Because most environmentalists understand that it's a non-starter to try to get poor people to stop spending or survive with no access to welfare, and so most environmentalist parties have policies that involve direct or indirect redistribution as a consequence, whether because they see it as fair or because they see it as unavoidable.
Just always remember that "left" and "right" do not exist, they are grossly simplified models that in a sense help us categorize political views, but actually they just hurt our capacity to categorize political views.
Obviously, conservation is conservative!
But your second sentence gives me the impression of someone who really revels in simplistic categories and concepts.
No; it was a targeted viewpoint against the contradictions in environmental leftism. It was only one word that drew the ire of those I was intending to challenge, and it would have been ignored otherwise, but that’s a sensitive touch point that gets to the heart of the contradiction.
There are some forms of public spending that are probably good for sustainability, and necessary to be undertaken by the public will. These should be carefully considered without moralizing the arguments for or against, or aligning the argument with political tribes.
Why do you think they hurt our capacity to categorize political views? Simplification is the only way to explain anything. You don’t want to try to explain political trends using particle physics.
Because ONE dimension is far too simplistic to have net utility instead of net harm. Instead of simplifying in ways that just help us understand, it creates false dichotomies and binary / dualistic thinking. It is self-fulfilling in harmful ways.
Simplify to at least two dimensions and it can be a useful discussion.
There are people across the "left" and "right" dimension who agree on the issues of top-down vs bottom-up forms of power structures. That's probably the most practical second dimension.
They simplify to the point of being false. There is no other way. No two people agree on everything in politics. There is enough agreement on major issues to form sides, but no matter what the issue there will be someone important who disagrees with their side on that one issue.
It’s possible to simplify to the point of being false, of course. But associating environmental activism with left-wing politics is not exactly a wild stretch.
It's also not a stretch to lump guns in with right-wing and for that matter, urban with left and rural with right. But this stuff is insane. It's self-fulfilling.
Environmentalism has been associated with the Left for the same reason as other nonsense here. There are both left and right reasons for environmentalism and both left and right pressures for things that harm the environment. But our simplistic political models have led to tribalism where groups of ideas get associated with one or the other of this one-dimensional polar left-right idea. So, bring up environmentalism in any "right" wing community and it doesn't matter if everything said is right-wing enough, people will suspect the environmentalist of really being some left-wing person.
And yet a lot of environmental activisism is against other left wing environmental activism. This case for example where mines are harmful for the immediate area, but allow extracting the minerals that make a cleaner future possible.
Sure, but it's not crazy that some left-wing groups oppose other left-wing groups. It would be a vast oversimplification to act as if "left-wing" is a monolithic, homogeneous group.
the problem is when you over-simplify to the point of just being wrong. The sweet spot is somewhere in the middle where you adequately describe the variety of positions available without being verbose. That's true of all mental models.
This is mostly a worldwide consideration. Modernization of poverty is the dominant driver of growth in population, resource consumption, and physical waste. Hans Rosling showed that all these things got better in societies with median wealth in the top 5-10% worldwide, and concluded that the answer to sustainability was to make everybody rich by wealth redistribution. However, it seems pretty clear by observation that causality works in the opposite direction.
It’s a reasonable question, but you pose it in moralizing terms, which is exactly the problem I am highlighting with environmental leftism. The movement seems to embrace one side of a moral crusade rather than a rational set of sustainable policies. This is the same reason that anti-environmentalism finds support among conservatives, which is also lunacy. Environmental conservatism should be a thing, but it’s not.
I should have included war in my list as another form of extremely wasteful and environmentally-disastrous practice. A huge portion of defense spending is completely anachronistic, and these areas tend to have the greatest environmental impact.
