Whose job is it to address climate change? A concerned activist may argue that we all bear individual responsibility, at least for ourselves. They may reason that since the carbon dioxide emissions (or lack of emissions) from our activities are contingent on our choice to emit, regardless of the degree to which we rely on emissions in our daily lives, emitting carbon dioxide is a choice. The decision to drive to work, in a non-electric car, is one which is made, and which necessarily increases one’s carbon footprint. By avoiding actions like these, one can remove themselves from the greenhouse gas budget, effectively neutralizing their part in the climate crisis.
But perhaps the question of responsibility is not so simple. Is lowering one's carbon footprint a meaningful action in the context of climate change’s scale? The average American emits 17.6 tons of carbon dioxide each year, while as a whole humans emitted 37.8 billion tons in 2024. The numbers are daunting, or perhaps, existential: An average American’s entire life’s worth of emissions equates to about a second of the world’s. Why should anyone bother going out of their way to emit less if their emissions alone do not make a meaningful difference?
Climate change can be characterized as a collective action problem: a situation in which an aggregate of individuals actions results in a collective issue which was neither intended nor conceived of at the individual level. As the statistics above suggested, the scope of anthropogenic emissions shows it cannot be solved by solely trusting individuals to make personal lifestyle changes. Perhaps climate change is a purely institutional crisis: emissions broadly result from systemic practices, sustained by major companies and governmental institutions. The large energy needs artificial intelligence companies require result in emissions far outweighing a single person’s. Given the scale of issues such as government regulation of AI’s carbon footprint, do lifestyle changes by individuals hold any value? At the same time, we are reliant on institutions, with transportation infrastructure rendering commuting to work infeasible without automobile usage in many locations. If getting to work is only really feasible by car for a person, to what degree can they be blamed for the emissions that their car releases?
The question of individual responsibility can thus be treated as two dilemmas: one which asks whether individuals can meaningfully mitigate climate change on their own, and another which asks whether individuals should feel obligated to manage their lifestyles, having been placed in a world in which resisting the institutions which mediate their lives is often difficult, if not impossible. I find that by starting with answering the latter moral question, we can better address the former, pragmatic one.
In his piece Climate Change and Individual Responsibility, Avram Hiller uses a moral philosophical framework to argue in favor of self-accountability. In rejecting the argument that individual emissive actions are not wrong because they are too small to make a difference, Hiller first titles this attitude the claim of Individual Causal Inefficacy (ICI). He then offers two arguments. The first is that all emissive acts, no matter how small, must necessarily be partially causative of climate change. Global warming presents as the aggregate of many discrete actions; given climate changes scale, one action does little. However, the severity of the threat presented by the aggregate renders each action harmful. Contributors to collective action problems cannot dismiss their culpability under the pretense that their individual action was not intended to contribute to the emerging threat. Because the collective action problem is problematic, and exists as the consequence of all participants’ contributions, each individual who contributes must be blamed. It is not acceptable to claim that the emergent problem is no one’s fault; if the threat of the collection action problem is viewed as unacceptable, everyone who contributed is to blame.
To illustrate a collective action problem of high stakes, imagine a person was to be tortured in an electric chair, with one million individuals each contributing partly. If each had a button which contributed one part in a million to the voltage, it would not be deemed reasonable to conclude that one person’s pushing of the button caused no harm. The imposition of direct human suffering very clearly illuminates why the argument that no individual action can be blamed fails in the face of morality. Even if the victim can not detect a change in their pain between one torturer pushing or unpushing, site of the victim would leave most to desire that everyone stop pushing their button immediately. Although it is difficult to conceive of the harm one causes via a phenomenon as collective as climate change, it is important to recognize that climate change will take lives at rates far higher than a million to one.
Hiller goes on to argue that individual acts do in fact make a non-insignificant difference. To illustrate this, he discusses the concept of climatic thresholds. Because the climate system consists of many significant feedback mechanisms, the realization of certain emission tipping points threatens to trigger runaway effects which could greatly accelerate the rating of global warming. A prime example is the threat of permafrost melting, in which large stores of carbon dioxide being released from permafrost would greatly amplify the greenhouse effect. Critically, while the last emitter before a threshold may be the one who induces the tipping point effect, it must be recognized that all contributions prior to this final step were needed to create such an impact. Therefore, all individuals are responsible for the tipping point impacts. In the context of the electric chair analogy, one may think of the tipping point as the button pressed which first causes the victim to experience pain.
Returning to the question of whether individuals should feel responsible for actions which they must take due to the institutional configuration set before them, the points of partial causability and threshold contribution challenge the impulse to dispel guilt. While it is not the choice of the individual to be cast into the circumstances of this world, they are still culpable for their actions. If one can only utilize power in their house by ensuring their button for the electric chair is pushed down, then their need for electricity does not excuse their contribution to the torture. While it is difficult to work against the circumstances we face, especially when they have been designed to maximize convenience while rendering other approaches inconvenient, we are all responsible for sacrificing convenience to avoid contributing to climate change.
But are such sacrifices in vain? Having addressed the latter dilemma, we are confronted with the question of whether individual action is actually pragmatic. One may argue that regardless of moral culpability, if one individuals’ emissions are miniscule when compared with those of a global entity’s, it may appear that relying on institutional change rather than individual change is the more sensible approach. The man in the electric chair is going to be executed anyway, so leave it to the judicial system to free him. However, rather than severe lifestyle sacrifices, it may be that the psychological state of assuming individual responsibility is itself productive.
In a study conducted by Rickard et al., college students were randomly assigned a newspaper on mitigating climate change which emphasized a framework of either individual or societal responsibility. Subsequently, they were asked to discuss their thoughts on climate change mitigation strategies. It was found that students who read the pro-individual paper were more likely to evaluate climate change in a more systematic manner than those who did not. However, those who read the pro-individual paper did not show higher risk perception: despite delivering more pragmatic responses, students who read the individual responsibility paper were not more concerned about its threat to humanity than those who read the societal responsibility paper.
The electric chair analogy is so defiling because our humanity leads us to despise the avoidable suffering of others. If informed of their contributions to a person’s torture, one is more likely to feel a greater sense of alarm at the person’s state (i.e. a greater risk assessment), and would attempt to solve the issue in terms of the steps they must take to make a change. But while most would feel guilty knowing their actions were leading to another’s suffering, the global nature of climate change, and the degree to which institutions force us to emit in order to participate in society, prevent people from viewing the issue in the same light as the electric chair. If the electric chair torture were to be sponsored by the government and not by the individual’s personal actions, though, their response would be less direct and less urgent. Though they would still feel for the person, and may sign petitions or participate in a vote to free them, because they view the issue as one they have less direct control over, they would not feel responsible for generating a plan to actually save the victim. In the context of our social entrapment by carbon emitting institutions, it is difficult to place the blame on ourselves. We are therefore impeded from associating our emissions with the same degree of harm that the more tangible electric chair scenarios begets.
However, the findings of Rickard et al. suggest that the psychology induced by the personal responsibility framework can enable us to act as though we understand the risks presented by climate change, even if our emotional perception remains subdued. The difference in psychological impact between personal and institutional responsibility frameworks can be reconciled through the Construal-Level Theory of Psychological Distance (CLT). CLT is rooted in the idea that individuals perceive the significance of different concepts based on the psychological distances their mind assigns to them, with the point of zero psychological distance being the present self. The larger the psychological distance of an entity from our direct experience, the more abstract our conception is of that entity.
Under CLT theory, the personal responsibility framework was too large a psychological distance from the participants present experience to alter their sense of risk perception. However, the relative proximity of personal responsibility to reality compared with institutional responsibility resulted in an observable difference in how the two groups concerned themselves with addressing the climate crisis. The personal responsibility framework fell within a range of psychological distance short enough that participants were able to subconsciously associate the issue more with themselves. This led them to generate responses which demonstrated a greater understanding of climate change as real.
While climate change can appear more hypothetical than tangible, its impacts are already taking lives that might have been spared. Given the undeniable contribution our lifestyles add to the carbon budget, and the fact that all thresholds can only be reached due to each of the contributing emissions that together form the aggregate, there is a moral obligation to view the crisis as one we all have a personal responsibility to fight against. At the same time, while sacrificing our lifestyles may not meaningfully reduce the global carbon budget, when we view the issue in terms of personal responsibility, we are more likely to treat the crisis as impending, which encourages us to look for solutions which are enactable. Whether or not a more personal perception manifests as a cultural shift towards reverence for the threat of climate change, the CLT demonstrates that it will encourage society to view the issue more systematically. From increasing the number of innovative climate start-ups to inspiring more pragmatic policy changes and voter bases, a shift in responsibility perception renders the issue as more “real.” A change in mindset will enable economic and political shifts which have until now been impeded due to the compartmentalization of climate change within a sea of out-of-sight, out-of-mind institutional issues.
Whose job is it to address climate change, a Collective Action Problem which has developed over many decades of individual actions ever-increasingly promoted by our nation’s culture and institutions? While none of us chose to be born or had control over the society we were born into, we now face a situation in which our collective actions will determine climate change’s trajectory. While it is unrealistic to expect all Americans to dedicate their lives to climate change, in viewing climate change as a personal issue, we shift its psychological distance closer to our realities, enabling us to recognize that despite its abstractness, it is as real a threat as sitting in the electric chair.