LONDON -- Perhaps philosophers have a name for it -- this modern phenomenon of continuing to enjoy life in a way that we know is leading to destruction because we feel that there is nothing we can do about it anyway.

I am, of course, referring to the ecological crisis we are now in, which can only be resolved two ways: a revolutionary change in the way we live or the destruction of the world as we know it.

A year ago, British scientist John Houghton asserted that "our long-term security is threatened by a problem at least as dangerous as chemical, nuclear or biological weapons, or indeed international terrorism -- human-induced climate change."

Houghton wrote this with the authority of his position as former cochair of the scientific assessment working group of the intergovernmental panel on climate change. He said extreme heat last July in the United States had killed 1,500 people, half the number killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center.

His claim hit home to most of those who read it -- leaving Fox News to scorn it as "the depths of bizarre hyperbole." Had Houghton written one month later, at the end of last August, he would have been able to report that deaths in France due to extreme heat had been counted as 14,800, five times larger than the number of people killed in the World Trade Center attacks. That was just one month in one country in one year.

This summer the heat is less lethal, but not one day passes without another report on the destruction of some form of life due to climate change. The most serious destruction this summer comes from flooding -- long predicted as one of the first indicators of global warming. It has hit Bangladesh hard. Of course, Fox News will lead the pack pointing out that Bangladesh has always been vulnerable to severe flooding, killing thousands, wrecking homes and land.

And everyone knows that any single incident can be massaged away by focusing on the particularity of that region at the time. But there is now a consensus, even if Fox News has, bizarrely, chosen to place itself outside it, that adds up all the singular incidents and particular conditions, and concludes that an extremely dangerous mass phenomenon is occurring.

What happens in the mind of the person who hears this news report while driving his car? How painful is the conflict between being a citizen and being a consumer? And how can it be resolved? What are the feelings stirred when the driver recognizes his or her love for the machine and knows that it is contributing to the destruction of millions of living things? Guilt? Anger? Resentment?

The aggression and self-righteousness of drivers everywhere, especially young men, is a well-charted phenomenon. The power of drivers to affect government elections, laws, the siting of supermarkets, has precipitated thousands of research documents. To what avail?

For the conundrum remains: The political category for the environment has scant connection to the categories for freedom of choice and movement. How do you make a felt connection between a man's right to jump into a vehicle and drive as far and as fast as he can with the survival of, say, the sand eel or a hamlet in the Ganges delta?

A different version of this conundrum was named some decades ago by the American Mancur Olson. In his work "The Logic of Collective Action," he discussed the problem of the "free rider," the person who benefits from the struggle of a trade union to improve pay and conditions, but doesn't actually join the union or contribute anything to its efforts.

Here we have negative free riders: individuals who contribute to a negative factor -- global warning -- and feel unable or unwilling to act individually to make any change.

The idea of the more pacific, quasi-religious ecological movements has been to persuade and cajole users of energy-hungry machines into changing their habits; making fewer journeys, living in walking distance of shops, schools and workplaces, traveling by public transport. It doesn't work.

It cannot be preached to less developed countries, especially China, which says, quite rightly, to the more developed nations that they should give up a few of their own comforts first. But very few, at the moment, will voluntarily choose the bus over the car, even when it means being stuck in a traffic jam.

Most prefer to turn on air conditioning, central heating or lawn sprinklers rather than live in places and ways that do not depend on heavy use of fossil fuels. Sometimes this is a rational choice. Often it's an irrational one (meaning the individual would save time and money, and improve his health, if he abandoned his car).

An unintended consequence of the invention of the car was the releasing in millions of the desire to extend the puny human body into a fearsome, powerful machine that can rip through space with impunity. Like nuclear power, this is a genie that, once released, cannot be put back. Yet who would have guessed 100 years ago that this desire lay dormant in human beings?

The answer to the conundrum has been that slowing the global warming process cannot depend on individual choices. It must be effected by government. But all those nations that have ratified the Kyoto Protocol look on the U.S. and despair.

While it's easy in crowded Britain to imagine the damage done by mass car travel, it's almost impossible to imagine it in the great spaces of America's hinterland. During the last American election, when Al Gore had a serious possibility of becoming president, environmentalists had some hope that the U.S. might ratify the Kyoto agreement and might at least involve the U.S. citizens in a discussion about carbon emissions -- as former President Jimmy Carter had tried to do.

Nearly 30 years ago, Carter called on Americans to wage the "moral equivalent of war" on environmental destruction, ironically borrowing a phrase invented by the psychologist William James, who had urged Americans to wage the moral equivalent of war against nature as a means of redirecting man's aggression away from other men.

If U.S. President George W. Bush, whose administration has emasculated many environmental controls, wins the next election, it will be because a majority of voting Americans would rather fight a symbolic war against terrorism than a real one against global destruction.