[badatshipping]

Am I alone in fundamentally not believing in the power of individual action when it comes to stuff like climate change, recycling, voting? People always say that if everyone thought that way then nothing would get done, but that doesn’t change the fact that my individual contribution is worthless.

I think the way to get society-wide change is for the government to either mandate or incentivize it at a systemic level. This “what can I do as an individual to make change” stuff seems like either virtue signalling or irrationally directed anxiety.

[maze-le]

No you are not. Issues that are bigger for one human/group to tackle effectively are the reason we have invented political processes and systems in the first place (laws, governance, taxes, regulations). We should use the tools we have, and not offload the task of confronting climate change to the individual. The individual is not suited for this task, as there are too many of them, that will do absolutely nothing unless forced to.

That doesn't mean that a single human can't change anything. Every single action, that reduces CO2 emissions (or sequesters already emitted CO2) is a step forward. But it will be too little, too late and the only effective course of action would be legislative in nature.

[tzs]

> I think the way to get society-wide change is for the government to either mandate or incentivize it at a systemic level.

The only way that will happen is if people like you vote in a government that will do that.

Not voting because your vote by itself has an infinitesimal effect on the outcome is like a smoker who ignores the health risks and keeps chain smoking because each individual cigarette only has a negligible chance of causing lung cancer, and thus concludes that smoking is not actually dangerous.

[badatshipping]

You are right that large-scale things happen as the cumulative effect of many small things, but the difference is that in your example the smoker is responsible for all of those cigarettes, whereas I only get one single vote.

Incidentally, I do vote; I just don't do so thinking my individual vote matters. It matters that lots of people all vote, but this reinforces my original point that some kind of structural incentive or policy is needed to get lots of people to all do something.