Originally posted by Rosuav
People have mostly stopped calling it 'communist', it's now called 'socialist' but it means exactly the same thing....
No. Communist normally means either stalinist or revolutionary communist (ie, those people who want to overthrow capitalism and have it replaced with a classless society). Socialist is normally (that is, outside of left wing circles) short hand for democratic socialist and they are reformists who have the demeanor of a worker friendly party which is often slightly more socially progressive than their conservative foes, the labor party of old used to be democratic socialist, for example.

but if environmentalism is used for leverage to create a government that's taxing more and giving more to the people, then that's more communist.
It's really not!

One hypothetical example would be a tax on every carbon dioxide producing industry/product/etc that gets put towards carbon credits. Is it hypothetical? Or is it true?
I don't really know anything about carbon credits, but nobody I know seems to like them (from the right OR the left), but, if greens parties (for example) were to call for a tax on petrol, or a tax on air flights (to put those cheap Ibiza holidays out of the reach of the working family), well that's really the opposite of communism, isn't it.

Greens are allies of the left in many things but they are not an inherantly left wing party (me and my mates got expelled from the Monash Greens in the early 90's - a story I could rant about for pages, but wont).