The heretic Brendan O’Neill:

It is the mark of shrieking authoritarianism to look upon dissenting views not simply as wrong or foolish, but as criminal. Throughout history inquisitors and censors have sought to silence sections of society by labelling their words as “dangerous” and a threat to safety and stability; now environmentalists are doing the same. Their demonisation of sceptics as “deniers” has had a chilling effect on public debate. The environmentalist ethos is hostile to free movement, too. Behind the greens’ attacks on road-building and cheap flights there lurks an agenda of enforced localism. What most of us experience as a liberty – the ability to drive great distances or to travel overseas, something our forebears only dreamt of as they spent their entire lives in the same town – has been relabelled under the tyranny of environmentalism as a “threat to the planet”….[P]erhaps the main way that environmentalism undermines the culture of freedom is by its ceaseless promotion of guilt. In the environmentalist era, we are no longer really free citizens, so much as potential polluters. We are continually told – by government, by commentators, by radical activists – that everything we do, from wearing disposable nappies to using deodorant to allowing ourselves to be cremated, is harmful to our surroundings. Liberty – true liberty – requires that people see themselves as self-respecting, self-determining subjects, capable of making free choices and pursuing the “good life” as they see fit. Today, by contrast, we are warned that we are toxic, loaded, dangerous specimens, who must always restrain our instincts and aspire to austerity. This is not conducive to a culture of liberty; indeed, it represents a dangerous historic shift, from the Enlightenment era of free citizenship to a new dark age where individuals are depicted as meek in the face of more powerful, unpredictable forces: the gods of the sea, sky and ozone layer…Environmentalism is instinctively and relentlessly illiberal, and it is doing more to inculcate people with fear, self-loathing and a religious-style sense of meekness than any piece of anti-terror legislation ever could.