What- no one else ahs ever heard the term “watermelon” used for environmentalists? (Meaning they’re green on the outside, but red on the inside.)
The Left long ago gave up on the idea of convincing people that they could deliver greater prosperity than the Right. They’re now fighting the idea of prosperity itself.
Yes, and it (like your other statement) is dead wrong. Most environmentalists are not socialists, and the idea that we somehow need to destroy the economy to fight global warming is a trope pushed by the right, not the left - those on the left have very credible models indicating that fighting global warming will actually improve the economy, rather than weaken it.
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I’m sorry, what has Obama been banging on about non-stop basically since 2010? The economy. Jobs. Jobs. Jobs. Inequality. Jobs. The economy. Not slowing down the economy. Jobs. Jobs. Health care for workers. Jobs.
Um, y’all do know that “communism” =/= “socialism”, right?
The Soviet Union was “socialist” in the same way Nazi Germany was “socialist”–in that it was not “socialist” at all.
That particular protester is correct–socialism IS the cure. One only needs to look at the stellar environmental records of actual socialist (and “social democratic”) countries–places like Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Germany, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, New Zealand, et cetera–to see that fact.
I’m sorry, but just because we want prosperity for everyone, rather than just a certain segment of the population, does not mean we “fight the idea of prosperity itself”.
As alluded to, it depends which “Red” you mean.
Most Green Parties around the world can be characterized as socialist or semi-socialist. They are almost always on the far left of the political spectrum in which ever country they exist.
A gross misconception as the environmentalist from the Yale media climate reported.
And yes, I have heard it before, together with the accusations of fascism by “lord” Monkton and their ilk. I did lost respect for many conservatives when one big poster from the right in the SDMB repeated the false idea that the environmentalists had banned DDT. It is almost a gospel that environmentalist killed millions with malaria for not controlling the mosquitoes but what happened is just that many conservatives choose to ignore evolution.
I have to put those canards in the same bubble that gave us the also false “no-go cities in Europe controlled by Muslims”
Of course, Hitler was an environmentalist !!
The Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change described climate change as the biggest market-failure of all time. Under a capitalist system, risks should be identified and then mitigated. Just as a company sacrifices a portion of its profit to buy insurance in order to protect itself from possible devastating events, civilization should be actively investing now to protect itself from huge hits to our future prosperity. Instead we hear arguments equivalent to, “shouldn’t we be sure that this factory will burn down before we waste our money on fire insurance?” It’s not the greens who are being anti-capitalist here.
Well, I haven’t read the book, but, according to the bundled review:
Is the bolded part a call for “socialism”? Matter of definition. But, she certainly is right about it. New study: To avoid catastrophic climate change, most of the world’s fossil fuels must remain in the ground. Now, I ask you, in what circumstances can we count on market forces alone to keep that stuff in the ground?
:rolleyes: Cripes, are they still on about that?!
OTOH, Greens are wary of central planning in any form, “decentralization” is one of the Ten Key Values.
I guess the OP is off somewhere formulating his killer come-back.
The Bolsheviks advocated for ‘true’ socialism as well, yet they wound up with the USSR anyways.
More than a few reds are also not fond of centralization ;). Anarchists being the obvious ones.
So basically, “Red” has far more varied subgroups than most people would assume at first glance.
Yep. I’m a Green, and what I would like to see are worker cooperatives like Mondragon become the predominant mode of production. These cooperatives would be democratically owned and managed by the workers within those organizations, as opposed to the centralized bureaucracy of the Soviets.
Hm. Sounds a bit like the Spanish Revolution. Or, the Russian Soviets as they were before the October Revolution (i.e., before the Bolsheviks reduced them to instruments of Party rule).
Black is the new red! 
But the beautiful thing about a free market economy is that it allows for the existence of socialist/communist/worker-owned corporations. Anyone can try to start something like Mondragon–and the general lack of such cooperatives is a strong sign that they generally aren’t able to compete with profit-driven companies.
I dunno . . . I mean, incinerating Jews when they could have been composted . . .
To quote anti-capitalist author David Schweickart :
That’s why I think we’d need government funding to start worker cooperatives on a massive scale.
Another route would be to require corporations, on an annual basis, to issue new shares of stock that go to an Employee Trust. Let’s say over the course of 20 or 30 years, the Employee Trust would own a majority of the shares in that corporation, making it a de facto cooperative.
These are both right on. Naomi Klein is a bright lady who’s written a very thoughtful book and the OP completely misses its point. It’s not against capitalism, it’s against unfettered capitalism, and it’s not promoting “socialism” except to the extent analogous to which progressive social programs in capitalist societies like the US and UK were enabled in the past by crises analogous to climate change. Things like the New Deal in response to the Great Depression, and postwar programs like universal health care (not in the US, alas), old age security, subsidized housing, funding for the arts, etc. She states that “… as part of the project of getting our emissions down to the levels many scientists recommend, we once again have the chance to advance policies that dramatically improve lives, close the gap between rich and poor, create huge numbers of good jobs, and reinvigorate democracy from the ground up.”
Conversely, the problem with unfettered capitalism is twofold. One is that it endlessly prioritizes economic growth over all else regardless of cost; it pushes for maximum extraction of oil, gas, and coal, deforestation and other blights regardless of air and water pollution and a rapidly deteriorating environment and destabilizing climate. Ironically it then seeks to profit from the crisis itself; Klein cites weather derivatives markets jumping five-fold to over $45 billion on 2006, the profitability of global reinsurance schemes that hit poor countries the hardest. Klein cites companies like Raytheon stating that “Expanded business opportunities are likely to arise as consumer behaviour and needs change in response to climate change”, those being things like more demand for the company’s privatized disaster response services and also “demand for its military products and services as security concerns may arise as results of droughts, floods, and storm events occur as a result of climate change.” Indeed the Pentagon itself expressed exactly the same concerns in a recent report.
Today’s kind of unfettered capitalism wins, she says,
… every time the need for economic growth is used as the excuse for putting off climate action yet again, or for breaking emission reduction commitments already made. It wins when Greeks are told that their only path out of economic crisis is to open up their beautiful seas to high-risk oil and gas drilling. It wins when Canadians are told our only hope of not ending up like Greece is to allow our boreal forests to be flayed so we can access the semisolid bitumen from the Alberta tar sands. It wins when a park in Istanbul is slotted for demolition to make way for yet another shopping mall. It wins when parents in Beijing are told that sending their wheezing kids to school in pollution masks decorated to look like cute cartoon characters is an acceptable price for economic progress. It wins every time we accept that we have only bad choices available to us: austerity or extraction, poisoning or poverty.