What is it with environmentalists and the Holocaust? Barely a month goes by without some prominent green or another outrageously invoking the greatest crime in human history when promoting their plans for eco-austerity.

Step up Dale Vince, green entrepreneur and donor to both the Labour party and pongy activist troupe Just Stop Oil. In an interview with the Mail, he has compared climate sceptics to Holocaust deniers. ‘Anyone who says the climate crisis is not happening or it’s not man-made, honestly, I think they’re a dangerous fool, because it’s like denying the Holocaust happened’, he said.

The use of this Holocaust rhetoric is grotesque, censorious and dangerous

Were that not grotesque enough – comparing those who question green orthodoxies to racists who try to diminish the murder and suffering of European Jewry in the mid-20th century – he went that little step further, and compared the Holocaust itself to the heat death we are all supposedly about to experience. ‘This [climate-change denial] is denying the holocaust that is coming now’, he thundered.

Depressingly, he isn’t the only prominent environmentalist who thinks like this. In 2019, Green party MP Caroline Lucas was forced to apologise for comparing climate scepticism to Holocaust denial. Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, similarly had to apologise in 2021 for comparing politicians failing to act on emissions targets to those who ‘ignored what was happening in Nazi Germany’ .

They’ve all been outdone, however, by Roger Hallam, the bedraggled co-founder of Extinction Rebellion and alleged brain behind Just Stop Oil. In an interview with a German newspaper in 2019, he said the Holocaust was ‘just another fuckery in human history’ when stacked up alongside all the other genocides. (Extinction Rebellion later distanced themselves from his statement, which Hallam said was taken out of context.)

The abandon with which some deep greens invoke problematic rhetoric to promote their cause is not only ridiculous and discrediting – it is also morally repugnant. By invoking the Holocaust so casually, seemingly as a means to land a blow against their opponents, they are unwittingly contributing to its dilution and relativisation – where the Holocaust is portrayed as just another bad thing that happened in history, rather than the unique, mechanised horror that it was.

In this, they become the useful idiots of actual anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers. As The Holocaust, a guide to the topic published by the Open University, notes: ‘Relativising the Holocaust has been one of the classic techniques of some of those engaged in Holocaust denial.’

I get that environmentalists are convinced that we’re all about to die from climate change (even though no sane reading of the science could possibly support this view). And I get that they think industrial society is slowly killing us (even though it is responsible for reducing climate-related deaths by 99 per cent over the past century). But just because they hold these batty, unscientific and apocalyptic views does not give them licence to make such outrageous comparisons, which risk distorting the historical memory of 1930s and 1940s Europe.

They aren’t the only ones, of course. The ‘Nazi’ slur is thrown around constantly nowadays, used to describe anyone who, say, happens to support Brexit or thinks women cannot possess penises. When Gary Lineker got in trouble a few months back for comparing the Tories’ less-than-liberal migration rhetoric to something out of 1930s Germany he was expressing a bizarrely widely held position among the great and good. But that doesn’t make it any less rank.

The use of this Holocaust rhetoric is grotesque, censorious and dangerous. These greens should take a long, hard look at themselves.