The Greens and ecology

Pic: Green Party

AWL ecology reading group, "What do the Greens say about ecology?", Sunday 14 December 2025, 8pm on Zoom: Zoomlink bit.ly/eco-rg. Click here for Eventbrite.

The Green Party is gaining members and better poll scores with messages shaped round a wealth tax and a more civilised asylum policy. It is promoting itself as the liberal and egalitarian alternative, primarily to Reform, secondarily to a Labour Party whose leaders are swamped by desire to placate big business and socially-conservative voters.

The main purpose of this article is to discuss the Greens' policies on ecology, which is surely a central issue both for them and in reality, but has been surprisingly un-central in their recent agitation.

First, some background. On other issues, the Greens mostly parallel Labour left policies of the last decades, though their immigration policy falls pointedly short of the free-movement plan voted through by Labour conference 2019 (and then immediately disavowed by the Corbyn leadership).

There are oddities. For example, the Green manifesto of July 2024 called for £8 billion a year more for the NHS. Rachel Reeves has allocated an increase of £29 billion a year phased over three years. Much of that has gone to paying private providers for procedures to try to slim waiting lists, but in any case it is visibly not enough. £8 billion (0.6% of public spending) would be even further off.

No wonder, though, that many voters encouraged by Labour's 2017 and 2019 manifestos, or even Keir Starmer's Labour leader manifesto of early 2020, warm to the Greens.

But Green parties are middle-class parties. They are tied to an electoralist mode of politics ("vote for us and we'll sort things out for you"). When they have gained electoral strength, then, whatever the manifestos, they have ended in government coalitions of at best minimal-reformist colour.

They are not the "political wing of the environmental movement" even in the very qualified sense that the Labour Party could be described as the "political wing of the labour movement". Anecdotally, of course, some people coming into politics first through environmental street activity (student climate strikes, XR, JSO...) end up in Green Parties, but often, in fact usually, there is surprisingly little overlap between street-active environmentalism and Green Parties.

The Australian Greens in their early years, and the German Greens in some phases were more radical and street-active than the current England and Wales Green party, but they have become more like moderate coalition parties as they have grown.

The Scottish Greens were in coalition government 2021-4; the Irish Greens, 2007-11, executing austerity policies. As of 2024 the Greens in England and Wales ruled, or were in ruling coalitions, in 42 councils. None of them is super radical.

The Greens England and Wales have sharpened their "image", using Zack Polanski's social-media skills.

As yet I know of little where they are substantively more left-wing than they were under Caroline Lucas as Principal Speaker or Leader from 2003 to 2010, Derek Wall as another Principal Speaker in 2006-8, or even Darren Johnson in 2001-3. All those leaders described themselves as socialists. Polanski says that "on a personal level" he "agrees with the majority (?) of socialist principles". He think it decisive to avoid annoying "all the people who are anti-socialist who might have voted Green" but wouldn't if the Greens "said we were socialists". Lucas's pre-Greens background was Greenham Common, Polanski's the Lib-Dems.

What about Green policies specifically on ecology, as set out for example in their July 2024 election manifesto?

The international Green Party movement started with the United Tasmania Group, in Australia, in 1972, well before the modern scientific consensus on climate change was established. (The "greenhouse effect" was known about in general terms, but its actual result was unclear. Average global temperatures had dropped from the 1940s to the 1960s). The chief early "Green" issues were conservation of congenial wilderness and opposition to nuclear power (of which more later).

But Green Parties have kept pace with the world scientific consensus about expanding renewables, phasing out fossil-fuels, and retrofitting and redesigning buildings, and so has the Green Party England and Wales. So far, so good.

They are for a carbon tax as their chief means to "phase out" fossil fuels (with no indication of schedule). In my view, such tax may have a part to play. Market mechanisms will continue for a long time even under a workers' government (although hegemonised by planning), and taxes can help reduce consumption here as they have done with tobacco and alcohol.

But carbon tax needs to be an auxiliary to other comprehensive policies of socialist planning and workers' control. Posed as the primary measure, it has regressive effects and becomes very unpopular. Canada was the one country in the world with some approximation to a carbon tax, but it still has the highest carbon emissions per head in the world after Australia, and Mark Carney abolished the tax for households on taking office in March 2025.

The manifesto section on "a fairer, greener economy" is illustrated by an image of a solar-panel-roofed house (sizeable, new, prosperous-looking, with a car parked outside it). Very nice, but not the key to breaking the way the race for profit is trashing the planet.

Solar panels on houses are good. 40% of houses in Australia have them, generating about 12% of its electricity; and only 5.5% in Britain. But large solar farms are a much bigger and more efficient way of generating electricity. And what about those of us who live in flats in cities?

The manifesto is thin on transport. It wants no new airport capacity and a frequent-flyer levy, it supports rail renationalisation (already under way), and it wants local authority control over (though not ownership of) bus services. But it says nothing about developing high-speed rail and (oddly) says nothing about converting road transport to electric vehicles.

The "fairer, greener energy" section of the manifesto shows an offshore wind farm. Good. But Green MP Adrian Ramsey has spoken against having the new pylons necessary to connect those offshore wind farms to the grid in his constituency (rural, 98% "ethnic white", 73% home-owners, 90% car-owners, previously Tory, etc.) on "not in our backyard" grounds. The Greens are somewhat like what the Liberals were in their "left" "community politics" phase of the late 1960s through the 1970s: electoral opportunists apt to tailor what they say to local prejudice as well as to coalition openings.

The manifesto calls for "communities to own their own energy sources", implying an unviable system of small-scale local electricity generation with little capacity to use grid connections and energy-storage to "electrify everything" (as ecological-socialist writer Matt Huber puts it: the idea does not appear in Green policy).

More generally, the manifesto hails, not the working class, but "small and medium enterprises" (SME) as "the lifeblood of our economy". SMEs include not just tiny workshops, but sizeable capitalist firms with up to 250 employees and up to £38 million on their balance sheets. Small capitalists are by no means generally less rapacious, exploitative, and eco-reckless than big capitalists.

The Greens are for public ownership of the biggest retail energy companies, but not of the whole energy industry, from electricity generation through the grid to retail.

They want to "phase out" nuclear power. The sobering historic fact about Green parties is that their major political achievements have been ecologically harmful, not helpful. The German Greens played a good role in getting the anti-gay §175 deleted from Germany's constitution, but for them the bigger victory was to get Germany to phase out nuclear power. That was regressive.

Germany has increased renewables, but the replacement for "baseline" power was coal and gas. Germany's carbon emissions per person are much higher than those in France, where the Greens were unsuccessful with the same scrap-nuclear demand.

On land use, the Greens propose only "almost tripling" financial support for farmers, plus setting aside 30% of land area for "nature [to] receive the highest priority and protection". I don't know exactly what that means, because 37% of land is already subject to protection-of-nature rules. They don't talk about reforestation.

The Greens want food "grown and traded in the UK, and as locally as possible", rather than produced where most ecologically suitable and (these days) often transported with little extra ecological cost. They have no plan for radical transformation of agriculture to reduce emissions (which will mean a shift from livestock, especially beef, farming to plant-based and farm-free food).

Their manifesto is very much "Greenery in One Country". Yet if anything is a global rather than local issue, it is today's environmental poly-crisis. The manifesto says nothing about aid from rich countries like Britain to poorer countries where the people want to have electricity and clean water supply, and often have good conditions for developing renewables, but can't do that without investment aid.

Equally, the Green manifesto says nothing about adaptation to the climate changes already baked in by carbon emissions to date. That adaptation is probably already urgent in Britain, and very urgent in poorer countries.

To be unkind but true: Green eco-policy is a collection of morsels which look tasty from the viewpoint of a socially-concerned, mildly prosperous, not-very-political householder who would like to see things "greener" locally. It is not a plan with a coherent historical, economic, and global perspective.

We surely wish good luck to new left-wing Greens in their striving for what the new Greens Organise faction, in their "Manchester manifesto", vaguely though sympathetically call "an internationalist, anti-capitalist, and ecologically transformative agenda". But the Greens Organise manifesto, unlike the platform of the older Green Left, does not even mention socialism. It mentions the working class only as an auxiliary to be "mobilised" for getting "a broad [electoral, presumably] mandate".

Many of the Greens Organise people are ex-Labour-left, and bring from that an interest in unions and workers' struggles. A 30 October public meeting at the Unite union's London offices, animated by Greens Organise though formally organised under different banners, showed some issues there.

Simon Coop, Unite's lead official for energy, and Steve Jackson of Greens Organise spoke. The draw-a-crowd speaker was Verity Burgmann, an Australian socialist who wrote the definitive book on Australian building workers' "green bans" in the early 1970s.

Coop expounded Unite's policy for public ownership of the whole energy industry, but Jackson said nothing about battling to make that Green policy. The not-so-good side of Unite's policy that it opposes government curbs on new North Sea oil and gas extraction unless and until the government nominates specific alternative jobs for the workers who might get employment on new rigs. If the Australian building workers had had the same approach, then they would have campaigned against government protection for areas like Kelly's Bush unless and until the government offered a different project with similar jobs. There would have been no green bans.

Of course, a fight for new jobs has to go with demanding rundown of fossil-fuel use and extraction; of course, the boom in the building industry in Sydney then was important in giving building workers confidence to take action: when the Kelly's Bush job was stopped, they could reasonably hope for jobs elsewhere within weeks rather than months. Still, Jackson made no criticism. Do Greens Organise support green-bans-type action, or do they oppose curbs on environmentally harmful industry "for now"? They should work it out. Diplomacy with top union officials is not the same as an orientation to working-class action.

In our view we need a working-class socialist plan, and not just a generic "popular opposition". Let's hope the new young Greens will get closer to that. But they should realise that the Green party is far from already going that way.