In the next few years there may be a growing divide between green chic and pragmatism. Those with safe public sector jobs will disport their shiny new Priuses (prii?) while those who have lost their jobs in the private sector will bang around in rust buckets or take the bus like true greenies should. The implication will be that greenies are smarter.

However I believe while some ideas coming from the Australian Greens and Greenpeace have some merit other ideas are fantasy. The alternative to coal fired baseload electricity is nuclear power. If not please explain why wind and solar heavy Spain, Denmark and Germany want to follow that path. Far from being smarter the Prius driving green hypocrites depend on both coal and taxpayers to maintain their fantasies. While green chic has the high moral ground we are in for a tumultuous few years before a return to pragmatism.

We can argue whether Green ideology is a part of the left or not; in fact, the most extreme Green thinkers, such as the Deep Ecologists, seen themselves as being "post-Left" and direct some of their most trenchant criticisms toward leftists.

However, this article proceeds upon the basis of a false premise; Marxism is not a part of the Left. If Marxism is a part of the Left then I personally would say I am not a part of the Left. The article simply assumes that Marxism is a Left ideology. Socialism is all about the emancipation of the working class and the working classes were the most enslaved in precisely Marxist (and Fascist) economies.

While I agree with Barry’s analysis of some “green” positions as utopian and backwards-looking, the main thrust of the article suffers from the same reactionary “leftism” of the Langers and others in that sad little clique of “last superpower”-ites.

A belief in the necessity of change for the better is one of the hallmarks of the left. Marxism itself is subject to change and development for the better. Engels was a product of his time. His language was a reflection of the era in which he lived. He wrote “man… becomes the real, conscious lord of nature” using both a gender exclusive pronoun and a feudal allusion. Does that mean we cannot develop our ideas further than patriarchy and feudalism?

Engels celebrated the conquering of nature by human labour but dialectics recognises that embedded in this is an element of human labour being conquered by nature. We can pump billions of gigalitres of water out of the Great Artesian Basin for the expansion of what will become the world’s largest mine at Olympic Dam but we will rue the environmental consequences. We can build a desalination plant to overcome Adelaide’s water shortage but destroy the fish stocks, sea grasses and molluscs of Spencer’s Gulf by returning a blanket of brine to the floor of the sea.

Barry is preoccupied with excluding from the “left” people who are prepared to actively challenge the multinationals and their local capitalist off-siders on environmental grounds, just as he excludes from the “left” those who oppose US-led imperialist aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan because Bush’s foreign policy is “objectively progressive”.

“Sustainability” is not a barrier to the utilisation of natural resources by the “conscious lord of nature”, but a spontaneous appreciation of the need to be guided by dialectics in doing so. Only in this way can we ensure that there will be a “nature” available to be used. Only in this way can we advance from the destruction of nature for the private gain of a few towards its continuing use for the benefit of the majority who are poor and striving for liberation.

I always thought the Left was for the workers and their families, derived from where the third estate (the common people) sat in the historic French parliament.

Barry York is spot on, in pointing out that that being left is not being capital G green. In my mind we are all green, every one wants to care for our planet, a timber worker has no future without trees, and kids can’t swim in the local creek if it’s polluted. But being green has been hijacked by a political force that Barry exposes as being masked as the left.

This difference can be seen in Tasmania’s former Premier. Jim Bacon was a young Melbourne left-winger when he first arrived in Tasmania and grew up to reshape Tasmania as Labor premier, but was relentlessly attacked by the Greens.

When he became Premier in August 1998, Tasmania's government was debt-ridden, the state's population was shrinking and the community divided.

His reconstruction helped turn the economy around, drew the state towards consensus with grassroots consultation and was marked by decisions, including the purchase of a fleet of passenger ferries that symbolically ended Tasmania's isolation. He supported AFL footy in the State as well as boosted the tourism industry.

In 2003, he was able to report that unemployment was down from 10.2 % to 7% - the lowest rate in decades and only 1% behind the national average; with 206,800 people employed in Tasmania - more than ever before;

He fully supported down stream processing and job creation. Under his Premiership he supported infrastructure projects such as gas, and the RPDC was commissioned to undertake an international search to develop world class guidelines for a pulp mill.

Clearly the left is about supporting working families and jobs in sustainable industries.

The root cause of our civilization's unsustainability is the very triumphalism promoted in this article. We can only destroy the ecosystems that support us because we see ourselves as separate from them and superior to Nature. But we will never escape from the fact that we are animals that need food, water and air to stay alive. These are only maintained by functioning ecosystems. Our denial that we are part of Nature, and our belief that we are superior to it are products of our recent ability to harvest large quantities of finite fossil energy. This allows us to boost agricultural production - and our population - temporarily above the limits imposed by a solar (photosynthetic) energy economy. Those times are now coming to an end and we will soon learn our real place in the universe as Nature reasserts itself. We are not going to like it but "Mother" Nature simply does not care either way. Ideological trumphalism, whether of the left or right, can never subsitute for the reality of the natural universe - and fools (individuals or species) always mete out their own punishment.

This is ultra-left-chauvinism at its worst. Whilst human beings did, do and always will shape their environment to their purposes, they don't do it as they please but within the limitations set by nature, of which humans are a part, though a uniquely self-conscious part.

Barry York points out that Marx and Engels views were consistent with the scientific revolution: but his own aren't. It's the overwhelming consensus of the most relevant scientists globally that climate change is not only real but proceeding much faster than even the worst projections of the last few years - the unpreceded speed of the melting of the summer Arctic ice is the 'canary in the coal mine' here.

And these scientists are not reactionaries or captured by the multinational-dominated fossil-fuels industry denialists and delayers with whom Barry York seems happy to line up. Their biggest enemy has been the Bush administration - again an ally of Barry York given (as also pointed out here)his alignment with that sad little clique of Langerites who support the Iraq invasion and occupation.

Overwhelmingly nationally and globally it is the big business lobbies which seek to deny, delay or minimise environmental concerns - whilst it is clearly the working class and the poor of the developinfg world who have, are and will suffer most from environmental degradation, especailly climate change (moving to Bangladesh any time soon Barry, to live on the delta and 'dominate' the storm surges as they flood the land and houses of millions of people)?

So, let's see - Barry lines himself up with the corporate sector, the imperialists, and against the interests of the labouring poor, peasants and workers of both developing and developed world. And he's on the left? yes, there are reactionary elements within Green politics (e.g. neo-Malthusianism or KESAB-ism), but that's why those of us of a red-green persuasion, who want to have BOTH an environmentally sustainable AND a classless world are fighting to counter their influence within the very broad field of environmental politics. Barry York and his clique are barriers or irrelevant to that key struggle.