Dominic Lawson, who’s joined his father Nigel’s crusade against climate science, has penned a blistering review in The Independent of Ethan Greenheart’s Can I recycle my granny?.

On the surface, that’s hardly surprising. Ethan’s account of his eco-martyr’s lifestyle is an easy target. He won’t travel anywhere that can’t be reached on foot. He extols the virtues of growing your own baby food (lentils and spinach, fertilised by the baby poo they help to generate). He castigates confetti because it contains artificial colouring which leaches into the earth – “the wedding day equivalent of acid rain”. And, he tells us, “'I do love my kids, but not a day passes when I don’t tell them what a burden they are to the planet.” So it’s just as well, perhaps, that they do their bit to lighten the load by working the treadle pump generator which powers his computer…

It’s ripe for parody. And of course (as you’ve doubtless spotted by now), that’s exactly what it is. Greenheart’s a caricature dreamed up by that provocatively libertarian webzine Spiked Online. Like all good parodies, it satirises the wilder fringes of its target in order to cast doubt on the more sober, mainstream core.

It’s just possible that the reviews editor at The Independent didn’t spot the spoof; treated the book as a genuine example of green loonery run rampant, and so cast around for a confirmed eco-baiter to rip it to shreds.

But it’s hard to believe that a bright spark like Lawson (whose father, incidentally, is featured in Spiked) wouldn’t have known that Ethan was a comic creation – or at least spotted it once he’d skimmed a few pages.

So why bother to slate a spoof – unless it’s simply a mischievous effort to help persuade the gullible that environmentalists are all Ethans at heart, dumping the burden of the world’s woes on their hapless children along with the poo on the spinach…