It is remarkable the extent to which the environmental movement, and the climate wing that has consumed it, seem determined to burn rather than build bridges to centrists and normal people. In prose worthy of Radio Moscow in its prime, an August 26 fundraiser from the Guardian declares fossil fuels are a capitalist plot: “Why does capital love fossil fuels? It’s not hard to explain. They exist in a small number of discrete locations, where the right to exploit them can be owned and monopolised.” Britain’s Green Party leader Zack Polansky sounds quite similar, even to the extent of seeming less interested in saving the planet than denouncing wealth. Brushing aside the environment, he warms to his eat-the-rich theme: “For years now, the very richest in society have accumulated more and more wealth. While they sleep at night, the money pours in, not from work, but from assets such as stocks, shares and multiple properties.” The greens resent your green.
Polansky continues: “The UK’s economy is on its knees. GDP growth, the scorecard on which this government wants to be marked, is crawling along at just 1.2% this year.” Imagine Greens making GDP growth the lodestar and, perhaps contradictorily, praising trade unions, wealth taxes and nationalized industry. And it gets worse.
Having taken a certain perverse pleasure in the kind of rhetoric generated by extreme leftist regimes, the sort memorably skewered by George Orwell in “Politics and the English language“, we cannot resist printing more of that Guardian screed, from one of their key in-house ranters, George Monbiot, who explains of fossil fuels that:
“Most can be extracted commercially only at scale, excluding small competitors. They can be stored and traded all over the world, allowing prices to be optimised across time and space. Renewable energy, by contrast, can be generated almost anywhere, by almost anyone with a small amount of money to invest. Renewables might now be cheaper than fossil fuel in the vast majority of cases, but this makes them less attractive to capital, not more. Fossil fuels are uncompetitive and highly profitable. Renewables are highly competitive and not very profitable. As a result, fossil fuel extractors will fight tooth and nail to prevent market forces from operating. They demand the equivalent of the royal monopolies granted by the English Crown centuries ago, excluding competitors and enabling old technologies to fend off newer ones. Their enormous profits allow them to bend politics to their will, attacking and maligning their critics, sowing disinformation and denial and assisting the election of those who favour them. In Donald Trump, they have found the monarch who will grant them their exclusive charter.”
Arise, ye prisoners of carbonization. Overthrow Czar Donald. But while it’s funny in a sad way, it’s also sad in a funny way because it so belligerently obstructs any possibility of constructive engagement in climate debate and policy.
So does this item from the “World ends, women and minorities hardest hit” file. The Canadian government, which is all-in on woke even while trying to be sensible, claims that “Indigenous Peoples have a strong connection to the natural world, and their leadership is key in tackling climate change.” It’s not clear why they think other races are less connected to nature, or what “their leadership is key in tackling climate change” is even meant to mean. But it’s the kind of ritualistic verbiage that tumbles forth in place of thought and tends to drive it out with a snarl.
As is a news story of sorts that “Elderly people are at particular risk from the consequences of climate change, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) said in a report on Thursday.” Especially since we’re also told “Low-income and minority ethnic people in England most at risk from dangerously hot homes”. And “There’s now firm evidence that high temperatures hurt pregnant women and their babies.” Leaving, as far as one can tell, just skinheads and plutocrats out.
On the former, another Guardian fundraiser from another in-house zealot says:
“Last year, I stood in front of a black-clad skinhead as he shook a fist full of rings thick enough to double as a knuckle-duster. Flecks of spit flew into my face as he railed against the green agenda of the last German government. Until recently, it would have felt bizarre to talk to protesters at a neo-Nazi-linked rally about the climate crisis or hear them rant unprompted about heat pumps. But far-right parties have entered the political mainstream, and their scathing tirades against ‘woke’ green rules are energising their base. That shift is one of several powerful trends that have pushed advocates of climate action on to the back foot – and made the rigorous journalism that many of our readers support even more impactful.”
Actually the Nazi party had roots in Germany’s long tradition of anti-Establishment environmentalism and Romanticism. But never mind. Because yet another such email hollers:
“Extreme politics and extreme weather go hand in hand, and both have to be confronted if we are to understand and overcome the polycrisis we are living through.”
Even more moderate climate voices are too often knee-jerk progressives. Reuters “Sustainable Switch” is all-in on ESG and Pride Month, and thunders “the U.N. says more than 1,000 people have been killed trying to receive aid in the enclave since the U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation began operating in May 2025, most of them shot by Israeli forces operating near GHF sites.”
Canada’s “Greens denounce government’s trampling of workers’ rights in Air Canada dispute” and “Green Party Slams Developer Demands to Reopen Canada’s Housing Market to Global Capital”. Noooooo! Not global capital. (In fact the big issue with foreign buyers in the Canadian housing market was those with strong connections to the Communist regime in Beijing, but the red greens missed that one.) And why would a Green party pledge to defend dairy quotas to the bitter end. What could possibly be described as organic about that kind of socialism-for-the-privileged?
Also of course “The Green Party of Canada is calling on the Government of Canada to take urgent and unequivocal action as a U.N.-backed report confirms the worst-case scenario for famine is now unfolding in Gaza”. They seem to have pulled that one from their website but we kept a copy. Admittedly Canada’s Green Party leader speaking to the Theosophical Society is just wacky. But mostly Green party policies and climate advocates positions are nothing the Socialist Worker’s Party (Marxist-Leninist) wouldn’t sign off on. Or Alfred Kinsey (including Scientific American beating the drum for sex-change surgery for minors). Or Hamas in many cases.
As we argued this March, there should be some natural common ground between conservatives and environmentalists who, after all, were once known as conservationists, and whose insights about the superiority of organic to mechanical processes fit nicely with much genuine conservative thought if not with the libertarian-progressive strand that historian John Lukacz, a self-described “reactionary”, once called “a bellowing optimism that is imbecile rather than naive.”
Don’t mince words, John. And nor will we about Green parties who seem not to have worked outward from a genuinely organic understanding of society including the economy, and indeed of human nature including sexuality, into the wider world of policy generally but instead to have decided the environment was a useful hammer for beating people into compliance with a bog-standard boring mechanistic approach to policy.
For instance that British Green leader, Zack Polanski, blathers on:
“I disagree with Reform UK and Farage on almost everything. But they’re correct to point at our politics and say it has failed. What they refuse to admit is that it’s their wealthy backers, including fossil-fuel finance, who have fanned the flames of the crises we face now.”
To portray Farage as a running dog of capitalism, rather than noting the long cozy relationship between the wealthy in Britain and the Tory party Farage loathes, is very much in the mold of Orwell’s:
“tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases – bestial atrocities, iron heel, blood-stained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder – one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them.”
Thus Polanski wraps up his screed:
“Millions of people are desperate for change and angry that those elected are not acting in their interests. I’m ready to build ideas with them and give them a political voice. I am here to offer bold leadership and to fight for a country where no one is left behind.”
Well, unless you count people who worry about the environment, and wish there’d be some sort of bridge-building or even just focus on it instead of cut-and-paste populism with a slice of watermelon.
The Green Party used to serve a useful purpose in splitting the leftist loon vote but since the LPC has subsumed much of that, their only strength now comes from left coast ridings where hospice economies prevail. Don't confuse "Greens" with those with a reasonable environmental ethic. As you alluded they have long ago become watermelons.