John Ruskin grasped with stunning breadth the ever-expanding powers of human making during the Anthropocene. He criticized Victorian industry, capitalism, and society as deficient in cultivating human virtues, including natural piety. Piety can connote religious purism, suggesting that Ruskin may be a forerunner to some environmentalists who argue that climate change demands moral purification, whether to prevent an imminent apocalypse or abolish carbon emissions. In their view, adopting technical means like carbon taxes to adjust consumer choices through market incentives only perpetuates the cultural compromises and economic rationalizations that are destroying the environment. Ruskin also criticized classical economics and its theory of money as idolatrous. For Ruskin, however, this idolatry is countered by piety, the virtue of recognizing and appreciating the gifts that enable and enrich a person’s life. As he shifts from grounding natural piety in divine creation to urging its cultivation through the contingent cultural ideals and moral standards of social practices, he acknowledges the inescapable power of human making. His astute analysis of moral imagination and the idolatry of money reframes ethical debates about climate change. Properly directed, a carbon tax can spur a reimagination of consumer practices and culture toward natural piety and sustainability.