From the Right Side

Envirodoxy: an attitude of mind revealed by an inability to think independently, coupled with an acceptance as scientific fact the worst-imaginings of some client-change scientists and green campaigners.

Usually associated, particularly amongst politicians, with a strong psychological need to pontificate, preach, and regulate, combined with a lack of faith in human adaptability and technological innovation.

The aptness of the term is illustrated by the responses of MPs to a Rough Guide survey on climate change. The following are just a sample, but illustrative of the views of all but a handful of MPs which are published in today's Independent:

Climate change is the most serious threat to human kind ever. Ben Bradshaw (Lab)

The most difficult challenge that Governments have faced since the dinosaurs roamed the earth. David Chaytor (Lab)

We must make the green agenda central to everything we do and, in that agenda, climate change is the issue which overrides all others. It is the biggest threat facing our planet... David Cameron (Con)

My own opinion is that it is more important than any other challenge we face (and that is saying a lot ­ with nuclear proliferation, international terrorism, pension meltdown and other worries being very strong candidates). James Arbuthnot (Tory)

Climate change is a threat greater than any other faced by mankind and is therefore the most important political issue of our time. Norman Baker (Lib)

The position of any who disagree with the new Envirodoxy has been aptly described by George Orwell:

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas of which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is 'not done' to say it... Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the high-brow periodicals. George Orwell