Summarised by Centrist
Speaking to The Platform’s Sean Plunket, public intellectual James Lindsay—currently touring New Zealand with the Free Speech Union—argued that climate change activism and Net Zero policies are not about protecting the planet.
Instead, he claimed they are a Marxist tool designed to dismantle Western economies.
Lindsay explained that the push for “degrowth”—shrinking economies in the name of environmentalism—comes from a communist framework, redefining prosperity as “harmony with nature” rather than economic success.
He described it as a strategic effort to deliberately suppress economic growth, convincing people that wealth and upward mobility are harmful.
He explained that traditional capitalism is based on GDP and productivity. Yet the degrowth model replaces this with vague concepts like “well-being,” defined as having less, working less, and living in so-called harmony with nature.
He warned that this ideology is not being used to improve people’s lives but to make them more dependent on the state.
Lindsay dismissed Net Zero as an economic dead end: “Even if what they’re saying is true about the climate, it’s not going to work. Pay more taxes and we’re going to fix the weather? It just doesn’t work.”
He linked the climate agenda to wokeness and identity politics, calling them communist tactics to weaken democratic nations.
Despite facing deplatforming efforts in New Zealand, Lindsay remains confident that the public is waking up. He told Plunket, “The turning point has arrived.”
