I read about half the piece.

I think it's correct when it comes to radicals who are environmentalists and Marxists. It doesn't reveal much about the "average" environmentalist / liberal.

I'll speak for myself, as a left-of-center libertarian, if we must have labels. I love technology. Agriculture allowed us to build civilizations. Industrialization and the printing press allowed everyone to share ideas. Information technology and industrial automation offer the possibility of freeing us from all drudgery and expanding the market for creative products/services.

Karl Marx was right that capitalism would not distribute wealth to those who do the work to produce the wealth. He wanted to abolish capitalism so labor would get a fair share, but instead we're finding automation is eliminating labor as the primary engine of producing wealth. The economy is undergoing a radical transformation, that hopefully will generate more wealth for everyone.

Regarding the environmental side, the evidence shows burning stuff, which still drives a lot of our economic activity, is changing the planet in ways that will be costly for humans. I am confident we'll find solutions. Taking a best-guess at the cost of these externalities and letting people buy/sell credits to produce them is reasonable approach. The other choices are a) hard limits against greenhouse gases, no matter how much economic value is a being created or b) just denying the problem.

It sometimes feels to me that a third of the population are rightwingers who live in fantasyland, just "believing" whatever they wish were true without regard to the evidence. Maybe it feels to some like these eco-Marxists are a third of the population. I'm sure they're not. I think people see me, and most of my hometown of Madison, and think, "Ah ha! Another batch of eco-Marxists," without noticing we have moderate political positions.