Politicians have learned that, if they don’t know how to solve a problem, they declare a war on it.

So: now we live under countless domestic policy wars—the war on poverty, war on crime, war on drugs, war on terror, war on energy consumption and the like. These wars spend money, increase federal executive power, but solve very little.

Now comes a dangerous cry to declare a war on climate change. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calls climate change “our World War Two” and Senator Sanders, who proposes an even bigger Green New Deal, agrees. Scholars claim it is already a war that we are losing and ask the president to declare an emergency.

All of this is code for “we don’t really know what needs to be done, but it needs to be big, expensive and federal.” Beware a new policy war on climate change.