Well, suppose all the people who want to be green go ahead and cut back to one car, go vegetarian, live in a smaller house, etc. etc. Maybe if everyone is really dedicated, we could all cut our emissions in half. So then what? We're still all emitting way more CO2 than the planet can absorb; climate change would still happen, it'd just be happening a bit more slowly.

We're not going to realistically solve this problem by all making personal sacrifices, because even in the best case, where everyone chips in, it's only enough to slow the bleeding. If we really want to truly solve this mess, we need to promote truly sustainable technologies that scale well and appeal to everyone.

Don't put solar panels on your house out of a personal sense of guilt about your own emissions, put them on your house because it grows the market for solar, stimulates research into better panels, and helps push forward the economies of scale that are needed to make renewables cost competitive with fossil fuels. Don't buy an electric car because you want to pollute less, buy an electric car because you want to fund the continued technological improvements of electric cars in general.

We're all focusing way too much on merely slowing down the death of the planet when we should be focusing on fixing the problem altogether. Don't aim for a slower death, aim for a faster transition to carbon-neutral. If we all feel that the planet is doomed anyway, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because it's a lot harder to motivate ourselves to try and fix a problem that feels unfixable.