Abstract

Although explicitly socialist perspectives have not gained a significant foothold within international environmental debates over the past few decades, socialism itself has in many ways become a spectre haunting contemporary discussions of global warming. Many conservative politicians and business leaders in the advanced capitalist world have long regarded environmental politics as a clandestine means of repackaging socialist goals and foisting them upon an unsuspecting public. Such anxieties about the stealth ‘watermelon’ agenda (green on the outside, red on the inside) have only increased in recent years as the climate crisis has moved towards the centre of public concern. Red-baiting has been particularly evident within climate politics in the United States, where antipathy towards science, aversion to rethinking the American way of life, and lingering suspicions about subversive environmentalists and shadowy international governance bodies have sometimes merged into a familiar brand of Cold War paranoia.