The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.

Many of my friends have long referred to environmentalists as “watermelons” — green on the outside, red on the inside. The idea being, because communism and socialism (interchangeable political/economic systems in practice) have failed everywhere they’ve been imposed, doctrinaire socialist zealots have embraced environmental causes as a Trojan horse. Their goal is simple: use environmental policies as a backdoor way to implement socialist policies in the Western democracies. After all, who doesn’t care about the environment?

A recent admission by Saikat Chakrabarti, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-NY) chief of staff, about the much-hyped Green New Deal (GND) reinforces the view socialists are using the environment to replace private property and free exchange in the market with state control of the economy.

In a meeting with Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, Chakrabarti said addressing climate change was not Ocasio-Cortez’s reason for proposing the GND, according to a report by The Washington Post.

“The interesting thing about the Green New Deal, is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all,” Chakrabarti told Inslee’s climate director, Sam Ricketts, The Post reported. “Do you guys think of it as a climate thing? Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”

This admission did not surprise me much. Far too many youths have embraced socialism — showing no understanding of how capitalism has improved their lives. What would they do, for example, without their smartphones, laptops, instant messenger and social media services, and the wi-fi enabled coffee shops on every corner, all courtesy of capitalism?

For instance, at a press conference in Brussels in early February 2015, in the run-up to negotiations culminating in the Paris climate agreement, Christiana Figueres, then executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, stated the global warming scaremongering going on for more than 25 years at the UN was about controlling peoples’ lives by controlling the economy, not fighting climate change.

“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” Figueres said. “This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model, for the first time in human history,” she continued.

Others who have highlighted the anti-capitalist agenda motivating climate alarmism include professors Joshua Goldstein and Steven Pinker, who, in an article in The Boston Globe, said progressives were using the climate change fight to push big government action on a laundry list of “longstanding social ills such as inequality, corporate greed, racism, and political corruption. … Naomi Klein’s campaign to ‘change everything’ casts global warming as an opportunity for the left to step up its various crusades.”

To be clear, GND would constitute a complete socialist makeover of the U.S. economy — the culmination of years of effort by watermelons. GND’s package of government handouts combined with a government-directed industrial policy is straight out of the old Soviet playbook. It would include, among other things, a huge government jobs program and “free” health care and college. It also would require a complete makeover of America’s housing stock, its transportation system, and its entire energy system, all by 2030.

Perhaps the more than 100 Democratic members of the U.S. House and Senate who rushed to sponsor or publicly embrace GND — including Sens. Cory Booker (D-NJ), Kamala Harris (D-CA), and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) — are finally being honest about their fealty to socialism. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has always proudly proclaimed himself a socialist. Hence, his support for GND should surprise no one.

Socialism is a scourge. From the former Soviet Union to Cuba, from North Korea to Venezuela, everywhere socialism has been tried it has robbed people of freedom and their property, produced economic stagnation and misallocation of resources, and directly or indirectly resulted in millions of deaths. The socialist policies promoted in the GND under the guise of saving the planet are no less deadly than previous utopian socialist schemes.

Both the human race and the environment will benefit when we permanently consign all such delusional national or international socialist plans where they rightfully belong, into the dustbin of history.