Watermelon environmentalists - green on the outside, red on the inside

At National Review Online, Conrad Black echoes Nigel Lawson in making a point that I've been making for years.

To some extent, as the immensely respected former British chancellor of the exchequer and energy secretary, Nigel Lawson, has written, Green is the new Red. Marxism has been debunked, and the militant anti-capitalists and oppositionists — too militant to be easily accommodated in conventional oppositions — have decamped to environmentalism, and have taken over the inoffensive tandem bicycle of the naturalists, with their pith helmets and butterfly nets. They have turned it into a nihilist juggernaut seeking an end to capitalist and bourgeois society in the name of earthly salvation and redemption.

I've said it over

I would find the arguments in favor of market controls and US energy cutbacks because of global warming a lot more compelling if they were not coming from the same people who were in favor of market controls and US energy cutbacks before anyone had ever posited anthropogenic climate change

and over

When leftists who have been telling me my entire life that Americans need to stop burning fossil fuels because America is using an "unfair" amount of the world's resources, or because exhaust fumes cause birth defects or sterility, or because it causes acid rain, or it's going to cause global cooling, decide that we need to stop burning fossil fuels because it's causing global warming, it's not easy to fight the suspicion that what they are really concerned with isn't global warming - it's Americans burning fossil fuels

and over

there are both legitimate environmentalists and strident "watermelons" (green on the outside, red on the inside) peddling apocalyptic scenarios

and over again...