The global-warming crusade (we mustn’t call it a ‘jihad’) is a strange exercise in Protestant virtue. Consider the endlessly repeated argument: “Even if the threat is being exaggerated; even if the models aren’t as reliable as they say; even if the scientific consensus isn’t quite so iron-clad as the activists claim, wouldn’t we be better off, still, if we consumed less, conserved more, and invested in efficiency and green alternatives This is a question of virtue masquerading as a question of engineering … It has often been remarked that the global-warming panic is rooted in a kind of religious sentiment, but nobody ever says which religion: American Consensus Protestantism, which, having been divorced from its service to that boring old Divinity with practically Republican attitudes toward sex and marriage, seeks a new god to serve Sacrifices will be required, of course: As Barack Obama promised, we are going to be obliged to adopt national policies that will raise our energy bills and thereby lower our standards of living … But what of the original question? Even if this turns out to be an exaggeration — even if the alarmist view of global warming turns out to be wrong on the substance and recent variation is all a matter of Milankovitch cycles or solar activity — wouldn’t we be better off adopting the reforms that the wise and holy men put forward? Wouldn’t it be better — morally better — if we consumed less, made a little less go a little farther, conserved, burned less oil and coal, exploited fewer natural resources, and exercised a little of what the old virtue-mongers used to call continence Better for whom Certainly not better for the poor, who, we have it on good authority, shall always be among us. (Jesus was a pretty good economist, but I believe that He may have gotten that one wrong: Poverty is, in fact, a solvable problem.) Technological and economic regression is almost always borne by those with the least power to forcibly pass along costs to other parties, and that ensures that forgone gains in the quality of material life will burden the poor rather than the well-off, whatever formal agreement is forged in or after Paris. But this exercise in virtue isn’t really about them — the poor and sweaty and miserable Them, who when they are not foundering in picturesque poverty are scheming to (sing along, Senator Sanders!) steal our jobs. No, this is about us rich people in the West, and our endless need for mortification, if not of the flesh then at least of the SUV. We’ve reduced the concept of sin to almost nothing in our shared common life, but the instinct for penance is unabated.