'As individuals, none of us have much incentive or reason to pollute less'

(Jason Brennan is something of a contrarian, but his views are worth considering, both about democracy and how and why we should respond too climate disruption. The following passage is taken from his book, “Against Democracy”)

How Do We Respond to Pollution? Most of my readers and fellow philosophers believe that the government not only may but instead must regulate carbon emissions. Their basic assertion is that pollution is a collective action problem. On an individual basis, any one of us can pollute to our heart’s content, and it would have no real impact. But if we all pollute to our hearts’ content, the results can be catastrophic. The problem is that as individuals, we have little reason to change our behavior. Consider some of my behaviors. I fly over twenty times per year. I drive a twin-turbo sports sedan, which I generally leave in Sport or Sport + mode for maximal acceleration. I play electric guitar through a high-wattage tube amp rather than acoustic guitar. I leave the air conditioner on in my house all summer. I almost never shut off any of my three computers. Out of the goodness of my heart, I might reduce my energy usage, but what good would it do? My individual impact is so small that such sacrifices would make no difference. I would suffer, but it wouldn’t help. This line of reasoning applies to each of us. As individuals, none of us have much incentive or reason to pollute less, even though we all want everyone to pollute less. Unilateral reductions in consumption have purely symbolic value. Therefore, most of my colleagues conclude, we should license the government to regulate pollution levels. Government can solve our collective action problem. Call this kind of reasoning the public goods argument for environmental protection. As we saw in chapter 2, we face something similar to this collective action problem when it comes to voting. It’s not precisely the same: if I were the only voter, my vote would make all the difference, while if I were the only polluter, my pollution would still make little difference. But it’s similar enough: given that there are so many other voters, for each of us, our individual votes make no difference. We have every incentive to free ride on others’ efforts, externalize the cost of our biases onto others, and pollute democracy with our uninformed, misinformed, or irrational votes. If the argument for regulating air pollution is sound, why not regulate votes as well? Why does the public goods argument justify regulating air pollution, but doesn’t justify regulating voting pollution? Why is it legitimate to regulate pollution to protect us from ourselves, yet not legitimate to regulate voting to protect us from ourselves? In chapters 4 and 5, I examined a series of deontological arguments that tried to show that voting rights are different, but none of these arguments succeeded. So these questions remain open.