Environmentalism Is the New Socialism

The left failed with socialism, so it's now turned to environmentalism to achieve its ends, writes Charles Krauthammer. Witness the EPA's recent decision on carbon emissions—which will give it control over just about every business in the country—as well as the Copenhagen talks, where developing nations think it's just fine to take huge chunks of wealth from the West under the guise of saving the planet.

"The left was adrift until it struck upon a brilliant gambit: metamorphosis from red to green," he writes in the Washington Post. "The cultural elites went straight from the memorial service for socialism to the altar of the environment. The objective is the same: highly centralized power given to the best and the brightest, the new class of experts, managers and technocrats. This time, however, the alleged justification is not abolishing oppression and inequality but saving the planet." (More environmentalism stories.)