world­wide — are respon­si­ble for two-thirds of glob­al warm­ing. And as for con­sump­tion, Stephen Pacala, direc­tor of the Prince­ton Envi­ron­men­tal Insti­tute, sug­gest­ed in 2007 that half of glob­al green­house emis­sions could be traced to less than 8 per­cent of the world’s pop­u­la­tion. A 2015 study from Oxfam found the poor­est half of the world’s res­i­dents account for just 10 per­cent of fos­sil fuel-based emissions.

If fight­ing cli­mate change is a war, it’s class war. Occu­py named the 1 per­cent. For Bernie Sanders’s cam­paign it was the mil­lion­aires and the bil­lion­aires. In con­trast, the cli­mate move­ment has long suf­fered from hav­ing an ene­my too amor­phous to under­stand, espe­cial­ly in an econ­o­my where many strug­gle to keep food on the table and roofs over­head. As that same cli­mate move­ment now begins putting a tar­get on the fos­sil fuel industry’s head with cam­paigns like those for coal, oil and gas divest­ment — and in a polit­i­cal moment rapid­ly turn­ing against elites — why frame a fight to lit­er­al­ly save human­i­ty as being about a top­ic as mun­dane as gas­es and weather?

Liken­ing cli­mate change to World War II presents anoth­er chal­lenge as well: Fas­cism today isn’t just a metaphor. Far right par­ties and politi­cians are on the rise across Europe, from Marine Le Pen of France’s Front Nation­al — eye­ing her country’s high­est office — to Alter­na­tive für Deutsch­land (Alter­na­tive for Ger­many), which in some polls has become that country’s third largest par­ty. Falling out­side the lines of the West’s tra­di­tion­al left-right divide are author­i­tar­i­an lead­ers in Rus­sia and Turkey, and vio­lent nation­alisms through­out Europe. Vojislav Seselj, an archi­tect of the eth­nic cleans­ing of Mus­lims in Bosnia, host­ed Belgrade’s first pro-Trump ral­ly in August.

Right in the mid­dle of all this sits Trump him­self, meld­ing open racism and xeno­pho­bia with a strong­man pop­ulism built on nam­ing politi­cians and demo­graph­ics (immi­grants, main­ly) on whom frus­trat­ed Amer­i­cans can pin their eco­nom­ic woes. The ques­tion of whether Trump is a fas­cist is an inter­est­ing, if aca­d­e­m­ic one. One thing that’s painful­ly clear, though, is that he’s not alone. Nor is he the kind of fluke in Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy lib­er­als and con­ser­v­a­tives alike are try­ing to paint him as. Even if Trump los­es the elec­tion, the kind of vio­lent hatred he’s stirred up isn’t going anywhere.

These far right par­ties — Repub­li­cans includ­ed — hap­pen to be filled with cli­mate skep­tics eager to rip the Paris Agree­ment to shreds. But for those with an eye toward the cli­mate, there are even more wor­ry­ing aspects to all this. How might the far-right han­dle a warm­ing world, one being sped along by their own bad or nonex­is­tent solu­tions? The best esti­mates hold that warm­ing could dis­place any­where between 25 mil­lion and one bil­lion peo­ple, many from places (read: the Glob­al South) from which Trump and his ilk would rather not have them com­ing. Amer­i­ca is already hav­ing to reset­tle its own cli­mate refugees in Louisiana, first res­i­dents of the slow­ly sub­merg­ing Isle de Jean Charles and now those dis­placed from flood­ing last month around Baton Rouge. If the far-right suc­ceeds, walls will be built — both bor­ders to keep refugees out, and sea­walls to ensure the wealthy can hold onto their sea­side property.

That’s because, for all their rants against the glob­al elites, the far right is ulti­mate­ly fight­ing for their inter­ests, and will let aus­ter­i­ty car­ry on so long as they get to have their way with the bor­ders. The result might be a wave of gov­ern­ments as hos­tile to gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion and inter­na­tion­al agree­ments as they are to migrants and com­mu­ni­ties of col­or, and where the fos­sil fuel indus­try is, con­se­quent­ly, free to run amok.

In such a con­text, how the Unit­ed States deals with cli­mate change is as impor­tant as whether we do at all. Pro­gres­sive cli­mate action may not bring a rev­o­lu­tion for the Left, but a reac­tionary response could solid­i­fy pow­er for a Right eager to promise pro­tec­tion in an increas­ing­ly volatile world. Whether rec­og­nized as cli­mate impacts or not, the effects of climb­ing tem­per­a­tures stand to cre­ate dra­mat­ic insta­bil­i­ty world wide — the kind that cap­i­tal­ists and fas­cists each love to take advan­tage of. At the top of the agen­da for the cli­mate move­ment, then, should be ensur­ing the far right’s swift defeat.

Cap­i­tal­ists and fas­cists aren’t always sep­a­rate enti­ties, either. Here we can look to WWII’s pre­de­ces­sor, the Span­ish Civ­il War, where oil com­pa­ny Tex­a­co fun­neled sup­plies to Gen­er­al Fran­cis­co Franco’s insur­gent fas­cists. As Adam Hochschild points out in Spain In Our Hearts, Tex­a­co head and Nazi sym­pa­thiz­er Tork­ild Rieber wrote blank checks to Franco’s far-right mil­i­tary coup. The com­pa­ny, since sub­sumed under Chevron, gift­ed Span­ish Nation­al­ists — who were already backed by Hitler and Mus­soli­ni — with lav­ish lines of cred­it, strate­gic intel­li­gence and all the oil mon­ey could buy — plus some that it couldn’t. Fuel­ing trucks, boats, tanks and planes, that oil also helped pro­pel Franco’s forces to vic­to­ry and over 35 years of auto­crat­ic rule.

One Fran­co-era offi­cial Hochschild quotes laid out just how good Tex­a­co was to the aspir­ing régime: ​“With­out Amer­i­can petro­le­um and Amer­i­can trucks and Amer­i­can cred­its, we could nev­er have won the civ­il war.”

Hochschild notes too that Rieber wasn’t alone. Dow Chem­i­cal gift­ed 40,000 bombs to Hitler just before the war began, and the heads of Ford, Gen­er­al Motors, East­ern Kodak and oth­er com­pa­nies met at New York’s Wal­dorf Asto­ria to talk ​“about the prospects for Amer­i­can coop­er­a­tion with the Nazi régime.”

Today, the fos­sil fuel indus­try is no bet­ter friend to democ­ra­cy than it was in the thir­ties. While Rieber’s alliance with Fran­co was dri­ven by ide­ol­o­gy, plen­ty of more recent exec­u­tives from com­pa­nies like Coca-Cola and Hal­libur­ton dealt with author­i­tar­i­an regimes for the sake of good busi­ness alone. In all like­li­hood, today’s CEOs will make friends with who­ev­er finds their way into Con­gress and the Oval Office come Novem­ber. So long as they make a prof­it, oil and gas com­pa­nies will be as hap­py to deal with a dic­ta­tor­ship as a democ­ra­cy — maybe even, as Rieber was, happier.

The peo­ple dri­ving cli­mate change and the ones who could make its effects tru­ly dystopi­an are cut from the same cloth. They’ve found plen­ty of com­mon ground in the last cen­tu­ry, and will prob­a­bly con­tin­ue to do so no mat­ter how bad things get for the rest of us. The war on warm­ing, then, isn’t one that can stand alone. If we want to save the plan­et, we need to stop the kinds of peo­ple who want to make it a dan­ger­ous place for those already worst-off.

We need a World War II-style mobi­liza­tion against cli­mate change. We also need one against fas­cism. The path toward each is the same: a stronger and more uni­fied left. Here it’s worth remem­ber­ing the gov­ern­men­t’s increased role in the econ­o­my start­ed before the war, with the New Deal. This wasn’t just a top-down ini­tia­tive of kind­ly Democ­rats: Mas­sive, dis­rup­tive protests forced Roosevelt’s hand in enact­ing relief pro­grams and labor pro­tec­tions like the Nation­al Labor Rela­tions Act. Depres­sion-era mobi­liza­tions also trans­formed the labor left into a pow­er­ful voice for work­ing class inter­ests, and a force to be reck­oned with in the halls of pow­er once war rolled around in the for­ties. If Amer­i­cans remem­ber World War II as one of shared pros­per­i­ty (and plen­ty — includ­ing many Japan­ese Amer­i­cans — do not), it’s in part because the threat of open revolt pushed the White House into a cor­ner a decade before.

With Amer­i­cans across the polit­i­cal spec­trum rail­ing against elites, it’s time to inject the cli­mate fight with a big­ger dose of row­dy pop­ulism — to take on run­away cli­mate change, cor­po­rate pow­er and polit­i­cal xeno­pho­bia alike. Mobi­liz­ing at the scale demand­ed by today’s polit­i­cal and phys­i­cal cli­mate will require nam­ing an ​“us” ver­sus a ​“them” more com­pelling than human­i­ty ver­sus physics, and — in the process — build­ing a left both big­ger and more pop­u­lar than the Unit­ed States has ever known.