Churchill, Climate Change, and the New Year's Eerie Silence

Lord Halifax, you have a point, but I want to fight.

Aah, 2025. The year that might be our next “hottest year on record.” Certainly, it seems to me that 2025 is the year to retire the one quotation of Winston Churchill most associated with climate change in favor of another one, one more suitable for the “eerie silence” that has hung over these last two months in the wake of betrayals by the American electorate and the COP29 leaders. No, it’s not the “Never give in!” quote of Churchill’s that you might be expecting; it’s one more appropriate to this harrowing moment.

The year is 2006. The year that An Inconvenient Truth is released, including that moment when Al Gore flashes the Churchill quote on the screen and reads out: “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 consequences...."

The year is 1940. The year in this climate change article analogous to 2025. May 28, 1940, in particular. Denmark and Norway have fallen to Nazi invasion, going the way of Czechoslovakia and Poland. Blitzkrieg has begun as Panzer units unstoppably drive through the Low Countries. The British Expeditionary Force have been forced to retreat to Dunkirk. France is a month away from surrendering.

The year is 1936. The year in this climate change article analogous to An Inconvenient Truth’s 2006. The Hon. Gentleman from Epping, Sir Winston Churchill—still as much a backbencher in 1936 as Al Gore essentially was in 2006—rises to address Parliament with one of his most urgent appeals yet: Britain must re-arm to match the growing Nazi threat to civilization. He invokes the deadly U-boat Campaign of 1914-1918 when German U-boats tried to blockade British shipping. Churchill says,

Owing to past neglect, in the face of the plainest warnings, we have now entered upon a period of danger greater than has befallen Britain since the U-boat campaign was crushed; perhaps, indeed, it is a more grievous period than that, because at that time, at least, we were possessed of the means of securing ourselves and of defeating that campaign. Now we have no such assurance. 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 consequences...."

The Year 2025, when I can’t imagine that Gore quoting Churchill today as a warning about climate change has any more relevance than Churchill repeating his 1936 speech in 1940. No, we are now firmly inside the period of climate change consequences.

In a report outlining their findings for 2024, researchers collaborating with the World Weather Attribution (WWA) and Climate Central projects said climate change had intensified 26 of the 29 weather events they studied during the year. Those disasters killed at least 3,700 people and displaced millions – but are only a small sample of what was experienced on the frontlines of a warming world. They included severe floods in eastern Spain, hurricanes in the US, drought in South America’s Amazon rainforest, and flooding across West and Central Africa.

The history of climate change, like the history of the lead-up to World War II, is replete with warnings, followed by procrastinations, half-measures, soothing and baffling expedients, and delays, followed by incidents of excruciating consequences. Why do we keep treating these consequences as isolated “incidents” we encounter, and not as a “period” that we have now entered? We point to each climate-related disaster (like the hurricane that hit Appalachia in 2024), or to each “hottest year on record” (like 2024), and we re-issue our old warnings. One of the first articles I read on New Years Day quotes Jane Goodall as saying, “We don’t have much time left to start helping the environment. We’ve done so much to destroy it…. We still have a window of time to start slowing down climate change and the loss of biodiversity.” What calendar is she looking at?!

Churchill’s warning is only relevant up until September 1939, the month in which Hitler invades Poland, the month that Britain finally declares war on Germany. Even then, there is a difference for the Allies between September 1939 and May 28,1940, the date of the new Churchill quote that I’ve been promising to unveil. On September 3, 1939, General Lord Gort confidently takes command of the British Expeditionary Force and they begin moving to France the very next day, deploying along the Belgian border. Nonetheless, there are no land operations, no real engagement with Nazi combatants until May 10, 1940. Observers began to call this period “the Phoney War.” Churchill called it the “Twilight War.” The British press employed some word play on blitzkrieg to call it Sitzkrieg, the sitting war. Heaven knows, the years between 2015 and 2024—the years respectively when COP21 produced the Paris Agreement and when COP29 in Baku did so little to advance it—has often felt like climate change’s version of the Sitzkrieg.

Everything changes in May 1940. Germany invades France. Neville Chamberlain resigns. Churchill’s first radio broadcast to the British people begins with: “I speak to you for the first time as Prime Minister in a solemn hour for the life of our country, of our empire, of our allies, and, above all, of the cause of Freedom. A tremendous battle is raging in France and Flanders.” He is amazed at the swiftness of the advance but claims “if the French Army, and our own Army, are well handled, as I believe they will be; if the French retain that genius for recovery and counter-attack for which they have so long been famous; and if the British Army shows the dogged endurance and solid fighting power of which there have been so many examples in the past — then a sudden transformation of the scene might spring into being.” If... if… if. Churchill, it seems, is still fighting the Twilight War. “It would be foolish, however, to disguise the gravity of the hour,” he says. This is the same day, May 19, that General Lord Gort orders British troops to withdraw toward port cities, including Dunkirk and Calais.

Nine days later, Churchill wakes up on May 28, 1940, to the news that, overnight, Belgium has surrendered unconditionally to Germany, and did so without consulting the British or French governments. Operation Dynamo, the evacuation of Dunkirk, is less than 24 hours old and, so far, fewer than 8,000 troops have safely escaped the collapsing defense of the Continent. Churchill was likely briefed that morning on the latest blow to his hopes for American assistance, namely, former U.S. President Herbert Hoover’s radio speech the previous day: American military might is for American defences with “three thousand miles of ocean” as a buffer. For this war, in the near future, there would be no “over there” over there by the Yanks.

The War Cabinet meets later that day and is apparently dominated by Foreign Minister Lord Halifax who, along with others, is insistent: Great Britain must open negotiations with Hitler in order to secure their vulnerable island. As reported,

The War Cabinet adjourned at 6:00 PM on the evening of 28 May. War Cabinet members left the room and remaining were twenty-five junior cabinet members. Churchill, tired from two hours of arguing against any kind of negotiation, explained to the remaining members the dire situation at Dunkirk and the likelihood that the Germans were going to take Paris with terms. Churchill commented, “there was no doubt whatever, that we must decline anything like this and fight on.”

This, then, is the full context for that moment when Churchill turns to Lord Halifax and the War Cabinet and says something that resonates now in the climate crisis as we know here it in January 2025. “Nations that went down fighting rose again,” Churchill says, “but those which surrendered tamely were finished.”

The month is January 2025. On January 6, Vice President Kamala Harris quietly and dutifully presided over the certification of the Electoral College votes. On January 20, Donald Trump will be inaugurated for his second term. Yesterday, he held a press conference at Mar-a-Lago to announce his agenda for the first days of his administration. Among other things, he said, “President Biden's actions yesterday on offshore drilling, banning offshore drilling will not stand. I will reverse it immediately. It will be done immediately and we will ‘drill baby drill’ and we're going to be drilling in a lot of other locations and the energy costs are going to come way down.” He also said, “We’re going to try and have a policy where no windmills are being built.”

The observation of the weeks following the November 6^th election that “there seems to be an eerie silence” was not made by me, but rather by my Spiritual Director. I, nonetheless, gave him the prompt. I had just returned from the failed COP29 climate summit and our session together was my first chance to debrief the outcome of the US presidential election. I had left for COP29 on November 6, that is, on the very day that the election was called for Trump, which meant that I had missed all the conversations, the processing, the lament, and also what I imagined would be the pivot toward positive, strategic, impassioned resistance. Instead, upon returning home, I heard very little from my colleagues. Think about it: by this time in early January 2017, right before Trump’s first inauguration, we already had so many discussions underway, so many plans in place. The Women’s March was already scheduled for the day after the Inauguration. The March for Science was scheduled. The Climate March was scheduled. Some clandestine outfit who called themselves the Alt National Park Service had illegally co-opted the Smokey the Bear brand to declare: “Resist!” We had energy and creativity. “Yeah,” David my Spiritual Director said, by contrast, this time around, “there seems to be an eerie silence.”

COP22 was underway in Marrakesh in November 2016 during the US presidential election that put Trump in office the first time. I have heard stories of delegates who came into the COP conference grounds the next day in tears. At least they could generate an emotional response. At COP29 in Baku, we all seemed to be numb. The Trump victory was a heavy cloud. In Baku, the US delegation was still a Biden-appointed one. John Podesta was the new U.S. Climate Envoy, having replaced the retired John Kerry. Nonetheless, the US delegation couldn’t generate a single headline; they made no newsworthy announcements. They were weary lame ducks. When the right-wing president of Argentina, a climate denier named Javier Milei, called his entire delegation home after only three days of COP29, there was again no great emotional reaction to the news. The next day Milei traveled to Mar-a-Lago. (Is nausea an emotion?)

I do understand that it is likely too early to ask about new plans. It may be too early to even expect new energy. For that matter, numbness might not be lack of emotion at all. It might be an emotion itself, and a legitimate response to contemplating four years of the havoc that Project 2025 is going to unleash on the international climate scene. But honestly, COP29 was programmed to be a failure even if it would have been Harris, not Trump, as the new President-elect of the United States. It’s hard thing to wake up on a day that feels like May 28, 1940, and realize that any semblance of “Phoney War” is over. It can be numbing and paralyzing. Just ask Lord Halifax. Sometimes you just want to be left alone, no matter the cost.

Is Trump a modern-day Hitler? Is climate change’s rapid advance on our collective well-being a modern-day blitzkrieg? Analogies are funny creatures. You throw them out there and they eventually elicit a left-brain, rational response. We parse out the logical appropriateness. But in the mouth of a rhetorician with a literary bent (and Churchill was nothing if not that!), analogies are designed for the right hemisphere of the brain, for the emotional response. And yes, I feel a certain way about January 2025 like how I imagine I might have felt about May 1940. And consequently, I am feeling my way into a quotation like Churchill’s: “Nations that went down fighting rose again, but those which surrendered tamely were finished.”

Like all good Spiritual Directors, mine would ask, “Are you sensing any invitation here?” Here in January 2025? Here in the eerie silence?

Yes. I want to fight.

I know that it might feel like we (our nation, our tribe, our church, our movement, our species, our planet) are “going down,” but that’s the point: to at least go down fighting, the one thing you have any control over. If we bother fighting, it is not because Churchill gave us the pep talk to “Never give up”? Instead, I think that Churchill’s reference to nations that went down fighting explains what Wendell Berry meant when he told us to “Practice resurrection.”* Berry didn’t say, “resign yourself to waiting for the resurrection;” he said to practice it, and here in 2025, that feels like fighting.

*The last line from Wendell Berry’s poem, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” available here.