Do you go out of your way to live a greener lifestyle? If so, that’s great. We should all be buying local, using energy efficient light bulbs, turning off vampire appliances, turning down our heat, driving less, eating less meat, and investing in renewable energy. But that’s just the problem. We should ALL be doing it, otherwise the effort is worthless.

The ever increasing amount of greenhouse gases pumped into the atmosphere will completely devour our independent–yet still noble–efforts to be eco-friendly consumers. That’s why, as Johan Hari of Britain’s The Independent writes, “The only way [to prevent catastrophic climate change] is by governments legislating to force us all - green and anti-green - to shift towards cleaner behaviour.”

Hari then goes on to make the point that our indivual efforts to buy green “often drain away people’s political energies” to lobby the government for such legislation.

You have a limited amount of time to spend on any political cause. If you have an hour a week to dedicate to acting on global warming, and you spend it scouring the supermarket shelves for the product shipped the shortest distance, that time and energy is gone; you feel you’ve done what you can. Part of you might also assume: I’ve made these choices; other people will too; in time, we’ll all be persuaded. But we don’t have time.

There is a much better way for you to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Every minute you would have spent shopping around for a greener choice, you should spend volunteering for Greenpeace, or Friends of the Earth, or Plane Stupid, or the Campaign Against Climate Change. Every hundred-pound premium you would spend to buy a greener product, donate it to them instead. Why? Because by becoming part of this collective action - rather than by clinging to dispersed personal choices - you will help to change the law, so everyone will have to be greener, not just nice people like you.

There’s lots of evidence that this sort of activism works. For instance, London is forcing SUV drivers to pay a punitive £6,000-a-year premium to drive through the city. And in Ireland, a 15 cent national tax on plastic shopping bags has reduced usage by more than 90 percent. Meanwhile, in the States, San Francisco has become the first city to ban plastic bags altogether and Chicago is set to put a 10 cent tax on plastic water bottles.

These are the sort of community efforts that need to happen. It’s about people caring not only for their own health, but the health of their neighbors and people in developing countries around the world they may never meet. Remember it’s in capitalism’s best interest to have us all thinking that we should only worry about ourselves and make individual decisions. But unfortunately, that sort of thinking is what created this perilous situation. It’s time for us now to act together.