The Youth Climate Strike on March 15 brought school walkouts to dozens of countries. Millions have been driven to participate out of disgust with capitalism’s wanton destruction of the natural world. Masses of people took to the streets across Europe, Chile, India, Kenya, South Africa, New Zealand and dozens more countries.
To realize the potential power of the working class to unite and fight for a better world, we will have to free ourselves from the ruling class’ leadership of the climate movement. The environmental movement is being led and promoted by the main wing U.S. bosses and their allies in Europe who are moving towards fascism to hold onto control of their increasingly threatened liberal world order.
These murderers who sit atop the capitalist world, who have plundered the earth while destroying the lives of billions of workers in the process will always and forever sacrifice the environment of the working class to preserve themselves and their power. Only communist workers power can build a society that serves the needs of the working class.
Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), in service to Nancy Pelosi and her big capitalist backers, seeks to leverage environmentalism to broaden out the base of support for the main wing of the U.S. ruling class while bringing reluctant politicians into line with the needs of these big fascist U.S. bosses.  Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal (GND) is a bid, in the words of its own organizers, to reorganize U.S. society on the basis of permanent wartime mobilization - “The Green New Deal is premised on the realization that America now faces ‘the moral equivalent of war’ in the twin crises of climate change and worsening income inequality.” (newconsensus.org)
This same ruling class that irradiated Japan with nuclear bombs, doused Vietnam with napalm and Agent Orange, and poisoned Iraq with depleted uranium is now asking us to swallow ‘war-time mobilization’ in the name of environmental protection and social justice.  They created cancer clusters in Gary, Indiana and offered lead-laced water to the children of Flint.  The only class interest the U.S. capitalists have ever pursued are their own.
We have seen this language from Washington liberals before, and it led to decades of war.  In reaction to the Arab Oil Embargo that shook U.S. imperialism in the 1970s, Jimmy Carter announced in 1979 that “We must deal with the energy problem on a war footing…[it is] the moral equivalent of war.”  Soon thereafter he announced a “Carter Doctrine” which set a policy of exclusive U.S. control of Middle East oil which launched an era of indiscriminate slaughter of Muslim workers from which we have yet to emerge.
The climate politics we see taking shape will be used to discipline politicians who show signs of being out of touch with the bosses urgent need to fundamentally reorganize society in preparation for conflict with rival imperialists.  In a cell phone video that went viral on the internet, long-serving and arch-imperialist California senator Diane Feinstein was positively roasted by a gaggle of children and teenagers who visited her office to expose her refusal to sign onto the Green New Deal.
The ‘Sunrise Movement’ that organized the Feinstein flaying, names the Koch Brothers on its main website as a fossil fuel company that has to be targeted for dismantling. Some of the most strident voices in the push for a GND have called for the nationalization of energy firms that refuse to sign on to the program, and have even called for top executives of these firms to be tried for crimes against humanity (thedig, podcast, 12/27/18).   
The more domestically oriented/’Fortress America’/small fascist wing of the U.S. ruling class, typified but not totally led by the Koch brothers, has more leverage in today’s Trump White House than in any other before.  The more internationally oriented main wing of the U.S. ruling class must build a political movement to smash their rivals, and environmentalism is shaping up to be a major strategy of these liberal imperialists to do so.  Agreements such as the Paris Accords align with the interests of giant gas energy firms whose holdings allow them to isolate equally filthy smaller energy bosses more closely tied to coal interests and other legacy energy production methods:
For ConocoPhillips and Exxon—as well the non-U.S. oil and gas heavyweights; BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Eni, Total, and Statoil—backing the Paris Agreement is not just riding the trend of increasingly environmentally-conscious businesses. Those companies with operations all over the world stand to benefit from the Paris Agreement because the nations’ efforts to cut carbon emissions will lead to transitioning from coal-fired plants to gas-fired plants. And natural gas is quite a substantial portion of all those majors’ businesses, investments and profits. (oilprice.com ).
If ‘green tech’ pioneer Tesla is any indication, AOC’s promises of a social-justice oriented and environmentally friendly U.S. capitalism are a pipe dream and the Green New Deal will amount to new corporate welfare schemes benefitting a new ‘green’ ruling class. Enjoying the boost of an estimated $5bn in federal subsidies Tesla CEO Elon Musk is now valued at $20bn (and projected to be worth $55bn) while his firm has recently carried out 7 percent layoffs, amounting to some 3,000 workers (wired.com,1/18) and firings of union organizers in the name of keeping profits high (cnn.com 10/26/17).  
Communism is the alternative plan – a planned economy is the only way to get to a sustainable future for all the world’s workers.  Only an international dictatorship of the proletariat can eradicate the still-greatest peril: imperialist war.
Only communist workers’ power can bring about the reductions in carbon emissions needed on a globally equitable scale. Imperialism threatens nuclear war and leaves workers left poorer by capitalism trapped in underdevelopment.  
U.S. bosses want to use environmentalist politics to impose a WWII-style planned economy where profits flow to a unified and disciplined ruling class equipped to wage the most deadly war in history.  The bosses political mobilization in the GND hints at the kind of politics and promises they need to generate in order to wage major war with mass support.  Millions may be taken in by the inherent nationalism in the bosses plans, and we should be prepared for growing fascism. The struggle to build the communist movement that will lead to a future for our class cannot wait. The egalitarian, pro-worker and pro-planet impulse that drives these same millions of people can only be betrayed by the drive toward profit and war that capitalism has never for a moment in its history been able to do without.  
Only a communist-led international working class can seize the means of production and abolish the frightful and senseless waste, first and foremost of the lives of our class brothers and sisters, but also of our planet’s resources, of capitalism’s current mode of production.  We need a red new system, not a green new deal; communism is that system.  Join PLP.