After all, you're Time magazine's 'person of the year'.

Come on. You're scared, right? Your Christmas of a lifetime was nearly ruined when you took the kids to Lapland and found brown slush where there should have been pristine drifts of snow leading to Santa's lodge.

The Lapps are having their least snowy winter in 350 years, they say.

Winter in the northern hemisphere has been so mild that people have barely had to turn on the heat at night. That's kept oil, which last year threatened to soar through $100 a barrel, hovering around $50.

Not that it's going to help you, as you sort through your ESB and Bord Gáis bills and wonder if it's those, not the mortgage repayments on higher interest, that'll tip you over the edge. And the longterm trend for oil prices is ever-higher, we're told, so it's only a temporary blip.

You might have seen Al Gore's climate change frightfest, An Inconvenient Truth, at cinemas last year. You were pretty scared - when oil was $80 a barrel.

Last week the European Commission announced that it wanted Europe to unilaterally go forward with a new energy strategy to combat climate change.

Reduce electricity use by 13% by 2020. Produce 20% of our electricity using renewable resources like wind power. Biofuels required to power 10% of all vehicles.

Reduce greenhouse gas emissions fuelling global warming by 20%.

If the rest of the world decides to join in, the target should be raised to 30%.

Ultimately, they say, that's what is required to halt global warming at two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial global temperatures. More than that and we may see a self-sustaining cycle in which ice caps melt, Bangladesh is under 10 feet of water and several island countries disappear from the map. Not to mention the N11 becomes the new coastline for Dublin.

Brussels launched the plan in the same week that Russia seemed to go to even greater lengths to prove it's an unreliable energy partner. It got into a wrangle with neighbouring Belarus, which promptly decided to try and impose its own tax on fuel going through the pipeline over its territory - to Western Europe.

So why didn't we greet Europe's plan to climb up on the climate change cross to redeem the world with more, or any, joy?

Instead, we learned that Tony Blair has no intention of giving up his frequent flier miles. We might pay a little extra to make sure that the ingredients in our soy chai latte we're sipping on the way home from Dundrum in our Dalkey Tractor are Fairtrade, but that's as far as it goes.

We'll be taking our cheap flights - to Lapland to mourn the loss of reindeer habitat or to Antarctica to watch the Ross Ice Shelf collapse, perhaps, but we're still flying.

We'll be using the internet - even though it's about to emerge as the biggest factor in energy use. An avatar on Second Life requires more kilowatt-hours per year than the average real-life resident of Brazil, eBay may require more than the entire country of Brazil. Hands up, who plans to turn in their Nintendo Wii and Apple iPhone to Al Gore in an energy amnesty programme?

So if all of the climate change guilty feeling being meted out by the media and NGOs won't, only government can save us by forcing us to do the right thing. Right.

Ireland ignores its Kyoto obligations and quietly delays implementing EU rules on rating homes for energy efficiency by two years. The rest of us share a conspiratorial wink with Dick Roche while the Green Party and Duncan Stewart have to be sedated.

Hands up who thinks that the government will do any better at keeping to a new set of targets?

It'll have to be a revolutionary vanguard who will save us, so. Hands up, who will join George Monbiot at the barricades to demand less freedom and more austerity?

The fact is, fear and guilt, the only two weapons in the emotional arsenal of climate change campaigners, aren't getting us very far.

Next week in this space I'll introduce you to some ideas about what might succeed where guilt and fear have failed.