From libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara:
Free market advocates have often used the watermelon analogy–”green on the outside, red on the inside”–to describe the relationship between the Environmentalism movement and socialists. As the theory goes, socialism was supposed to bring prosperity to all while capitalism collapsed into a perpetual cycle of the rich getting richer while “the masses” got poorer. When the reality was that as the rich got richer, the general standard of living, even for the poor, soared, socialists faced a crisis. The crisis was deepened when it became clear that the poverty of the socialist countries was “achieved” by brutal, repressive tyrannies.
But they didn’t give up their socialist dreams. They came up with a new mantra to advance socialism–Environmentalism, originally called Ecology. The new playbook claimed that all of this capitalist prosperity was ruining the Earth. The original culprit was pollution, a very real problem. But rather than give up on capitalism, Americans cleaned up the pollution, but largely kept the capitalism. The prosperity and industrial progress continued on a progressively cleaner path. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the crisis reached its climax.
The socialists then turned to climate change, the ultimate environmental catastrophe. “It’s climate change” can be trotted out to explain every bad thing, from routine extreme weather, to corporate bankruptcies, to terrorism. In order to save the planet’s climate, draconian central planning–i.e., socialism–must be imposed on all economic activity..
There is plenty of evidence to back the watermelon analogy.