Environmentalism and communism - do they really compare?

Climate policy often draws comparisons with communism. But if we want to be effective and precise, we need to understand environmentalism as an ideology in its own right.

This post is a bit of a departure from what I had intended for this Substack. Most of the posts here are summaries of our Climate Debate UK research about Net Zero. This long post is more of a discussion on political theory, and how to understand environmentalism. Specifically: is environmentalism a form of communism?

A meme has been doing the rounds this week, helped along, as all memes are, by Elon Musk himself, who retweeted it.

It is a funny meme, and it should be taken as such. There are, of course, people who self-identify as communists, who believe that climate change is a crisis of capitalism, and so on and so forth. And there is also the fact that, apparently not unlike communists, advocates of climate policy seemingly have no limit to their desire to use the power of the state to change both society and its individuals, and to control their experiences, sentiments and day-to-day lives. These people, who hide their ideological impulses behind fearmongering and fake science deserve unfavourable historical comparisons and pillorying. We need say no more.

But a more serious question is raised by the satire. Are these resonances more than superficial? Moreover, are they useful in understanding more recent history, to begin to challenge this orthodoxy that dominates nearly every western government?

I have argued here and elsewhere, that environmentalism is an ideological movement in its own right, and that it ought to be understood as such if it is to be confronted properly. If we believe we are confronting communism when we are confronting the excesses of green ideology, then we may look daft, misunderstand our own argument, misrepresent that which we want to confront, and misdirect our energies by fighting ghosts.