Set against the magnitude of this crisis, our inescapable smallness. There’s just no way around it: I can swear off the internal combustion engine, renounce meat, cover my roof in solar panels, touch no plastic, and plant a hundred trees a day for the rest of my life, and none of it will bring the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide any closer to 350 parts per million, nor ease the world’s biodiversity crisis. Those things will only happen when hundreds of millions of people change their consumption habits. And that will only happen when governments pass the right laws.That’s why focusing on government and industry, as opposed to individual behaviour, has become the default position of the environmental movement. For too many years, governments and corporations alike urged us puny citizens to do our part without bothering to do theirs. Reduce, reuse, recycle, and shop green while you’re at it; refrains like these have allowed the big players of industrial society to shift their ecological responsibility onto our frail shoulders.

Source: Election 2021: We’re choosing our politicians while the world burns around us