By admin 
The past 11 years have been the 11 warmest years on record. The next 11 will be even warmer. It may feel like nothing we can do as individuals will make a difference to stem the climate crisis. But this is a mistake. Individual actions do matter, just not the way we usually think.
Mostly we think about making a difference in straightforward, material terms. If the issue is climate change, and we know that climate change is caused by greenhouse gases, then we ask, “What can I do to reduce my share of greenhouse gases—my personal carbon footprint?”
The problem with this way of thinking is that each of us contributes an infinitesimally small drop in the bucket of global greenhouse gases. Suppose the question is whether to ride a bike to work instead of drive. Burning a gallon of gas in a car generates about 20 pounds of carbon pollution. In 2024, humans put about 41.6 billion metric tons of CO2 equivalent in the atmosphere. That’s a ratio of about 1 to 4.5 trillion, or one teeny tiny drop in a damn big bucket.
Many in the climate community have switched from emphasizing your personal carbon footprint—a concept popularized by the oil giant BP, after all—to emphasizing your political footprint. “If you want to do one thing about climate change,” science educator Bill Nye says, it’s “vote.”
Yes, definitely, please do vote. But this doesn’t solve the “big bucket” problem. Have you ever cast the deciding vote in an election? Maybe in your five-person book club, but almost certainly not in a consequential statewide or national election. Social scientists call this the “paradox of voting.” Given the incredibly small odds any one ballot will make the difference, why does anybody bother? The effort isn’t worth it.
So how can individuals make a difference?
We can make a difference by influencing each other—by not only contributing drops into the bucket, but by showing others that we’re doing so, and, in the process, influencing them to do the same. You probably haven’t cast the deciding vote in a significant election, but we bet you’ve worn an “I voted” sticker. Maybe you’ve even snapped a selfie and posted it.
Wearing the sticker turns voting into more than a tick in the tally. The sticker signals something like your pride in civic life. It tells people you’re the kind of person who votes. It might make others want to be voters, too.
Our actions have social consequences, not just material ones. The actions you take today shape the choices your neighbors make tomorrow.
Consider how we pick up and drop other habits. Smoking, economist Robert Frank argues, is a meme. The strongest predictor of whether someone will start smoking is whether their friends and family do. But research from Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler finds that the same is true for quitting smoking. When a sibling quits, the odds that you’ll keep smoking go down 25 percent. When a close friend quits, they go down 36 percent. And if your spouse quits, you’re 67 percent less likely to stay a smoker. Smoking rates plummeted from their mid-20th-century peaks because “whole groups of people were quitting in concert.”
“Behavioral contagion” is why secondhand smoke is truly dangerous, as Frank points out. The material consequences of someone else’s smoke getting into your lungs are dwarfed by the social consequences of public smoking looking cool and inspiring more smokers. This is the power of public prohibitions of unhealthy behavior. Keeping smoke out of one individual’s lungs is a small benefit compared to keeping smoking out of the public eye.
The same lessons apply to voting, climate action, and much else. What predicts who votes? Finding out if their college dorm-mate votes. What predicts who puts solar panels on their roof? Whether their neighbors put up solar panels first. And what most drives people to get off the doomscroll and into the streets? When their friends are going to the protest and ask them to come along.
These examples remind us of the impacts of our actions beyond our individual footprints. If we’re all so susceptible to social influence—to quitting smoking when our friends do, getting into solar when our neighbors do, voting and protesting when our roommates do—then we’re all also purveyors of social influence.
Are we saying the best way to make a difference is to go around putting peer pressure on each other? Isn’t that a tad manipulative? Since we—the authors of this essay—are philosophers, maybe you’d expect us to say it’s important to do all these virtuous things for the right reasons. To get solar panels because you’ve grasped the moral tragedy of climate change, not because your neighbor Larry’s roof looks kind of fab with them.
Actually, our view is that people—philosophers especially included—need to get over themselves a bit. We should welcome more voters and e-bikers and protesters for whatever their reasons are.
A related worry is that all this minding the social consequences of our choices can lead to virtue signaling. Won’t it be teeth-grindingly annoying, at best, if more people start parading their green virtues? Or worse, could it be counterproductive, sending would-be e-bikers zooming to the hills in their SUVs?
Here, too, we’ll bite the bullet: Virtue signaling is—or can often be—virtuous. If you’re letting your friends and family know what you care about in hopes that they’ll feel comfortable sharing that they care, too, you’re doing something far from cringe. You’re building a community.
There are more and less effective ways to do it, too. Sharing your choices is especially powerful when it runs counter to people’s expectations about you (e.g., when a Republican puts solar panels on the roof). It’s less powerful when people see you as in it just for the likes and shares. Many of us were raised to sneer at social influence—instructed to resist peer pressure at all costs—but there’s another term for thinking about all this that’s less off-putting: role modeling. As we explain in our new book, Somebody Should Do Something: How Anyone Can Help Create Social Change, study after study shows how powerful the models we set can be.
We aren’t just role models for our friends, roommates, or neighbors, either. All of us have lots of unexpected places to spread social influence; to our parents, co-workers, run-club buddies, and on and on. We can practice doing it deftly, focusing on our genuine beliefs, fears, and hopes. And there’s one more person we can influence a whole lot, too: our future selves. The choices we make today shape the person we become tomorrow.