Left-wing author Naomi Klein declared from the stage of the Green New Deal rally on Monday night, “Tonight, you saw Ed Markey come out as a Democratic eco-socialist!"

It was no lie. Markey, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, had just gotten a standing ovation from the crowd by shouting (oddly enough, on behalf of windmill and solar companies), “Give us some of that socialism.”

In these moments, and more broadly in the rollout of the Green New Deal, it is laid bare what critics of left-wing environmentalism have always said: The green movement is less about improving the environment and more about increasingly concentrating power in the central government.

Klein is a left-wing agitator whose 2015 book argued climate change provided a perfect excuse to abridge economic freedom and build a command economy. As a sympathetic left-wing reviewer put it, “Klein suggests that climate change presents an opportunity to build political power on a vast scale “

The Green New Deal rallies have all featured a video Klein co-produced, narrated by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., that tries to bundle their proposed windmill subsidies with “Medicare for all,” a “jobs guarantee” including a “public option,” universal child care, and “publicly funded election campaigns.”

In other words, signing up for the Green New Deal means signing up for a massive government takeover of the economy.

“Medicare for all” really means socialized health insurance, which means no private health insurance, which means government direction of the healthcare sector, which means government control over our most intimate, consequential decisions.

A federal jobs guarantee, federal child care, and taxpayer-funded and bureaucrat-directed campaign financing means that politicians and federal employees basically call the shots in your life.

Watch the Green New Deal rallies enough, and the green hue fades away except for the constant bashing of fossil fuel companies. Some of the anger at oil and gas companies is about subsidies. That’s fair enough: The government shouldn’t subsidize oil, gas, coal, or any energy source.

But look closer at what the Left means when they say “subsidy” and you realize how ambitious their plans are. Liberals last week were touting a study purporting to show $649 billion a year in oil and gas subsidies in the U.S. How did they get that number? By comparing the actual tax payments of U.S. oil and gas companies, which are very large, to what the study’s authors thought the oil and gas companies ought to pay.

Counting a big chunk of after-tax profits as a “subsidy” reflects a totalitarian mindset.

Finally, when you consider how the Green New Dealers reject zero-emission nuclear power, you begin to realize that something else is going on here.

This isn’t about clean air. It’s about centralized power.