Climate change is caused by our collective actions and due to the Earth's population each individual's contribution is inherently tiny compared to the whole. Collective action is required to address climate change, but collective action is made up of individual actions. The more individuals who refuse to act, the smaller the collective action will be. The logic behind the idea that "since your individual actions are too small to matter you shouldn't even try" is the same as reasoning that "your individual vote doesn't decide the outcome of an election, there… Read morefore you shouldn't vote." And while your individual decision whether to act to address climate change or to vote won't affect the outcome, telling people not to will have an effect because it causes collective inaction. We must leverage the government to enable change and be willing to change ourselves for climate change to be addressed.
While China and India both top the list of carbon equivalent emissions currently, they only do so because of their large populations. Their per-capita emissions, while growing, are still far lower than those of western countries like the US. In addition, emissions have been generally linked with high levels of development and quality of life. Unless we're willing to force the vast majority of the world's population to remain in poverty, it is imperative for us to make it possible to have high levels of development and quality of life without our massively outsized impact on the environment, starting with ourselves. The vast majority of the world's population will not be willing to be kept in poverty in order to preserve our privileged lifestyles, so our choices to stop climate change are either to act ourselves to significantly reduce our contributions to climate change and make high standards of living sustainable, or to face the largest world war in history.
