Make no mistake, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels would have given short shrift to global warming and environmentalism in some of their most colourful prose. As Sherlock Holmes explained to the Scotland Yard detective, there is the curious incident of the dog in the night-time. But the dog did nothing. ‘That,’ Holmes replied, ‘was the curious incident.’
Who heard the Marxist bark? In the history of global warming, that dog was classical Marxism, a Promethean doctrine that argued for the strengthening of man’s power over nature. It is hard to conceive of the pre-Gorbachev Soviet Union being a party to global carbon emissions treaties on ideological grounds, let alone during a strategic race to bury the West.
Scratch a green, and not too deep you’ll find the argument that humans are the cause of the planet’s woes — an idea which can be traced back to the English economist Thomas Malthus and his 1798 essay on population which earned him enduring fame, and for Marxists, notoriety.
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