The “Progressive Left” loves to shift blame for the climate crisis onto the climate-change denying right. But close examination reveals that they are just as guilty…

by Michael Seebeck

The progressive Left is as complicit as the climate-denying Right in driving mass extinctions, biosphere collapse, and anthropogenic climate change. Each side enables the other, accelerating ecological ruin through complementary roles.

Progressive media, think tanks, NGOs, and parties endlessly blame billionaires, corporate greed, and “big polluters” for the bulk of emissions and ecocide—deforestation, industrial agriculture, and habitat destruction. These claims are at best half-truths. What they systematically omit is demand: the relentless pressure from billions of consumers.

Close examination of the policies and messaging of major environmental (eg Greenpeace) and climate NGOs, such as Extinction Rebellion, and of prominent figures such as George Monbiot, reveals the same pattern. They prioritise perceived human rights and firmly deflect attention from overpopulation and population growth, insisting that rapid environmental destruction and rising fossil-fuel emissions stem primarily from the greed and profiteering of the corporate Right and the billionaires. Because they refuse to confront increasing demand driven by population growth and rising affluence, they align with the progressive Left in enabling the very corporate and billionaire enrichment—and the accelerated ecological destruction—they purport to oppose.

The Left helps ensure an endless supply of those consumers—globally through resistance to population discussion, and in Western countries via advocacy for mass immigration and open borders. This serves corporate interests perfectly: expanding markets for ever-rising consumption driven by both population growth and rising affluence, while also providing a ready pool of cheap labour when needed. The corporate Right gets what it wants; the Left complies.

Wealth redistribution is presented as essential to solving environmental crises, with rising affluence for billions treated as an unquestionable good. Yet this ignores a basic reality: the already affluent—including most progressive advocates themselves, by global standards—show little willingness to relinquish their own wealth or consumption in any serious redistribution. No meaningful limits are placed on wealth accumulation in developing countries either; suggesting such limits is dismissed as racist. Almost no human, anywhere, does not aspire to greater wealth and higher consumption. Romantic claims that people in developing countries or indigenous communities possess intrinsically lower impacts or superior biodiversity management, irrespective of numbers, are themselves a form of soft racism. Humans are biologically the same. Indigenous peoples have often protected biodiverse areas when left alone, yet historical evidence also shows many instances of selling off land for mining, logging, and other extractive industries in exchange for wealth. Lower consumption levels typically reflect relative poverty, not an inherent rejection of material aspirations. Given the opportunity, nearly everyone accepts more.

Far from solving the crisis, wealth redistribution is likely to intensify it. Raising the consumption of billions expands markets for chemicals, disposables, electronics, vehicles, and palm-oil products—delivering a vast windfall to the very corporations the Left condemns. Celebrating rising affluence as a human right functions as virtue-signaling that absolves the affluent Left in developed countries of its own overconsumption.

Corporate greed cannot function without markets. Without surging demand for the products of destruction, and without an expanding labour force willing to log, burn forests, and hunt wildlife, there is no large-scale ecocide. Fixating solely on supply ignores the engine that powers it.

The deeper driver remains continued population growth. On this the progressive Left stays conspicuously silent, thereby shielding both corporate interests and the Right by diverting attention from the fundamental pressure of numbers.

The capitalist machine cannot be defeated or cleanly replaced. It has operated since the advent of agriculture, profiting from its expansion and enabling further growth. No system has proven more efficient at the rapid commodification of nature and “natural resources.” Even socialist and communist governments have run their economies through capitalist mechanisms. Regulation is possible in theory, yet it has always proven deficient: the growth imperative itself generates loopholes, capture, and corruption that permit relentless expansion.

The only realistic path to limiting capitalism’s destruction of the biosphere and climate is restriction of supply—restriction of consumers, of labour, of capital flows, and of fossil fuels. The progressive Left readily champions the last of these. Few, however, confront the implications. Modern agriculture feeding billions depends on fossil fuels; so does the production, transport, and backup of renewable infrastructure. Eliminate fossil fuels without addressing demand and population, and food systems collapse for vast numbers of people. Reliable energy systems collapse with them.

It has escaped the progressive Left that capitalism readily corrupts science. They accept the claim that “green” energy is low-emissions and can fully replace fossil fuels. This rests on a fundamental category error: treating intermittent, weather-dependent sources as equivalent to dispatchable ones. The impossible physical scale of renewables required for total replacement—and the massive, biosphere-destroying mining, processing, and land-use demands that would entail—is likewise waved away. When belief aligns with vested interests, inconvenient evidence is discounted. Acknowledging the impossibility would force a confrontation with population; in the Left’s preferred parallel universe of boundless resources and infinite land, such limits violate their conception of human rights. Extrapolation of current trends toward widespread human suffering is simply ignored.

When crises of famine or energy shortfall arrive, the same progressive Left will almost certainly accept further fossil-fuel expansion and accompanying biospheric destruction—something it already enables in practice through its silence on demand and numbers.

The corporate Right needs the progressive Left to greenwash and morally validate endless growth in consumption of food, energy, minerals, housing, and infrastructure. The progressive Left needs the corporate Right to deliver the rising affluence it champions for billions, without ever confronting population growth. In this mutual dependency, the functioning biosphere, the climate, and biodiversity are the permanent losers.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

This piece was originally published on Michael Seebeck’s Substack on 6 September 2026.