George Monbiot appeared recently on Frankie Boyle's far-left political chat show, "New World Order." A columnist and environmental activist, Monbiot explained how we have to save the planet. And boy, does Monbiot have some ideas.

The easy things we need to change, Monbiot said, are to end air travel flying and cease consumption of meat. If that doesn't sound easy to you, then you're not alone. Indeed, those ideas are so destructive of modern life, economics, and the pursuit of happiness, that they could justifiably be regarded as insane.

But Monbiot was just getting started. Next up, he took us down the intellectual river, into the heart of activist darkness.

"We have to overthrow this system which is eating the planet: perpetual growth," Monbiot declared. And the writer pulled no punches. Annual economic growth targets of 3% represent "madness," he said. The columnist reached his crescendo. "We can't do it by just pitting around at the margins of the problem; we've got to go straight to the heart of capitalism and overthrow it."

The morons in Boyle's audience lapped this up.

In a way, I'm glad Monbiot said what he did. With this interview, Boyle, a terrorist sympathizer and champagne socialist, unwittingly gave us a rare window into the malicious faux-humanitarianism that motivates many climate change ideologues. I don't exaggerate when I say it's malicious.

The free market system has, since the 1980s, lifted billions of people out of poverty worldwide, exceeding all of the achievements of all the nonprofits in history. Monbiot and his comrades, in seeking to overthrow the modern way of life, are proud servants of moral darkness. They seek to impose socialism, communism, or some other defective ideology precisely because these will limit economic growth and human flourishing.

History proves that capitalism uniquely serves a growing and broadly shared prosperity, new innovations for health, technology, and science, and sustaining democratic government. And yes, that makes economic growth moral.

There may also be a moral imperative to adopt reasonable climate change policies — it's something I'm quite willing to accept. But we must call out the intellectual and moral deceptions offered by people like Monbiot. Failing to do so, we entertain the growing chance of a poorer, less happy, and morally darker world.