If we are to cope with climate change we need a new moral order
...Underlying all this confusion is the problem that we don't have a way of ranking rationalities, so that the word means something more to a moral agent than it does to an economist. There may be ways of fixing that and averting catastrophic global warming that don't make use of religious resources, but I can't think of any.

It's important to this argument to understand that religious resources need not be theistic. All they need do is make manifest a higher rationality than self-interest. This isn't an argument about whether God exists, but about how human beings make up their minds and form their characters. Atheist states based around myth and ritual are not hard to find. Social Democratic Sweden struck me even at the time as a theocracy organised around the worship of itself, and the official ideology was atheist. That's a benevolent example but there are plenty of malevolent atheist regimes that could serve as unpleasant examples. One of the most chilling aspects to accounts of life in North Korea is the degree to which official propaganda appeals to altruism and bravery.

What religious thought – and ritual – can supply is the two things absent from normative consumer liberalism. The first is a belief that the choice between ends is not arbitrary or wholly personal: that there are moral facts of the matter; that saving as much of humanity as possible is an obligation on all of us, and that this is actually true, and not just a matter of preference.

The second is the kind of conformism, reinforced by all kinds of social ritual, large and small, which will enforce the social discipline needed to carry societies through some pretty ghastly changes. Let's face it, any adjustment to an ecologically sustainable standard of living is going to be a lot nastier than anything Greece is going through now. It will need considerable determination and solidarity....