People that overestimate the value of their opinions, maybe.
You can vote for candidates that take climate change seriously.
You can decide to buy or lease an EV instead of an ICE one.
You can raise the bar for when you book a flight.
And so on...
1. Vote for the party that protects the environment 2. Work on smt that has positive climate impact
The people that believe in climate change don’t understand how to solve the problem. And the people that know how to solve the problem don’t really consider it a problem worth solving at this point.
Cars matter very little in the big picture as well -- it's a distraction to blame the little people.
The vast majority of pollution is caused by industrial processes. The fix here is simple: regulate and enforce the regulation.
The main polluting countries are:
the USA: too afraid to do anything in case it affects their economy, political caste too corrupt to do what's needed.
Russia: doesn't give a shit, mostly see global warming as a way to get more influence, more usable land, and have such a little population density anyway they can afford to fuck some of it.
India: polluting as a result of too many people and trying to catch up economically, but might get their shit together like China did.
Saudi Arabia: has built their whole state on an unsustainable dependency on burning more than half of the oil they extract just for AC and water, and is completely fucked regardless.
In my country people aren't stupid and do embrace reasonable and managed use of natural resources, regardless of party.
Re global regulation you need to get the main players like the US, China and Russia to agree some sort of policy which is tricky but might be possible if people lobby their politicians.
China has already solved their problem and significantly improved air quality in its cities, and is the world biggest builder of nuclear power plants. They ceased being a problem already.
There are a lot of people that want to deflect from action on climate change by focusing on the oil refinery and not the tailpipe.
Your list is suspiciously missing China, the biggest producer of CO2. Saudi Arabia is down the list, after South Korea and Germany; their CO2 per capita is but not abormally. It is the per capita emissions and population that matter. Then USA (300 million), Russia (147 million), Saudi Arabia (40 million), India (1.4 billion). The first three have large per capita emissions, double the others. The list of CO2 producers are basically a list of large and/or rich countries.
On the one hand, that sounds true.
On the other hand, everybody who acts is an individual. States and countries don't act on their own, they are driven by acts of individuals.
So, what's the right framing? Maybe that we need society-level changes, driven by individuals.