The Mexican eco-terrorists are just the most extreme case of an anti-humanist worldview that has been embraced very broadly across the green left and far beyond. Books and documentaries warning against progress, industry and even civilisation itself are a publishing sensation.

But just as sections of the earlier left made the mistake of not seeing the Soviet Union for the macabre wretch that it was, this now quite old, fifty-something New Left has made its own ideological mistakes. And the primary mistake we have made is the turn away from Promethean ambition and embrace of this basket of conservative, romantic

In short, if your computer model assumes that population growth causes emissions growth, then it will tell you that fewer people produce fewer emissions.

counter-Enlightenment credo of that clutch of related concepts—degrowth, anti-consumerism, catastrophism, technophobia, localism and small-is-beautiful limits—that so dominates in contemporary culture.

Mine is hardly a new position though on the left. This is the very argument that Friedrich Engels mounted against Malthus in his Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy in 1844: “[T]here still remains a third element which, admittedly, never means anything to the economist—science—whose progress is as unlimited and at least as rapid as that of

The left needs to recapture the vaulting ambition of idealists like the Cosmists, of the universalist spirit of liberty, equality, democracy and reason of the Radical Enlightenment of Spinoza and Diderot and Paine. We need to embrace once again continent-transforming projects like those of Lenin and Roosevelt. We need to paint on our placards and

on or it will fall over. Superficially, this appears to be the same thing as growth, but it is not. And the distinction is not a philosophical trick, but a difference of profound significance.

Green anti-modernity does not threaten neoliberalism; it is a manifestation of it!

It is far too easy to get caught up in abstract declarations and moralistic or aesthetic arguments about scale, say Fücks and his co-thinkers, who emphasise instead the need to pay attention to the numbers. And when we do, we find that indeed, there is substantial evidence for decoupling, for secular declines in resource and energy intensity