‘Tis the season for family, and what better way to celebrate family than to bear witness to the diverse expertise of one prominent British house?

So today we have former UK Chancellor Nigel Lawson on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page. Lord Lawson (indeed!) writes on the folly of Copenhagen – and carbon-control initiatives in general – noting, “The reason we use carbon-based energy is not the political power of the oil lobby or the coal industry. It is because it is far and away the cheapest source of energy at the present time and is likely to remain so, not forever, but for the foreseeable future.”

Reducing carbon usage will, therefore, be expensive and the world can’t agree on who should foot the bill. Lawson conceptualizes the challenge nicely, saying it is one “of burden-sharing, and in particular how much of the economic cost of decarbonization should be borne by the developed world, which accounts for the bulk of past emissions, and how much by the faster-growing developing world, which will account for the bulk of future emissions.”

Instead of going through the annual ritual of meeting in a world capital to wring hands over carbon caps, the lord prescribes a “Plan B,” namely, adapting to the consequences of warming, should they come. “Addressing these problems directly is many times more cost-effective than anything discussed at Copenhagen. And adaptation does not require a global agreement, although we may well need to help the very poorest countries (not China) to adapt.”

As most conservatives are, he’s a fan of increased R&D for energy innovation, too.

But Lord Lawson isn’t the only taste-maker in his clan. In an interview at Oprah.com, Nigella Lawson – daughter of Nigel, former journalist, and the woman who brought sexy back to TV cooking – offers her own prescription, this one for an awesome holiday season filled with food.

Nigella seems to share her father’s opinion that we make things harder on ourselves than they have to be. Simple solutions (“Plan B’s”) abound, for instance: “The Christmas Chocolate Cookies—you don’t even need to roll anything out. You just mix it together and roll them into the balls. They’re so pretty and festive, and they really are child’s play to me.”

Ms. Lawson also offers some advice for party planning that could just as easily apply to the world’s hectoring environmental planners: “[I]n living generally, you have to have such an odd mixture between a firm structure and flexibility because you’ve got to obey the rules, but you’ve got to go with the flow as well. I always think it’s really important to write a list of what you’re proposing to do. But then I think you have to go through the list and probably cross about half the things out.”

“Adaptation,” someone close to her might call it.

As for her own commitment to the environment: “I cook … everything in those throwaway foil tins because the washing up is a huge stress. And if you’re cooking something quite liquid, you just double up so it’s firmer. And I used to feel slightly guilty about this, but [I] used to say to people, ‘If you have to choose between saving the environment and saving all sanity, go for your sanity.’”

So let that be our message when the political discussions of 2010 get to be too bruising, overreaching, or infuriating to handle for even another minute: Adapt and choose sanity.

A belated Happy Hanukkah, a timely Merry Christmas, and an early Happy New Year to all.