Zac Goldsmith edits the Ecologist magazine when he isn’t shagging his sister-in-law, this month’s issue attacks Nigel Lawson as “dishonourable” for daring to suggest that the Green Emperor has no clothes.

The right honourable Nigel Lawson has dared to question the looming Green consensus being forged around the Stern Report. The Chancellor who dared to fight inflation and socialism to the death certainly won’t be bothered by the enviromentalists getting into a lather, he says:

In fact, the voluminous Stern Report adds disappointingly little to what was already the conventional wisdom – apart from a battery of essentially spurious statistics based on theoretical models and conjectural worst cases. This is clearly no basis for policy decisions which could have the most profound adverse effect on people’s lives, and at a cost which Stern almost certainly underestimates. It is, in a very real sense, the story of the Iraq war, writ large.

Scratch the surface of even the most harmless cuddly Green and you find an agenda which is a totalitarian and based on “Gaia” mysticism cloaking an essentially anti-human tendency which values “Gaia” as more important than humanity. Lawson has an explanation for that as well:

It is, I suspect, no accident that it is in Europe that climate change absolutism has found the most fertile soil. For it is Europe that has become the most secular society in the world, where the traditional religions have the weakest popular hold. Yet people still feel the need for the comfort and higher values that religion can provide; and it is the quasi-religion of Green alarmism and what has been termed global salvationism – of which the climate change issue is the most striking example, but by no means the only one – which has filled the vacuum, with reasoned questioning of its mantras regarded as a form of blasphemy.

Third World Poverty is picturesque and simple as well as low in carbon emissions, but harsh on the human condition…