The Toxic Intersection Of Climate Alarmism And Communism

Environmentalists, it’s been said, are like watermelons – green on the outside, red on the inside. The term has been around for some time, but it’s just as true as it ever was. Environmentalism has far too much in common with communism. In fact, the parts are so interchangeable that it can be hard to tell the difference.

We are reminded of this by the “degrowth” movement. In the words of some of its adherents, degrowth prioritizes “social and ecological well-being instead of corporate profits, over-production and excess consumption. This requires radical redistribution, reduction in the material size of the global economy, and a shift in common values towards care, solidarity and autonomy.” 

In other words, economic growth has to be reversed to save the planet. Poverty, then, is not only locked in, since the economic pie cannot grow larger, it also begins to spread, dragging those who had escaped it back into its grasp.

​​Kohei Saito, an associate professor at Tokyo University, makes the case for strangling economies in his new book “Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism,” which has brought him a fair amount of attention. Maybe he should next consult with the staff of Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who introduced the New Green Deal, not as an environmental protection policy but rather as a “how-do-you-change-the-entire economy thing.” It would be a fitting match, maybe even become a contest of who could produce the most deranged thinking.

We should all be thankful Ocasio-Cortez’s legislation didn’t become law. But of course that failure was not the end of Marxism or communism disguised as a clean-up-the-world “thing.” Saito, considered “something of a Marxist celebrity,” the leftist Guardian newspaper tells us, has made that clear. It’s his goal to bring “together the red and the green.”

For reasons that escape us, there is a sizable number of people across the world and across history who hate capitalism, which is nothing more than the free market at work, and want to terminate it with extreme prejudice. Too often they are the same people who believe humans are destroying their planet, that they are, as British crank David Attenborough, said “a plague on the Earth.”

At other times, the overlap is nothing more than a marriage of convenience.

Far too often, the anti-capitalism belligerents are outright enemies of humanity.

Nothing, to paraphrase the great Milton Friedman, has lifted man out of his natural state of grinding poverty and perpetual want than free markets. Not socialism. Not communism. Not Marxism. None of those systems, which cause virtually identical outcomes, could ever create the prosperity that has changed the way billions live today.

But they have been good at spreading misery, murdering millions, crushing the human spirit and elevating the absolute worst among us to positions of raw power.

Since those are poor selling points, the collectivism-by-force mob has had to rebrand its campaign to cover its intentions. Protecting the environment, which includes the “fight” against climate change, is both a handy and perfect masquerade for the anti-capitalists and authoritarians, who are the same people, and are as poisonous as a pit of deadly vipers.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board