An excerpt from Maggie Koerth-Baker's new book on the energy crisis:

Smallpox was a scourge that humankind is better off without, but we didn’t get rid of it because individuals decided to quarantine themselves. You don’t fight a systemic problem on an individual level. Eradicating smallpox required us to make big societal investments in the research and development of vaccines and in the infrastructure to get those vaccines to every corner of the globe. ... In other words, you could beat your own lifestyle into submission with a ten-foot club — you could do more to save the planet than almost anyone is willing to voluntarily do — and it still wouldn’t be enough. This isn’t about you, and it isn’t about me. It’s about the systems that we share. The answer to the question “So now what?” has to be “Now we change the systems.”

In a follow-up interview, Maggie elaborates: