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So global warming is still a problem. The huge changes that we and other countries have made over the last decades have not been sufficient - a steeper reduction in carbon emissions is needed, to limit the warming of the planet. Most of us have been half hoping that some dazzling scientific invention would save us from this sword of Damocles, hovering over our feast. Or hoping that the scientific consensus would change, and the whole thing turn out to be a monster-sized Millennium Bug. But the experts say, on the contrary, that we should get ready for some major cultural changes. We will have to take leave of our habitual freedom to consume. Ideally this will be voluntary - people will feel it is wrong to drive so much, fly so much, eat so much meat. And new attitudes will just replace the old ones - as has largely happened in relation to race and gender. But what if most of us remain reluctant environmentalists? Then we’ll need the government to curtail our freedom. That would mean a strange new era of politics, in which the state becomes a sort of green nanny. It’s possible to imagine this in dystopian terms - parents denounced by their children for eating the wrong thing - and foreign travel only available to a super-rich elite, and people condemned for thought crimes against the planet. But it’s also possible to imagine the shift in more positive terms, as a sort of liberation from the era of excess. Maybe we will feel more in touch with the natural world, through a new sense of our solidarity with the vulnerable planet. Admittedly that’s pretty difficult to imagine - our freedom to choose to be excessive consumers is a pretty big part of who we are. And our alienation from nature is arguably an insoluble part of being human. Maybe some of us will enjoy a smooth transition to a simpler greener life - but the rest of us will probably hanker for the fleshpots of Egypt. Some of us will find religion helpful - for it helps us to see beyond the heightened individualism of modernity. Christians might find solace and inspiration in the fact that their central ritual is a celebratory act of eating and drinking in which we eat and drink only a tiny amount. We don’t need more than this bare minimum, as long as we are sharing it together - for the greatest joy does not come from consumption, but from participating in what we see as the most authentic form of culture. Maybe other forms of culture can echo this logic - maybe we can move towards consuming less but in more communal and celebratory ways.