Or perhaps enviro-whiners.

Tell me: How did it come to pass that virtue — a quality that for most of history has generally been deemed, well, a virtue — became a mark of liberal softheadedness? How peculiar, that doing the right thing by the environment — buying the hybrid, eating like a locavore — should now set you up for the Ed Begley Jr. treatment.

The answer is obvious: being a green fashion victim is not virtuous, it is softheaded at best but likely worse. It accomplishes no more than changing your hat color. That isn't virtue, it's dim wits.

There are so many stories we can tell ourselves to justify doing nothing, but perhaps the most insidious is that, whatever we do manage to do, it will be too little too late. Climate change is upon us, and it has arrived well ahead of schedule. Scientists’ projections that seemed dire a decade ago turn out to have been unduly optimistic: the warming and the melting is occurring much faster than the models predicted.

Nonsense. It depends on which models you look at, and when you look, as well as what empirical measurements you select. Wait a few months and you'll have even more confusion. We have suspicions about climate but very little knowledge.

But the real idiocy here - not surprising for a green tard - is that the alternative to empty green consumption gestures is not doing nothing, it is doing useful things like capturing and sequestering atmospheric carbon.

Whatever we can do as individuals to change the way we live at this suddenly very late date does seem utterly inadequate to the challenge. It’s hard to argue with Michael Specter, in a recent New Yorker piece on carbon footprints, when he says: “Personal choices, no matter how virtuous [N.B.!], cannot do enough. It will also take laws and money.” So it will. Yet it is no less accurate or hardheaded to say that laws and money cannot do enough, either; that it will also take profound changes in the way we live.

Nonsense. Laws, money and empty consumption gestures, assuming that the money bit means some sort of government wheeze, are all do nothing feel-good gestures for political effects, the things politicians do instead of meaningful governance.

climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle — of character, even. The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us (consumer spending represents 70 percent of our economy), and most of the rest of them made in the name of our needs and desires and preferences.

This is the real agenda, the same old politics of limits that has been shown to be wrong repeatedly in the past, but has been tarted up like an octogenarian debutante for a few last turns in society. It's sick.

Cheap fossil fuel allows us to pay distant others to process our food for us, to entertain us and to (try to) solve our problems, with the result that there is very little we know how to accomplish for ourselves. Think for a moment of all the things you suddenly need to do for yourself when the power goes out — up to and including entertaining yourself. Think, too, about how a power failure causes your neighbors — your community — to suddenly loom so much larger in your life. Cheap energy allowed us to leapfrog community by making it possible to sell our specialty over great distances as well as summon into our lives the specialties of countless distant others.

Here’s the point: Cheap energy, which gives us climate change, fosters precisely the mentality that makes dealing with climate change in our own lives seem impossibly difficult. Specialists ourselves, we can no longer imagine anyone but an expert, or anything but a new technology or law, solving our problems. Al Gore asks us to change the light bulbs because he probably can’t imagine us doing anything much more challenging, like, say, growing some portion of our own food. We can’t imagine it, either, which is probably why we prefer to cross our fingers and talk about the promise of ethanol and nuclear power — new liquids and electrons to power the same old cars and houses and lives.

The “cheap-energy mind,” as Wendell Berry called it, is the mind that asks, “Why bother?” because it is helpless to imagine — much less attempt — a different sort of life, one less divided, less reliant. Since the cheap-energy mind translates everything into money, its proxy, it prefers to put its faith in market-based solutions — carbon taxes and pollution-trading schemes. If we could just get the incentives right, it believes, the economy will properly value everything that matters and nudge our self-interest down the proper channels. The best we can hope for is a greener version of the old invisible hand. Visible hands it has no use for.

And while we're at it, let's rail about the pernicious effects of books! We have lost our oral culture and are now dependent on reading and writing as well as all manner of methods for distribution - everything from newspapers to the freaking internet! Berry at least avoids having a damned computer, he just has his wife type his stuff up for him on a manual machine.

Energy is what civilization is about. It always has been - from the first folks who learned to control fire to the newest technologies of today. It's just plain dumb to attack our use of energy, though we can make good arguments for developing and using better methods.

Our current problem set is not about personal virtue. There are no moral or ethical dilemmas. There are no political opportunities. We are in the process of maturing a bit more, and though it may be frightening for the rigid and backward looking it's what we have done many times before, and will do many times again. If you need an example to understand the concept look up the history of whale oil.

If you get it, and want to take an active part in change, you can make some bets on appropriate solutions. Perhaps you would be satisfied to lower emissions, as with solar or nuclear energy. Lower emissions won't actually help though, since what is needed is negative emissions, the actual removal of existing carbon from the air. There are systems to do that that need your financial support, and which might make you a bundle some day if you place your bets now.

My current fave is biochar. All I need is about U$3 mil to get started. Sure, I can make bath tub biochar at home, but it would be much better if I made it for my whole neighborhood. We have a lot of dirt around here, and make a lot of biomass, so it's appropriate. While the green tards whinge about fashion crime, we could save the world.