NBC’s “green” website offers such helpful tips as “fix a leaky toilet” instead of letting the water supply spirit away indefinitely. If you’re a normal, responsible person, you may recognize these “green” practices as things you’ve done your entire life because you’re a normal, responsible person.

Many Americans have been saving electricity, eating leftovers and promptly fixing plumbing problems for years because that’s what worked for their families and budgets. Some of them have even drunk tap water and started their own gardens—even composted!—simply because they enjoy saving money and eating well.

In recent droughts, the Southeast conserved water like never before, not because it was green, but because it made sense. When the price of oil goes up, sales of efficient economy and hybrid cars go up.

People act on incentives. It is not conspicuous environmentalism and its endorsement of intentions over results that will save the earth from whatever may face it. It is not “raising awareness” that will ultimately improve living standards. It is not that super-keen feeling you get when you buy organic lipstick that will change the world.

Liberals have learned from their past crusades. Climate change, as they present it, is a problem so big that it lends itself to the biggest-government solutions yet. Because it is an incremental science, environmentalists won’t have to be accountable for results during any of their lifetimes. And, because going “green” now only requires eating leftover turkey and buying carbon offsets, there’s very little personal sacrifice involved in claiming measurable moral superiority.

It’s the War on Poverty on steroids. Or, organic supplements. Whichever you prefer. Meanwhile, as it always has been, it’s up to free markets and free people to solve the world’s problems.

It is developed countries with booming industries that create the technologies to sprinkle lawns with reclaimed water and run cars on electricity. It is development in underdeveloped nations that eventually creates the per capita income necessary to sustain basic sanitation and environmental standards.

Economic prosperity and environmental standards are as inseparable as environmentalists and their smugness, but activists insist on badmouthing the very thing they need to sustain their lifestyles and their purported goals. Because being a capitalist just doesn’t feel as good as being “green.”

Luckily, as long as the nouveau vert are too preoccupied with their compost and hemp shower curtains to impede development, we can work so that the rest of the world will someday have the luxury of being conspicuous environmentalists too.

This article is from the January issue for Townhall Magazine.  To subscribe to twelve issues of Townhall Magazine and receive a free copy of Andrew McCarthy’s Willful Blindness:  A Memoir of a Jihad, click here.